Shirkey on Participation & Openness

In "The Shock of Inclusion," Clay Shirkey reminds us that our success in the age of the Internet will be determined by the ways we use this new tool or the ways we fail to use this new tool.

Using an analogy from the intervention of the printing press, Shirkey suggests that alchemists (who were working on turning lead into gold) failed and chemists succeeded in large part because of how they used the availability of printing to share their work. Shirkey writes,

"The problem with the alchemists had wasn't that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work, describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they all might benefit from both successes and failures, and build on each other's work."

In short, Shirkey suggests that developing a culture of "sharing" through print is why chemists and other scientists succeeded... not print itself, but a willingness to share using print.

Shirkey extends this thinking to the Internet writing,

"As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research."

He notes that although experts such as professor, physicians and others who have held a privileged position in regards to the ability to publish their ideas know longer have that position and that we will "will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere."

Shirkey suggests that we have the opportunity to use the Internet

"as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy."

Clay Shirkey on Finding Time for Participation in Web 2.0

Here is a first for me-- posting video... maybe even watching a video. I am an old-time text person. This is short, about 15 minutes. Shirkey basically asserts that the big change that has come about is that we are all spending less time passively watching media (TV in particular) and spending more time producing and sharing media whether through blogs, video, wikis, map-making via Google Earth, etc. He suggests that we have spent lots of time in this passive mode and that even if a small percentage is devoted to production and sharing that we have a lot of time to convert to production and we will produce a lot of new material.

Leadership at a Distance

I have just begun to read a book titled, "Leadership at a Distance" edited by Suzanne P. Weisband and published in 2008. I am also reading Clay Shirkey's book, Here Comes Everybody (2008). (also see Shirkey's blog)

Both books are interested in how people and organizations work in dispersed, often global environments. Shirky's view is that "forming groups has gotten alot easier. To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed" (p. 18). In the opening chapter he describes a remarkable story of an individual who lost her cell phone and the way in which a lot of people worked together over the Internet to find and eventually retrieve this cell phone.

The Weisband book, on the other hand, focuses on the the various difficulties and failures of working and "leading" in a dispersed work environment. The scholars who write these chapters report on the variety of challenges and difficulties of managing work from a distance. They note that despite the availability of various communications tools (email, groupware, blogs, wikis, etc.) there are still many difficulties in using these effectively.

Two ideas come to mind in thinking about this. First, there may be many important experiential differences here. For the most part the authors who are studying organizations are mostly studying established organizations in which workers generally are used to working in more traditional hierarchical, F2F models of leadership and who are trying to adapt to a flattened, and networked world. Shirkey is looking at organizations and individuals who are developing activities within the new world.

But there are still reasons to be very cautious about some of the examples that Shirkey reports. He notes numerous successes in the networked world, but it would seem to me that the ease of creating new organizations also means that there is likely to be just as rapid an unraveling of organizations.

Two main thoughts come to me about this: 1) we need to understand more about how traditional organizations adapt to the new networked world and 2) we need to know more about not only networked collaborative worlds, but those that persist over time. It may be relatively easy to organize people to accomplish a purpose for a short-term goal, but much more difficult to sustain these organizational structures over time.