Reporting from Picnic ’08 in Amsterdam: Cloudy with a chance of collaboration – day two

26 Sep Reporting from Picnic ’08 in Amsterdam: Cloudy with a chance of collaboration – day two

By Doris Obermair
Images Silvia Langa

Internet and technology guru Clay Shirky was in charge of the second keynote speech at the Picnic conference on collaborative creation. He reminded us that the web faces the same dilemmas as open societies in the physical world: on the one hand there is this openness and willingness to do stuff collectively through social software and online communities, such as Wikipedia but on the other hand we need to know how to defend that openness against abuses from those who control of, let’s say the infrastructure: the classical «guarding the guards dilemma».

He also brought the hype and euphoria about virtual co-creation to a realistic level, saying that predictability about the outcome or the performance of processes of collective co-creation on the web is like predicting the weather, at best you can say: «cloudy with a chance of collaboration». So far these virtual organizations without organizations work well in activism or open-source software but the snag is that companies still haven’t figured out how to cope with spontaneous motivation patterns and the lack of predictability and planning. But day 2 had more highlights: Global Voice founder and pioneer blogger Ethan Zuckermann made an inspiring introduction to a circle of talks that will start tomorrow called «Surprising Africa».

There were too many white guys speaking about Africa he drop ironically and made a it clear that it’s time that Africa is explained to the rest of the world by the Africans. In a brief panel discussion he was accompanied by Kenyan author, journalist and web activist Binyavanga Wainaina who is the founder of Kwani?, a web-based platform that promotes African writers and Hellen Omwando head of market intelligence for Royal Philips Electronics. The day closed with the award ceremony of Green Challenge, the annual contest for sustainable and viable business ideas. The award worth ? 500,000 went to Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, an inventor team from the United States that presented sustainable ecological alternatives to conventional synthetic building materials.

Stay tuned for day 3.