Reboot10 - The Summary of '08

This year's Reboot theme was Free, a subject I have some views about. I couldn't make it, but have followed with some interest. Here are a few of the blogs covering the things I found interesting, plus some of my comments. I find many commentators critiquing these new ideas don't go far enough - this post, on the other hand, probably goes too far

New Thoughts in Social Media:

1. Jyri Engestrom on Nodal Points (blogged by David Weinberger). Jyri is imho one of the structured thinkers in the Social Media space (which is sadly far too full of neo-hippies, snake oil salesmen and general fluffbrains) and talks about how this all ACTUALLY WORKS. He has pushed his concept of social objects - ie reasons for connecting but expressed in codifiable form - forward to nodal points, which are connection nodes in the social matrix where information is stored and which can give peripheral context

“Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.”

Like Jyri, I've been fascinated for awhile about how we can leave context data at key point in data matrices and have it pop up where / when needed - so more thinking on this is welcome!

2. Don Stowe Boyd follows the whuffie factor to its endgame and argues that the cosy nostrums of warm fluffiness will be more like the cosa nostra of the Mafia. Its not all sunshine and flowers..... (more of this below)


FreeConomics

3. Jerry Michalski on Free (as found reported by Dieter Rappold in one of the few good overviews of the sessions I found)

On the second day Jerry Michalski also talked about different free business models based on the Article of Chris Anderson in the Wired Magazine:

1. Freemium (Flickr)
2. Advertising (Google)
3. Cross Subsidies (donate CDs, have packed concerts)
4. Zero Marginal Costs (digital goods)
5. Labor Exchange (digg, Amazon Reviews)
6. Voluntary Donations (A throusand friends)
7. Pay what you want (TerraBite)

- He showed us also that so much can be done for so little - Craig Newmark shook up 3 industries of billions and billions with craigslist: Yellow Pages, Classifieds, Directory Services! No wonder given the fact that 60% of the internal cost at Telecoms are histrocial costs for legacy systems and billing processes. If one could get rid of that! We got told in business schools that Scarcity = Value. But we increasingly see a growing abundancy mentality.

As Dieter notes, the risk is that:

Todays abundance of Music/Content/Software imposes an important question: Why pay before I know that it’s good? That means we have to be famous first - then get rich!

Which is a Zipfian economy model - ie a very small number of people get very rich (and the advantage goes to those already famous on Record Company money), but most get very little, even with tiny talent differentials.

Also, as you can also see, few of the above models are actually Free, they are Offset models, wherein someone else pays for the free lunch - and herein lies the mental sleight of mind in the FreeConomy. This sleight of mind leads to risky errors, such as:

4. Working for Free - An argument about the freedom of free work (Last seen in large numbers c 1970's), fine thesis except for the small flaw that unless you have a trust fund you either (i) moonlight from your daytime job, (ii) have to trust others to feed you or (iii) you go for the "starve in a garret" mode.


Impact of Low Transaction Costs on Organisation / Social Structure

5. J P Ragaswami (Confused of Calcutta) made the basic point about ease of arbitrage in a low transaction cost world - “for every artificial scarcity there will be piracy. It will be destroyed.”

6. Traci Fenton on Democratic Organisations - 10 democratic Design principles (again thanks to Dieter for the list):

1. Purpose + Vision
2. Transparency (open book management)
3. Dialogue + Listening
4. Fairness + Dignity
5. Accountability
6. Individual + Collective
7. Choice
8. Integrity
9. Decentralization
10. Reflection + Evaluation

7. Lee Bryant (Headshift) on freeing the Battery Human. Dieter's report:

And asked how we can codify freedoms and values to provide longevity to them. Ironically we are stuck in the concepts of Max Weber and Frederick W. Taylor. But the consumerisation of Enterprise IT is a big chance to change that. Given the fact that Taylorism is simply too costly in complex, global ever changing market. Social Networks combined with weak ties are a efficient corporate immune system - whistleblowing when things go wrong.

I must admit to being hopeful, but also fairly sceptical about this sort of thing in any large scale organisation, firstly for the reasons of organisational complexity explained well over here by Dare Obasanjo:

There is less politics at a startup. In any activity where humans have to come together collaboratively to achieve a goal, there will always be people with different agendas. The more people you add to the mix, the more agendas you have to contend with. Doing things by consensus is OK when you have to get consensus from two or three people who sit in the same hallway as you. It’s a totally different ball game when you need to gain it from lots of people from across a diverse company working on different projects in different regions of the world who have different perspectives on how to solve your problems.

.....if you do the maths, you find that the number of transactions you need to get anything done in a peer only, dis-organised structure is huge and grows geometrically as you add people - and thus soon becomes unsustainable (the downside of Metcalfe's Law). This is the reason hierarchies come into being, Taylorist get on the job etc - to reduce the messaging and complexity. National "democracies" are in fact very hierarchical by definition, and if you go through Traci's 10 points you'll find that most of them are precisely what we criticize those in power for not doing!

Secondly, the thing less talked about in Social Media is that it operates under power law maths - the Zipfian economy I refer to above - ie, without checks and balances a few rich get richer faster, and the rest are worker drones. This is just another way of saying "Feudal". There is a long tail, but it doesn't necessarily wag the Big Dogs. Thus, seductive though this all sounds in the "sunshine and flowers" way its usually painted, it just does not actually work this way without very careful design. (Don't get me wrong, its possible - see Ricardo Semler's work here for example - but its non trivial to do and its not a "Social Media" thing per se - so caveat emptor!)

Exacerbating that, the laws under which public companies operate force a level of Corporate Evil (yes, even Google) that probably needs to be tackled before peace, love, brotherhood etc breaks out - if not, its more likely just a California Cult scam to make you feel good while being reduced to digital sharecropping.


Other Stuff

Nicole Simon has a whole lot of video interviews over here. There is also Twittering ad nauseam on reboot10 etc etc. It is interesting that as these tools increase in use, the content creators are doing far less long style blogging (at least it was far harder to find it about Reboot10 ).

Now my problem with this is that I just don't have time to listen to N linear video interviews and try to make sense of a plethora of loosely connected twts (Stowe Boyd usefully edits those of his talk on his blog page) - I think the issue with these tools is that they shift the attention time from the creator to the reader, and that is hugely inefficient. Not only that, but I can't do that copy/paste thing to create my own content as easily - so its far less user-friendly for me as a potential amplifier / echo chamber.

Hopefully more people will blog this week so more of the sessions can be linked in here (add any you know of in the comments too!).

All that being said, its great that things like Reboot happen, and I hope to be able to add my (irreverent) contributions next year