Nov 27th: We-Think Manufacturing
We-Think is currently associated with open source software, gaming and media. But there is no reason why it should not in time spread more in the phsyical economy of atoms and things.
At a Microsoft organised event on innovation in Brussels a couple of weeks ago I met Neil Gershenfield who runs the Bits and Atoms lab at MIT. Gershenfeld is exploring the blurring line between software programmes and physical systems. Until know we have mainly written programmes for computers. But all kinds of physical systems run on programmes. So in time we could imagine software programmes embedded in all kinds of things, running them and even making them. Gershenfeld imagines a future in which people equipped with mini-fabrication plants could down load the instructions to make just about anything. This would revolutionise current approaches to networked innovation and production, based on small compaines sharing designs. In kite surfing and other sports designs are often made by the players and then downloaded and made by manufacturers. Learn more here
Another initiative along these lines was unveiled in the UK this week, called the RepRap. Read more about it here. The basic idea is that your computer would be linked to a machine a bit like a printer, but instead of printing pages it would make 3D objects using designs downloaded from the Internet. This would enable distributed manufacturing of basic items. Combined with distributed energy production it could change the dynamics of the phsyical economy.
Nov 23rd: We-Think A - Z
With my stepson Freddie I have been compiling an A - Z of We-Think style organisations. It is also available as a wiki
Notable mentions include Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing blog which carries a lot of useful links as well as Jeff's account of various collective and collaborative undertakings. here
Also Michael Bauwen's outstanding site for the P2P Foundation which has a host of links to other projects. here
20th: We-think: Where next? Part I
Most of the big developments in the We-think economy of course have come from the US: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bebo and so forth. But the US isn't the only source of innovation in We-think style organisations. Several other places may provide clues to what our collaborative future might be like.
Korea is evolving a more distributed ubiquitous innovation model as my colleague Molly Webb, a Demos researcher has been finding out during her research there for the Demos project we are both involved - the Atlas of Ideas - which is mapping new sources of innovation in Asia.
Molly's voluminous report on Korea will not be published until January but the highlights of what it has to say on social networking read like this.
In Korea the mobile is everything. Mobile penetration topped 78% in 2006, and is expected to be over 80% in 2008. Phones are beginning to provide not just entertainment but health services. One on the market already checks your blood sugar levels. One in development at the Korea Research Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) will go even further in incorporating medical devices into a mobile phone. People are increasingly using their mobiles to go online.
Korea made a bet on ubiquitous broadband infrastructure, which is more advanced than anywhere in the world, to facilitate mass connectivity and fast-paced innovation. President Roh was ushered into office by a huge online fan base, Nosamo and in 2004 when conservatives tried to remove him because of the unprecedented influence of online politics, millions marched in the streets to protest the impeachment. The first concerns about the disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang came online.
Korea has the potential to create the kind of society where innovation comes from everywhere, from the masses not just from elite.
OhMyNews International also influenced the election with extensive reporting. A news website with just 55 employees, it supports over 38,000 "citizen reporters -- ordinary Koreans who are invited to submit their own articles and opinions on any aspect of current affairs. The idea has been embraced by the public and forced traditional news providers to rethink the way they work.
Koreans are using their ubiquitous broadband in unique ways.
Cyworld, a Korean online networking site, boasts about 15 million users who generate 90,000 hits per day. Out of a population of 48 million that means that over 30% of people in Korea are using the service. The target audience is young people, and it has been suggested that 80-90% of Koreans in their 20s have a 'minihompy' (mini homepage), an online space for photo sharing, journaling and networking. It is free to sign up, but there is a cost to decorating a minihompy using 'dotori' or acorns, a micro-payment system.
According to people Molly spoke with while in Korea, students must have a minihompy if they want to participate in the kinds of university social relationships they traditionally only engaged in offline. Some of the more addictive services include a tool to see who has visited your minihompy, gift boxes and wish lists for friends, and the ability to update the site from a mobile phone. The site seems to follow the patterns of mobile phone usage, where close relationships become closer.
Korea is also spawning an entirely new generation of pro-gamers. Just after Kim Jong Il exploded his first nuclear test in October 2006, the Times of London featured South Korean culture in their arts pages. David Watts, in "South Korea, A cultural rebirth," called this Korea's 'cultural spring' referring to the boom in cultural activity that accompanied democratisation. "The Land of the Video Geek" in The New York Times the same week featured the connected youths who are Asia's darlings today. Gaming is encouraged by some parents as a way to relieve stress. Instead of going to a film, couples often sit side by side in PC bangs - Internet cafes - playing massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). SK Telecom has a pro StarCraft team, with a former sports psychologist as their coach. StarCraft's top gamers are celebrities. In Korea online gaming champions are the rock stars of the 21st century.
Digital Media City, a project initiated by the Seoul Municipal Government, aims to bridge Korea and the world through a technology culture. And Korea is pushing into Open Source Software to kick-start the currently weak software business atop Linux platforms. Despite its prowess in gaming, Korean software lags behind comparably high tech economies. Policy makers blame this on the predominance of US groups in the software business.
The Korea Internet Promotion Agency is leading a strategic initiative to reduce barriers to open source software (OSS). Its activities span core technology standards development, technical support (sites for technical support jumped from 400 in 2004 to 1,000 in 2005) and training people. Linux deployment within government - both national and local - reached 26% in 2005. Though some government organisations have adopted Linux.
In the interests of regional development, Korea has been pushing for tri-country collaboration by establishing the China-Japan-Korea OSS Promotion Forum, and following up the initial meeting with working groups that continue to work on specific issues. Korean policy makers believe this is the most promising area for cooperation between the three countries.
Nov 13th: Is We- Think Bad for You?
On Start the Week, the Radio 4 programme I had a bit of an argument with the very articulate Baroness Susan Greenfield, the neuro scientists. Her argument is that digital culture is probably bad for young people because they spend too much time staring, rather blankly at screens. Were that true then We-Think culture may well be disastrous. But the reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves. My six year old son, working with his 11 year old brother, created a Bebo site in about 30-minutes. It says "My name is Ned and I am a raging ball of madness." As soon as he had created it, he wanted to be able to connect to other people -his cousins - to see their sites and get content from them. As his brother Harry said: its circular.
Nevertheless the case against We-Think culture needs to be taken seriously.
These arguments are often used by those who feel threatened by the rise of participative production to argue that traditional, top down, professional models should be defended.
You cannot find it or the cacophony argument. There is so much stuff out there that its impossible to find what you are looking for, or how can you be sure you haven't missed something? Isn't that why we need trusted professional guides to sift through material and show us where the good stuff is. But We-think collaboratives are creating new tools, rating and ranking systems - Technorati, deli-cious and the like which address this challenge. Sure people need to be able to search and find stuff with more intelligence than the average Google search but the solutions to that are likely to come from within peer-to-peer networks as much as outside them.
Quality, trust and authenticity. This was a theme of the recent discussion at the Newsxchange conference in Istanbul. How could TV stations possibly trust user generated content if we don't know where it's coming from? Who will attest for its quality? Well once again mainstream media is not immune from some of these questions. As for the collaborative world the best solutions will come from within. Wikipedia's editorial process might not be perfect but it is at least pretty much transparent, you can follow the debates over what to do and pitch in. Ratings and rankings, created by the participants, will be one of the most powerful ways to test for quality. That does not mean there will not be mistakes or that these collaborations will not be open to corruption. But the problems are not insurmountable.
The culture of distraction. Young people are so immersed in technology they lose themselves in constant, short term, click of the button distraction. As Maurice Saatchi, father figure of the ad agency of the same name puts it: "A young person in the course of a 30 second television commercial, can also send a text, download a photograph, log onto a website, check the music on their phone and still what the commercial, albeit at six times normal speed because its on a PVR." Saatchi was not criticising but merely describing the behaviour of so called digital natives. But others, such as Baroness Susan Greenfield, the reknowned brain scientist sees this kind of culture as highly destructive of the way people think. Yet it could be seen just as an ability to multi task and think laterally. I am convinced early exposure to computer games and the web can help people to think strategically and logically, because they have to understand the logic on which the game is based. This is not the first panic that modern media is rotting people's brains. That might be a worry if modern media were simply a sit back, push button experience. But it's not. It's highly participative and often creative. Young people get a sense of themselves as creative and productive.
Isolation or over-socialisation. In the earlier days of the Internet some critics such as Cass Sunstein worried that it would lead people into social isolation, cut off from conversation with others, only getting exposure to a world they have chosen to live within. Now if anything you hear the contrary worry that there is too much socialisation: we-think might endanger our capacity for independent thought because we are too influenced by the views of others, we cannot think for ourselves. That too overstates the power of collaborative filtering and preferences. The culture of online communities is far more about open debate, free speech and a diversity of views. As John Suroweicki points out in the Wisdom of Crowds, a when there is a large enough community engaged in a debate them that encourages a diversity of views and so long as there is diversity then it actually becomes easier for people to think independently. Communities that think alike may enforce conformity but so long as there is a enough diversity then there will be encouragement for people to think independently.
Shallow identities. The identities people adopt in social networking sites are often confected and shallow. People can pretend to be something they are not. The relationships they form with other people, as a result, are shallow: they do not amount to much. There is no doubt something in this. But communities organised online increasingly also have a real world presence, whether through political campaigning - the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign - or at a more intimate and local level through meet ups. Moreover why should we expect young people to have fully formed identities. Social networking creates a perfect opportunity for them to try out roles that they might feel scared to explore - boys talking to girls - in real life. Social networking might be a good way for people to pay with a try out identities, to form them.
Low barriers to entry allow manipulation. The rise of social media production relies of lowering barriers to entry. It's becoming easier and easier for people to become media producers in their own right, if only in small ways. But that also opens up the collaborative world to manipulation by special interests, companies and ideologues. Yes that's true. But the level of scrutiny of what is going on is so much greater in the world of We-think that if someone is not who they claim to be - a blogger turns out to be paid by a company - then they will likely get found out. There are no guarantees against this kind of manipulation by special interests in any form of media, but at least in We-Media the level of scrutiny and transparency is high enough for there to be a good chance it will be kept in check.
Good journalism will not get funded. One of the fears of journalists in the mainstream media is that markets and audiences will get so fragmented that it will eventually become impossible for news organisations to fund proper investigative journalism. The spread of we media will not lead to a new era of empowerment but instead it will neuter critical independent journalism, robbing it of its financial supports in the form of advertising. There may be a risk of that in the long run. But there is still clearly going to be a need for and demand for high quality journalism. The wider availability of information about health does not mean we do not need good doctors. We will still need good professionals. This is an argument that peer-to-peer media production will be cutting off its nose to spite its face. My Space and Bebo have driven a raft of teen managzines out of business - the likes of Smash Hits. If social media does the same to advertising revenues for mainstream television news then it could throw the baby out with the bathwater and we could find ourselves without high quality news journalism on TV.
But this argument under estimates the interaction between mainstream media news and collaborative, social production of news and information. A Russian journalist at the recent Newsxchange conference in Istanbul explained, for example, how her news room often takes its lead from discussions on blogs which showed where news was heading. It would be impossible to do TV news, she said, without the blogs. Far from displacing mainstream media the blogs may help provide it with sources, ideas and a new layer of governance to keep it honest.
We-think is certainly bad for traditional, industrial era media production, which has relied on high barriers to entry and high capital costs to protect itself against competition. But that does not mean its bad for us.
Nov10th: Communities and commerce
The greatest threat to the rise of social networking and collaborative media production is its own success, or rather the interest it is attracting from venture capitalists and others. Over inflated prices for companies and ambitions almost inevitably will lead to disappointment and deflation of hopes and expectations.
Perhaps the key issue over the next few years will be how community and commerce will co-exist. The value of social networking, user generated content and participative media rests on their ability to create sticky communities around content, activities and practices. The value rests in the community and the interactions it makes possible.
But then efforts to commercialise communities threaten the very thing that makes them valuable. Relationships get turned into commodities. Motives become tainted by money. Rights and rules get established about who can do what. Already companies are trying to work their way into the social world, paying for people to blog or insert viral advertisements onto websites. Professionals video producers take to making their work look more "amateur" to give it cachet on the web, to make it look like it comes from within the community.
If deals like Google's partnership with YouTube do not pay off them the social networking craze will be seen to be over hyped, not worth the money being invested in it. Yet many will argue that it will pay off only if the community loses its bearing and becomes a slave to commerce.
The dynamics of open business are all about managing these relationships: when does community support commerce, enable it and when are the two at odds?
Nov 9th: We-think Witness
Muhammed Amin was one of the best television cameramen before he died in a plane hijacking. His son gave the 2006 award named after his father to a social organisation called Witness, which I know a bit having met the ceo Gillian Caldwell at conferences on social entrepreneurship.
Witness's motto is "see it, film it, change it." It's aim is to put video cameras in the hands of people facing human rights violations under authoritarian regimes in the developing world and train them to tell their own stories. Witness then undertakes to make sure their work gets distribution. It has produced graphic, intimate and shocking footage for example of schoolboy soldiers being inducted into militias in the Congo.
As Witness's Gillian Caldwell puts it so eloquently the power of peer-to-peer media is that is "surfaces so many more voices that would not normally be heard in debate." It allows people directly affected by human rights abuses to put their side of the story and to get it heard in the right places.
Witness which as funded initially by Peter Gabriel is just one example of how we media allows people previously cut out and denied a voice to gain one and to find a global audience that wants to listen.
The first internet boom was infamous for offering to get pet food to urban consumers quicker. But organisations like Witness show that this wave could have, as Yochai Benkler predicts, much more profound impacts extending freedom, deepening democracy and in the process extending equality. There is no better example of that than Witness.
Nov 8th: Unbounded Public Innovation
Just read the very useful Unbounded Freedom, by Rosemary Bechler, an account of how IP issues affect cultural production and economic development worldwide. A very good defence of open source and creative commons approaches drawing on Yochai Benkler's excellent The Wealth of Networks. Unbounded Freedom published by Counterpoint, the British Council think tank. Find out more here.
Also Will Davies and Kay Withers' very thorough account of IP issues in the UK context in Public Innovation, published by the IPPR. This argues for a strengthening of the public domain and rights to public knowledge and against further extension of copyright terms. Find out more here
Nov 6th: Film Making for All
Nine million US teenagers watch home movies created by other teens. Four millions US households have video cameras and software to make home movies. About 750,000 people in the US do so every week. YouTube shows 100m video clips a day. About 50m Americans have created web content. We have only just begun to untap the appetite for participative culture.
The emergence of highly collaborative, participatory forms of cultural production is being enabled by the availability of relatively cheap tools that amateurs can use to do something that only professionals could do a little while ago. That is how the advent of the digital telescope and new light sensors lead to the resurgence of amateur astronomy. As long as more tools of this kind are becoming available then We-think media will continue to rise. Two new tools of that kind came to my attention recently.
The first is a software package made by a small, venture funded company in Cambridge called Short Fuze which is trying to do for film and animation what Garage Band did for pop music. Short Fuze's aim will allow a user to choose a genre, construct a story and animate characters, adding elements almost like lego bricks. You could, for example, scan in your picture and use that as the basis for one of the characters. Endless opportunities for school children to use pictures of their favourite teachers will no doubt open up. If Short Fuse takes off then it will turn making reasonably high quality film and animations an everyday activity.
The second is Narrowstep, which allows anyone to set up an Internet TV station within 24 hours, providing a schedule of programmes via their website using Narrowstep's telvOS - television operating system - software. One of Narrowsteps early successes has been to help someone to create a TV channel just for cyclists. Cycling of course is a hugely popular sport but not one that would attract a large enough audience for mainstream television. (I once pitched the idea of a cycling version of the car programme Top Gear to a BBC executive who just scorned the idea.) Narrowstep however has allowed the creation of a global, niche cycling channel with a global reach, aggregating lots of Chris Anderson's long tail consumers. Cycling TV is just three years old, the creation of a single London enthusiast but it now employs 12 people and mainly carries free to air content and charges a small fee.
So combine Short Fuze with Narrowstep and we are on the verge of not just something like YouTube, sharing low quality video clips, but websites that can sustain entire schedules of programming, to quite high quality. The kids of today are creating Bebo and MySpace sites. In five years time they will be creating their own TV stations. Today we impress ourselves by being able to use PVRs to skip advertising or record programmes to watch later. But quite soon young people will be their own schedulers of their own content and manage their own distribution as well.
Nov 3rd : Let's Hear it for Herb
Last night I had dinner with Tim Fenton a former BBC journalist who has just spent the last year sailing around the Atlantic with his family, guided most of the time by an extraordinary Pro-Am navigator who works from Canada called Herb Hilgenberg.
Herb is a legendary figure in the sailing fraternity. Each evening he is at his short wave radio, with about three computers logged onto weather forecasts, shipping news and charts. Over that three hour period sailers call in to him in a strict order going clockwise round the ocean. He spends about five minutes talking to each, explaining what kind of weather they should expect ahead and helping them chart the best route. For each boat that calls in about ten others are likely to be listening. Herb works from weather publically provided weather information in the US and blends that with his years of experience as a sailor and weather watcher.
Fenton has lots of other ways of getting the same service. He could have done all his own calculations but that would have been time consuming. He could have bought weather routings from one of a range of providers. But the Herb option proved to be both reliable, free and connected the Fentons to many of the other boats in their area. And every time Fenton called in for Herb's advice, Herb asked for his weather readings. An excellent article by the Canadia coast guard on Herb's service can be read here.
Just another small example of how Pro-Ams armed with new technologies can share ideas, information and news without having to go to traditional organisations so long as they can work off a kind of information commons: a public platform of freely available weather information.
Nov 3rd : Can News be Conversation?
At the Newsxchange conference in Istanbul today I provoked the ire of David Mannion of ITN by suggesting many TV news bulletins were becoming like a form of pantomime, a series of highly predictable set ups, confected to make it look as though a reporter was authentically, on the spot. The truth of course is that much of TV journalists work is conducted away from the camera, over the phone, reading wire stories and plugging into other news sources.
At the end of the conference Peter Horrocks, the head of TV news at the BBC challenged me - in a friendly way - to think of how a news bulletin might look and fell different if it took interaction with the audience more seriously.
Well this is a first, rough stab.
The headlines. The newsreader would read out the headlines and routinely remind viewers that if they wanted to see how the decisions were made and what the editorial team had considered but rejected then they should go to the editor of the day's blog. The news lists of potential stories that we worked on during the day are in the dailoy log online. People expect to be able to see how decisions are made.
The key reports. Journalists might still deliver their news, insight and judgements in finely crafted professional packages but the explanation of how they put together these stories, who they called, what press conferences they went to, would be available on line. People will want to see how stories are put together, to understand the process, rather than just be presented with the finished item, take it or leave it.
User driven items. The news reader might say: "You recall last week we asked you to vote on a list of issues you'd like more of and these are the priorities you came up with. So we've responded and here is the item in question."
Pro-Am reporting teams: Last week we told you we were planning an item on, for on hospital closures, and we invited people to join a Pro-Am reporting team with our health editor. The team was made up of four people. This is their joint report.
Don't forget so fast: We've also asked you what of the stories you've seen over the past few weeks that have gone out of the news - rioting Paris suburbs, Darfur - you'd like to hear more of.
Setting the agenda: If you want to pitch an idea for tomorrow's bulletins then this is the open news list you can contribute to. We've got an interview coming up with the Prime Minister and if you'd like us to ask your question send them in to the political editor.
Feedback and comment: In the course of the programme we've had these comments, questions and feedback. For clarification on any item go to the news website. Five of the reporters and editors who put together the programme are now available online for an hour to take questions and comments.
Thanks very much.