Clay Shirky on the merits of metadata

Video featuring an interview with Clay Shirky with some memorable quotes, found courtesy of Jake Mckee.

One of Shirky’s great points is, that in order to coordinate group efforts on a large scale, one needs to fail informatively, i.e. deliver the metadata to enable the user to identify which projects and tasks are worth pursuing and which are not. Answering a question by Chris Heuer on “how to connect the dots” i.e. groups working independently of each other but often on similar projects : (my emphasis)

The two modes of management we have are the micro manager [and the] grand strategic visionary. Neither of these really work with community. You need something in the middle, which is a kind of facilitation skill. Noone to guide the community, noone to let them go. And it is really, for the individual projects, that’s what you need.

For the, you know, web scale how-do-we-connect-the-dots, the only answer I’ve seen, that really works at large scale, is to work informatively, and to fail informatively.

So if you go on to Sourceforge, which is the biggest collection of open source projects in existance, three quarters of those projects are completely inert, 1 developer, no downloads ever, it’s just nothing ever happened. But on Sourceforge you can always tell what’s working and what’s not, every day. So it doesn’t matter that you’re letting people try things all over, because they can discover each other and move off “this project isn’t working but that one is”. And so you gotta give people the kind of metadata it takes to say : “This is what my organization does, what’s your organization doing, I can find it on Google, I can pull it out of an RSS feed, I can work with it”. If you give people that kind of information, then they’ll find their way to each other, and you don’t have to do anything top-down, you don’t have to do anything to restrict the grand experimentation. But you also don’t end up with lots of little pockets. The open source movement, as so often, they do that better than anyone else, but I think the rest of the world is catching up.

More on the merits of metadata in this post from last year.

Shirky also had an opportunity to expand on the previously prophesized “50 years of chaos” and what happens with the introduction into society of technologies such as the printing press and the internet :

The biggest surprise and the biggest pleasure researching the book was actually the early history of the printing press. Because it became clear, reading the various accounts of what happened between 1450 and 1650, that we didn’t move from situation A to situation B. We used to have this pre-literate world, where scribes were copying bibles by hand. All of a sudden we had science and this enormous up-welling of all kinds of publications and the catholic church was undone as a pan-European force. We didn’t go from A to B. We went from A to a long period of chaos. And only out of that chaos did B arrive. And that’s my thesis for what we’re seing now with the internet. We’re not seing an orderly transition to a new kind of society. We’re actually seeing all kinds of experiments, short term and long term. We can’t tell which ones are gonna last and which ones are gonna be blips. And in the meantime, a lot of stuff in contemporay society is just going to break. And so, things are going to get weirder, before they get saner, I think is the conclusion.

Tags : Chris Heuer, Clay Shirky, Jake Mckee, rss, video, visibility 

I have been looking around for a way to start Kaplak’s looking into the workings of online niche communities. We have some great examples in our own local backyard, but I wanted something, which showed how the internet has come along and changed things.

Looking around I stumbled upon this video by Jake McKee on what we may simply term the “LEGO community”. Everybody knows LEGO, but few know that LEGO is not just a children’s toy. LEGO has a large following of playful adults around the world. See the video and judge for yourself.

One of the interesting points of the video is that all these scattered individuals passionate about LEGO have been connected with the internet. Where many of these people were isolated before, the internet has made them aware of each other’s existance, globally. One gets the impression that this has helped spur a new vitalization and outburst of their creativity. New possibilities to show off creative endeavours (like this video, shared with YouTube, is an example of) and get inputs back, has caused something we may term an “awakening”, with an expression borrowed from Lawrence Lessig.

Personally, I’ve recently refound a lot of joy myself in my old LEGO’s and have been surfing around on sites such as Brickset, which offers an online database on most of the LEGO models ever produced. I’ve also played around with LEGO’s official Digital Designer. This program engages LEGO fans to help design new models, which can also be “uploaded” and sold via an online marketplace. The LEGO Digital Designer and marketplace is one of Chris Anderson’s examples of how a company can utilize the long tail of interests in different LEGO models. If, that is, the program was not artificially limited to a specific range of bricks, which it is, for industrial reasons… In order for LEGO to be able to sell the models you build with the Digital Designer, you have to use bricks currently in production. You can’t use ‘outdated’ bricks. It seems odd to me, that one should re-experience that old problem one always had building things with LEGO, that you always missed a particular piece, in a 100% digital product.

What’s more interesting to Kaplak, though, is the exchanges taking place between LEGO fans themselves, and the eventual capabilities of fans to share and eventually sell their creative endeavours to other LEGO fans. There’s nothing more than trademark issues (i.e. the protectionism of a traditional business model scared of copying, which we’ve touched upon before) to prevent users from creating their own models, trade in bricks on eBay, and share or sell their construction instructions, in spite of anything LEGO has to say. And maybe even issues like these won’t stand in the way. The awakening of this niche community is in many ways also an empowering of individual fans and entrepreneurs, who is so far perfectly capable of building their own databases and wikis.

Tags : Adult fan of LEGO, awakening, business, Chris Anderson, community, Jake Mckee, LEGO, long tail, niche, niche ecology, trademark, understand premises