The recent issue of the
Open Source Business Review is all about
Social Innovation – what appears to be a an experiment in seeing how these two memes both converge and diverge. (hat tip to
Mark Surman for
pointing me there).
At the same time, this convergence is not unique to those fields. The quotes below from a recent post by Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures point to some very strong parallels to the content in some of the pieces in the Open Source Business Review.
The common threads among all these areas are systems level work approached with a common emerging values/mindset in the context of pervasive adoption of communication and collaboration technologies. They are also employing a new mode of organization that is increasingly permeable, iterative, and emergent.
In a society that is at its physical limits and where the systems that took it there are breaking down, this type of convergence isn’t surprising but it is encouraging. For those who can navigate it, the transition might not be comfortable, but it is full of opportunity.
| Craigslist. That service is essentially a very lightweight governance system that manages an enormous collection of users who contribute all of the content and much of the oversight that makes the service work. It is because Craig and Jim focus on managing the efforts of their users instead of doing the work of those users that Craigslist is so phenomenally efficient. Many of the most interesting web services are like Craigslist, at their core, lightweight governance systems. Facebook and Twitter come to mind. |
| It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. |
| The creators of these services recognize that services like theirs will ultimately disrupt the economics of many, if not most, parts of the global economy in much the same way that Craigslist collapsed the multi-billion dollar classified industry into a fabulously profitable multi-million dollar web service. |
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