As is only right and proper in this new, collaborative world of ours, a few thanks… first to @Gleonhard aka Gerd Leonhard for pointing his Twitter community in the direction of this…
Which, likewise, then demands a big thanks to Kevin Kelly; the author.
It is a great, great post.
Because within that piece are a lot of fundamental truths as to the nature of the new landscape that is unfolding in front of us… In fact that only thing we currently lack, as Kevin rightly points out, is an accepted name for the process that is currently engulfing us all.
Digital collectivism? Dot.Communism? The list goes ever on; alas most terms come laden with implications from another age… They come with baggage.
Hence: ‘Socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation…’
That’s a great line.
I look around at the communities that I’ve either created editorially via www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity or, more recently, with the little self-publishing collective that is starting to gather around @addiply – particularly in the ‘campfire community’ we are looking to build around www.addiply.ning.com – and there is no greater political purpose to any of it other than to throw a money-making tool out there onto the web and to then find someone who can get it to work…
First, it was Craig on www.thisfrenchlife.com; it’s been Linda on the now late and lamented www.darwenreporter.com; then it was James on www.london-se1.co.uk; now, hopefully, the appliance of a spot of Berkeley business science can help Richard Koci-Hernandez and his J-School kids find a magic, selling formula as they take the $ version of Addiply out onto the streets of www.OaklandNorth.net and www.MissionLocal.org over the forthcoming weeks and months and start to sell as they story gather.
Because Addiply doesn’t come with a rule book; an instruction manual.
Nothing does.
It’s a tool. And on the very real basis that, right now, ‘nothing works, but everything might…’ slowly but surely we’re collaborating to see how we can together empower ourselves as individual self-publishers to earn rather more for our own, individual efforts as has previously been the case…
So, I pop a post into www.addiply.ning.com onto what James has been up to on www.london-se1.co.uk of late; ‘Heh, that’s smart…
http://addiply.ning.com/profiles/blogs/just-a-general-catchup
And I’ve always been a big fan of what www.peoplesrepublicofsouthdevon.co.uk have decided to do with their Addiply ‘kit’… it’s neat.
And, likewise, the way that they saw how it might fit within their own thinking; that it was as much about empowering them to choose the advertisers that they felt struck an appropriate chord with their community as it was empwering them to earn a few quid for their digital efforts…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=246
It was a way of looking at www.addiply.com that I hadn’t overly-pondered. Me? I’m easy. I’ll take anyone. PRSD want to stick to their ethical and green guns… Fine, go for it Lee…
Go back to Kevin’s original piece and all we’re doing is trying to fine tune communal tools ‘… to generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members…’
Or about a dozen, give or take, in our case.
‘In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product…’
That’s where we, IMHO, score. The more we collaborate, tweak and twiddle, the more money our community is likely to make; the hope is, say, that Berkeley’s J-School might see rather more by way of a real return than they might collaborating, say, on a Wikipedia page… this way lies ad dollars…
But the other point to bear in mind is that whilst everyone in our own little, insular orbit rushes to congratulate ourselves on spotting a movement – ‘our’ movement – the embarrassing fact is that we are just soooo late to this particular party.
My Little Man beat the Old Man to it by about 18 months as he – as a seven-year-old – took his first tottering steps into ‘Club Penguin’ and ‘Waggers’ started to collaborate and build an igloo with some penguin he’d never met before.
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=205
That lot have been helping themselves overcome the usual rounds of teenage traumas, boyfriend break-ups, spots on the day of the Graduation Ball, etc, etc for years – working things out together – as we all drew up the draw-bridges of our various Old Media castles and tried to work out this Web-thing all by ourselves…
As Mark Potts rightly notes… ‘They are the collaboration and relationship generation…’
We’re not. We’re the children born of silos, not networks.
Our first inclination is to keep things to ourselves – be it geographical space or technological innovation; to only ever take a finished product to market.
Not a half-baked DIY ad system idea with barely a proper back-end or, indeed, even a bank account to call its own.
Who on Earth would ever do that… A-hem…
And that’s my big point with Addiply.
I don’t know how it works. But our little community might. They might not know today. Or next week. But someone will find a tweak here or a turn there that we hadn’t thought of. But will share.
So I look at www.OaklandNorth.net and, in full expectant father mode, wait for the first advertiser to show.
Not cos I’m waiting for my 10%, but I want to see how their experiment works out… does 50 bucks a month do it in Oakland? And who does it do it for? I don’t know. Nothing works, but everything might… So might that rate work? Let’s see…
The placement’s great; they’ve got the grunts on the ground; have they now got the chance to fund a sustainable little cherry on top of EveryBlock?
In fact the only stipulation we really give as we throw out our pieces of www.addiply.com code is that I’m allowed to blog about it; that I can find a way of sharing new and better practices with my community as we all try together to re-tool ourselves for an enhanced digital future.
It’s all that Apple’s doing with its iPhone apps… ‘Heh, people, build us some apps that we can then all share…’
As for a name, who knows? But Twitter clearly has it’s part to play in this Age of Participation; of beat writer collectives and Hyper-Local Alliances.
Twitter is a collaborative device par excellence; complete with its own language of approval. A simple symbol that we share between our community to say: ‘Yeh, that works… that’s good… like it…
So, RT, Kevin Kelly.
RT.