Ryan Coleman, a TorCamp Citizen I've come to know and love, did a fantastic job in hosting and facilitating VizThink1 a visual thinking jam session last night at his offices at Clay Tablet. Ryan really stepped up the plate, added a whole new dimension to our community and facilitated a whole new conversation. And because he setup the wiki using the BarCamp event pattern, this one event will trigger more and will almost certainly go global. The goal (visually presented, of course): So who is this nascent new community? Well, this is it (for now): See Ryan's full presentation on SlideShare:

Technorati Tags: ryancoleman, torcamp, visualthinking, vizthink

BarCamp London friend (and Italian) Riccardo "Bru" Cambiassi reports about a very threatening note a BarCamp organizer in Italy received for organizing rItaliaCamp to open up discussion about the 40 million Euro italia.it portal. Who is threatened by openness and participation? Some people are very threatened, apparently. Please DIGG this story. read more | digg story

Three weeks ago, I coined a new term in my attempt to understand and communicate some of the ideas under the surface of Toronto Transit Camp. I referred to Transit Camp and BarCamp as open creative communities. It was a vague notion founded on my intuitions about what I have been observing in places as diverse and apparently disconnected as BarCamp to CaseCamp to NewMindSpace to Burning Man. So what do marketers and tech geeks have in common with half-naked neo-tribal bohemians in the desert? Alive, originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.

These are communities of interest, practice, proximity and values.

These communities live in a hybrid virtual- and place-based geography. They are hyper-creative and produce some phenomenal artifacts of human ingenuity and culture. They are open, in that the barrier to entry is not a membership fee or a geographic line in the sand or a common ethnicity. The barrier to entry is creative citizenship, and you are either a citizen and a participant or you are not, based on your individual relationship to that community's interests, practices, proximity and values. They are communities with both global and local dimensions. And they are self-organizing at an increasingly rapid rate, in the most unexpected places. (more after the jump)

Technorati Tags: transitcamp, community, torcamp, emergence, opencities, torontotransitcamp, opencreativecommunities, burningman, Web2.0, wikinomics, creativity, barcamp, futureofcommunities, inmylifetime, socialweb, creativeclass

Definitions.

Creativity: the ability to create something new; the production by one or more people of ideas and inventions that are personal, original and meaningful Innovation: a process that extends beyond the act of creativity towards some useful application; for something to be innovative it must be of some use to somebody Community: a community is any group of individuals who interact and share some common characteristics; those characteristics may be geographic, ethnic or national; they may also include practices, interests, values and proximity; Open: for a community to be open, it must be possible for new members to enter into the community without artificial or irrelevant barriers;

The Meaning of Openness.

Open is a critical differentiator of these kinds of communities, but it is important to understand what open means. Open community does not necessarily mean equal individuals. Unlike the concept of demos, an open self-organized community is much more rooted in actual human social behaviour, rather than idealized political philosophy. Equality of opportunity is an important social norm of an open creative community, but one's place within community has to do with one's skills, abilities and willingness to engage with others and participate. Status exists, but it is freely given in a reputation economy where leadership authority is socially constructed and legitimated. Community members are encouraged to vote with their feet. A heavy-handed authority figure will quickly lose the social basis of their power because an open community offers no barrier to alternative leadership and few opportunities to close the gates for members to enter or exit. Open is fluid and adaptable. Open is self-organizing. David Crow has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the Toronto BarCamp community. He has been wrestling with openness, the nature of Community-driven leadership and the Wealth of BarCamp. He just posted an excellent piece on the question of community openness on the Future of Communities blog. Open creative communities are not guilds, fraternities, clubs, member-based associations or formal organizational entities. You do not need a professional designation, a membership card or require the ownership of land or capital to enter one. An open creative community is not a network of isolated nodes, it is a cluster, a social agglomeration. It is inclusive of both professional and amateur, a space where hobbyists, theorists and practitioners can interact.

Emergence.

Bio-mimetic language is taking over. The laws of self-organizing biological systems are providing new insights to human social and technological evolution in an increasingly interconnected world. Social systems demonstrate emergent biological properties. By embracing new lenses and tools, we can harness the tremendous latent power of natural systems to solve our increasingly complex problems. This is the real power of social software tools and the social web.

The Search for Identity.

We are in search of ourselves, and we find possible answers to our search for self through our interaction in community with others, through both our similarities and our distinctiveness. We are increasingly aware of the complex and multidimensional nature of identity in the modern world. We are much more than the roles and demographic slices that our companies, families and mass media would want to trap us in. We belong to many tribes simultaneously. We are multi-dimensional beings engaged in the process of becoming.

The Impact of Technology.

Technology, in particular social software tools, the social web and social media are changing our search for identity and the nature of communities. We have increasingly useful and easy to use tools for self-expression. We are able to express the many dimensions of our selves and find community through that expression. We can increasingly harness low-cost open technology platforms as our tools for our search for self and community. The centrality of this eternal human search for self and community makes the issue of Net Neutrality all the more urgent.

A Meta-Innovation.

We are a civilization in need of meta-innovations: innovations that foster other innovation. This concept lies at the core of endogenous growth theory. Thomas Homer-Dixon calls our challenges of the future an Ingenuity Gap - a gap between the demands for ingenuity being made by increasingly complex and intractable problems and our ability to supply ingenuity in the form of solutions. Jane Jacobs warned of a Dark Age Ahead. Researchers, teachers, thinkers, writers and practitioners like Richard Florida, Bruce Mau, Alexander Manu, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Meric Gertler, Jon Hawkes, Roger Martin, Donald Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Charles Landry, Tim Jones, Daniel Pink, Sara Diamond, Glen Murray, and many others have been wrestling with these ideas of meta-innovation: the nature of creativity, the importance of place, the process of innovation, the peer production paradigm, creative industries and creative cities. Our politicians are paying keen attention. In this global discourse, there has been a profound silence on the practical social and cultural methods to scale design thinking and creativity throughout our society. There has been some work on creative education and on cultural planning for cities, which usually incorporate top-down approaches to "engineering" creativity. Where is the dialogue on emergence? Governments and policy-makers need to be enablers and then get out of the way of what is a natural biological process. But enabling what, and how?

A Possible Future.

A new world is emerging, beneath the surface of the old. It is a world of open creative human communities that are both global and local; multidimensional and interconnected with one another. It is a world increasingly based on a reputation economy, where authority is earned and accumulated through social media along with other traditional avenues of social interaction. It is a world fueled by a peer production paradigm and a reputation economy that interacts with the industrial capital economy, a world where creative innovations will fuel future growth and human development. I dream of a future that harnesses the power of self-organizing open creative communities to global innovation networks in order to solve the most difficult problems of our time - from technology and business problems to problems of collective action like climate change, social equity and cultural sustainability, migration and international conflict. I dream of a future where every individual has the power and ability to discover his or her creative passions, and to resolve their multi-dimensional identities into a coherent whole through their interaction in open community with others. The holy grail is the unification of one's practical needs with one's hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is a universal desire, and it is the most powerful force in human civilization.

What is your community?

I'm not making this up. Read the inspiration here. Pastor Chuck Warnock of Chatham Baptist Church, Virginia saw something in the Transit Camp model that he felt was needed in the Church. In particular, the BarCamp principles as we outlined them:

Bar Camp Principles Apply:

1. We are equal individuals in an open community.
2. Leadership can emerge from anywhere.
3. We are all participants.

Pastor Warnock apparently saw a need for openness, self-organization and participation in the Church:

I just think this is amazing. Here we have a self-organized group of transit evangelists who are getting together on their own to help the transit system improve and they have principles that any church should be shouting from the rooftops -- equal individuals in open community, leaders emerge from anywhere, and all are participants. Maybe we ought to let non-church members organize churches for us.

Warnock's ChurchCamp wiki is up, a solutions playground for the church, with the 3 principles given prominence of place, like a wikified version of Luther's 95 Theses. If we needed proof about the amazing hunger in the world outside tech for the methods and tools for openness, participation and community being developed in the BarCamp community laboratory, we need look no further.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, churchcamp, opencreativecommunities, transitcamp, torontotransitcamp

Vista's DRM mistake, and the decline of Microsoft Windows: Microsoft introduces Vista to area bloggers, Nov. 2006 Tom's done a fantastic job summarizing the current state of things with respect to MSFT, Vista, DRM, Big IT, Enterprise 2.0 and how they are all interlinked into a bigger story about the long-term trend towards OPEN. Some key quotes:

No, the next revolution in business productivity comes from empowering *people*, and not Big IT. The next revolution comes from embracing emergent uses of tools and a default status of “openness� not the other way around. Port 80 has set us free [port 80 is used by web browsers to access the greater internet and the one loophole left necessarily, grudgingly, open in every corporate firewall].

Meanwhile those who know, and those who are [not] tied to corporate IT have switched to Mac already. It was the MacBookPro and Apple’s switch to powerful (and finally equivalent/better) x86 hardware that did it. Try going to a tech or blogger conference and every single person sitting comfortably ensconced behind the glowing Apple logo of their MacBooks.

Read the whole post.

Ryan Feeley has a blog. Expect to see lots of usability critique, urban warrior tools and food porn. Ryan was a proto-photo-travel-blogger back in the day, long before LiveJournal or Movable Type. It was called Wrecktangle, and it was genius. So why did it take Ryan so long to find his voice post 1.0? Good question, let's ask him. In the meantime, read Ryan's pithy critique of Apple OS X's Spotlight feature.