Mon, Mar 19, 2007
Beer Is Good #
This Thursday's PARC Forum in PaloAlto features CharlieBamforth, chair of the Department of Food Science & Technology at UC Davis. (M0R)
His talk? "Beer: The Best Beverage in the World." (M0S)
Ah, academia, how I love thee. (M0T)
/talks | Posted at 10:52pm
Thu, Oct 26, 2006
WikiSym 2006 Keynote Video #
The keynote that DougEngelbart and I did at WikiSym this past August on HyperScope and Wikis is now available on the Web, thanks once again to MortenBlaabjerg. There are three parts: (LEO)
(Also posted this item on the HyperScope blog.) (LES)
/talks | Posted at 12:03pm
Thu, Sep 28, 2006
HyperScope Talk at SHIFT in Portugal #
DougEngelbart and I gave a surprise remote talk at SHIFT this morning from his offices in Fremont to the conference in Portugal via video Skype. ThomasMadsenMygdal took this picture while Doug was talking. Here's how it looked from my point of view: (L9F)
At the end of our talk, BeverlyTrayner asked a question that I'm not sure I answered adequately. She asked about the relevance of these advanced capabilities when so much of the world doesn't have access to computers or the Internet. (L9H)
If you can make one group of people more effective, and if that group's productivity has a positive effect on the world at large, then your influence has extended well beyond that group. My example for this was Wikipedia. Many developing countries don't have widespread access to computers or the Internet (although OneLaptopPerChild will change this). Nevertheless, Wikipedia is improving their lives by making it cheap and easy to publish high-quality textbooks that can be distributed in book form. Wikis allowed Wikipedia to happen, which in turn is affecting far more people in the world than those who have access to Wikis. (L9I)
SHIFT looks like it was very cool. Many thanks to PedroCustodio for inviting us to speak. Hopefully next year, we can attend for real. (L9J)
/talks | Posted at 4:09pm
Wed, Aug 30, 2006
WikiMania Interview with Ward Cunningham #
My interview with WardCunningham at WikiMania 2006 is now available as an MP3. Many thanks to the folks who made it available! (L4F)
/talks | Posted at 2:57pm
Tue, Aug 15, 2006
Denmark Meetup This Friday #
ThomasMadsenMygdal and other good folks have very graciously organized a blogger meetup in Copenhagen this Friday at 6pm in my honor. I'm really looking forward to mind melding with some of the Danish thinkers and do'ers in this space and seeing what happens. Looks like there's going to be a great crowd, and I hear Danish beer is outstanding. If you'll be in the area, please join us! You can RSVP on Thomas's blog. (L26)
/talks | Posted at 8:51am
Mon, Aug 07, 2006
Yochai Benkler and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh at WikiMania 2006 #
On Saturday morning, I had the pleasure of attending talks given by two very important contributors to my field. About a year and a half ago, shortly after I first met KatrinVerclas, Katrin started telling me, "You've got to read YochaiBenkler." I'm pretty sure that she ended 90 percent of our subsequent conversations with, "You really should read Benkler." When Benkler came out with his book, Wealth of Networks earlier this year, everybody else in the world seemed to echoed Katrin's advice. (KYH)
I knew that Benkler was speaking this weekend, so I finally downloaded his book and started reading it on the plane. Unfortunately, I only got through the first chapter. You can imagine how lame I felt when I found myself having dinner with him on Friday night. Fortunately, Benkler himself gave a thirty minute synopsis of his book on Saturday morning. (KYI)
(As an aside, Benkler unintentionally scored some major geek points, when his laptop revealed that he runs Linux with KDE. There are a lot of outsiders commentating on OpenSource these days, but most of them do not actually run Linux themselves.) (KYJ)
Benkler's thesis is that technology has enabled unprecedented forms of large-scale cooperative production, what he calls "commons-based peer production." Think Wikipedia, think OpenSource, think MashUps?, etc. According to Benkler, these non-market activities are no longer on the periphery, but form the very core of economic life for the most advanced societies. (KYK)
Technology is largely responsible for our ability to behave this way, but only partially responsible for the authority to behave this way. The latter is a cultural phenomenon that has been catalyzed by the technology, but is not entirely causal. (KYL)
The question is, is this behavior an outlier, or is it economically sustainable? Benkler didn't talk a lot about this -- this is why I need to read the book -- but he did cite numbers such as IBM's revenues from Linux-related services, which far outpaces its revenues from IP licensing. (This alone is not evidence; smaller OpenSource companies like MySQL are making significant revenue from dual licensing, a lesser known fact of life for many OpenSource companies.) (KYM)
Benkler touched a bit on the importance of humanization in commons-based peer production, which he said is the focus of his current research. He also cited the reemergence of a new folk culture in society today, something that LawrenceLessig also talks about. (KYN)
There was a minor hullabaloo between JasonCalacanis and Benkler during Q&A. (See AndyCarvin's description, plus some background and commentary. It was entertaining, but low on any real controversy. Benkler acknowledged that the interface between market and nonmarket interaction is not well understood right now. There are good examples of how paying people kills the community dynamics, but the patterns are not necessarily discernible yet. However, RishabAiyerGhosh, who spoke after Benkler -- made it crystal clear that those citing numbers about how a small number of people are responsible for a large percentage of work are missing the point. If you pay for 75 percent of the work, you end up with a three legged chair, which is worthless. (KYO)
Ghosh has done some of the best quantitative analysis on OpenSource communities, and he's been doing it for a while. The BlueOxen report on open source communities was heavily based on work that Rishab had done. (KYP)
Ghosh kicked off his talk by talking about JamesWatt's exploitation of the patent system, and argued that Watt's significantly slowed innovation with the steam engine and thus was partially responsible for delaying the IndustrialRevolution. (KYQ)
(I didn't find Ghosh's argument particularly compelling or relevant, but it was a good story. Patents give folks monopolies, and monopolies are bad for markets. We know that already. But patents are also supposed to incentivize innovation. Ghosh was insinuating through his story that patents were not a strong motivator for innovation in this particular case, but I have trouble believing that. ChristophFriedrichVonBraun wrote an excellent, but dense book, The Innovation War (1997), where he explained how difficult it was to correlate patents to innovation, either for or against. And von Braun barely touched on software, which adds even more complexity to the question.) (KYR)
Ghosh then went on to talk about FLOSS developer motivation and described his value-flow and cooking pot analogy for how markets can sustain this type of behavior. He also pointed out that the collaboration is not new, but the scale is. (KYS)
Ghosh continues to do good research, much of which is hosted at FLOSS World. (KYT)
/talks | Posted at 2:53pm
