here comes everybody | Perfect Path

Thanks to France being all quatorze juillet yesterday, we got the benefit of Clay Shirky’s wit and wisdom over lunchtime at Demos. Although the first few minutes were “Previously on ‘Here Comes Every Body’”, as you’d expect in a session chaired by Paul Miller at the lefty think-tank there was much focus on the use of social software in public policy and political organisation. Yay! I hope you don’t expect me to weave what was said into a structured narrative. Here are the brain globs that formed for me.

The Obama campaign has focused on strategic use of the tools learning the lessons from the Dean campaign’s tactical experimentation.

Of course he wants Obama to win, but Clay has laid a $50 bet on President McCain – simply because people lie to pollsters – they *say* they’ll vote for a black president but…

The use of social software in the Obama campaign has been focused on marketing efforts and not policy development. The hope is that the people can be let back in more once the presidency is won.

If making a TV documentary about the future of the web (As Charlie Leadbeater seems to be doing – hatchet buried btw, he’s coming to Tuttle in September) it would be cool to allow remixing to create versions focused on narrower industries or themes.

You can’t extrapolate from Linux and Wikipedia in order to tell you what to do now – Wikipedia is under constant “attack” – the page for Galileo is protected because it’s a focus for the “500-year flame war” over his persecution by the Catholic Church but that doesn’t mean that your 5-person wiki needs the same level of defences.

Something clicked with me about the Open Source thing – where most Sourceforge projects go nowhere and the potential coming out of 2gether08 – most of the conversations we had will go nowhere, but one or two will be amazing – we just don’t know which one or two.

And as my blood sugar levels plummeted, I heard that Etienne Wenger is doing something interesting where CoPs meet tech but I was already seduced by the fruit basket and didn’t really hear what.

Glad to see that the podcast is already up – well done Demos!