archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Common models for participation in social and contributory media invariably set ‘content creators’ – the group of people who provide original material – at the top of an implied or explicit scale of comparative value. Bradley Horowitz’s Content Production Pyramid is one example, Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder is another. In these models, value – usually to potential marketers or advertisers external to the domain in question – is usually measured in terms of the level of involvement of the different groups present, whether consumers, synthesizers, or creators.

By the numbers, these models are accurate: the vast majority of the content in social media comes from a small slice of the population. And for businesses, content creators offer greater potential to commercialize / monetize / trade influence.

It’s time to evolve these models a bit, to better align them with the sweeping DIY cultural and technological shift happening offline in the real world, as well as online.

The DIY shift manifests in many ways:

• Web 2.0 culture of contribution, self-publishing
• Commoditized / outsourced / on-demand design, development & manufacturing
• Shadow IT
• Open Source & public data sets
• APIs, Web Services, SOA (public and private)
• Mashup infrastructure: Yahoo Pipes, Google Gadgets
• Physical goods: fabbers, and fab-labs ReadyMade, Make

The essential feature of the DIY shift is co-creation: the presence of many more people in *all aspects* of creation and production, whether of software, goods, ideas, etc. Co-creation encompasses more than straightforward on-line content creation – such as sharing a photo, or writing a blog post – acknowledged by the architecture of participation, user-generated content (and ugly term…), crowd-sourcing, and collective and contributory media models.

Co-creation includes active shaping of structure, pattern, rules, and mechanisms, that support simple content creation. This requires activity and involvement from roles we often label editor, builder, designer, or architect, depending on the context. The pyramid and ladder models either implicitly collapse these perspectives into the general category of ‘creator’, which obscures very important distinctions between them, or leaves them out entirely (I’m not sure which). It is possible to plot these more nuanced creative roles on the general continuum of ‘level of involvement’, and I often do this when I talk about the future of design in the DIY world.

A better model for this world is the ecology of co-creation, which recognizes that the key difference between industrial production models and the DIY future is that the walls separating traditional creators from consumers have fallen, and all parties interconnect. Judgements of value in ecologies take on very different meanings: Consider the differing but all vitally important roles of producers, consumers, and decomposers in a living ecosystem.

What will an ecology of co-creation look like in practical / operational form? In The Bottom Is Not Enough, Kevin Kelly offers, “…now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.”

An ecology of co-creation that combines top-down architecture and design with bottom-up contribution and participation will take the form of a deliberate hybrid.

I’ll quote Kelly again (at some length):

Here’s how I sum it up:  The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions.  Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.

The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of “everybody” (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.

[Side note: Metaphors for achieving the appropriate mix of control/no-control for a system will likely include choreographing, cultivating, tuning, conducting, and shepherding, in contrast to our current directive framings such as driving, directing, or managing.]

Knowledge at Wharton echoes Kelly, in their recent article The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media
A tug of war over the future of media may be brewing between so-called user-generated content — including amateurs who produce blogs, video and audio for public consumption — and professional journalists, movie makers and record labels, along with the deep-pocketed companies that back them. The likely outcome: a hybrid approach built around entirely new business models, say experts at Wharton.

No one has quite figured out what these new business models will look like, though experimentation is under way with many new ventures from startups and existing organizations.

The BBC is putting hybridization and tuning into effect now, albeit in limited ways that do not reflect a dramatic shift of business model.

In Value of citizen journalism Peter Horrocks writes:

Where the BBC is hosting debate we will want the information generated to be editorially valuable. Simply having sufficient resource to be able to moderate the volume of debate we now receive is an issue in itself.

And the fact that we are having to apply significant resource to a facility that is contributed regularly by only a small percentage of our audiences is something we have to bear in mind. Although of course a higher proportion read forums or benefit indirectly from how it feeds into our journalism. So we may have to loosen our grip and be less worried about the range of views expressed, with very clear labeling about the BBC’s editorial non-endorsement of such content. But there are obvious risks.

We need to be able to extract real editorial value from such contributions more easily. We are exploring as many technological solutions as we can for filtering the content, looking for intelligent software that can help journalists find the nuggets and ways in which the audience itself can help us to cope with the volume and sift it.

What does all this mean for design(ers)? Stay tuned for part two…

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Presentation Prize today.

Though I’m sad to say it, this latest round of Celebrity Information Design Death Match, pitting Information Visualization Guru Dr. Edward Tufte vs. presentation tools and their legions of droning slide shufflers goes too –
Presentation software (at least it’s Keynote)…
<announcer voice>
Gore’s Nobel Prize must truly be a bitter pill for the esteemed Dr. Tufte, whose extensive declamations on the evils of PowerPoint remain insightful and even amusing, but have been outflanked by Gore’s combination of savvy presentation techniques, and repeated use of the famous “Earth’s Environment Is About to Perish” flying scissorkick move.
</announcer voice>

Seriously: Aside from the environment (we fervently hope), the real winner of this year’s Nobel Peace prize is effective storytelling that blends qualitative and quantitative messages to create a compelling visually supported narrative experience that clearly communicates complex ideas in an emotionally compelling package.

The scientists and Mr. Gore take quite different approaches to the climate changes. The committee has been a measured, peer-reviewed, government-approved statement focused on the most non-controversial findings, whereas Mr. Gore rails against a “planetary emergency.”

Both messages — however imperfect — play their part, scientists said on Friday. The Nobel Prize “is honoring the science and the publicity, and they’re necessarily different,” said Spencer A. Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics and author of The Discovery of Global Warming, a recent book.
From Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

Dr. Tufte says, “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple.” Too often, Dr. Tufte is right: think about how many times in the last five years you’ve considered feigning a seizure or gastro-intestinal distress to escape a truly awful presentation.

Yet for some ideas – and perhaps the very biggest of audiences – ‘the [school] play’s the thing’. Loud, slow, and simple might be just the right rhetorical style for complex messages that require the broadest kinds of consensus. (If Gore had figured this out during the campaign in 2000, the world would certainly be a very different place today…)

And yet, despite Gore’s pivotal role in shaping the Internet, a search for “al gore inconvenient truth” on the Slideshare website turns up – well – nothing that seems relevant in the first 10 results. There’s likewise no slideware to be had at the official site for the movie. But rest assured Mr. Gore, we know the humble origins of your Nobel Prize and Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth lie in a mere slide show.

In addition to the customary joys of DIY life in the new mediaverse – contending with opaque and incomplete documentation, reconciling conflicting content models and templates, and the seemingly endless repetitive labor of manually naming, tagging, and reviewing migrated items – changing publishing platforms means the opportunity to explore what it will be like to be an Information Archaeologist in the future.

Operatively, this means digging deep into the many layers of cumulative information strata beneath the gentle orange user experience that greets visitors to JoeLamantia.com. When performed on a website you’ve created and maintained for almost 10 years, the experience is a mix of cleaning out your attic, workshop, or garage, and excavating the foundations of a former residence.

Such an effort yields a rich assemblage of digital artifacts:

• dozens of orphaned HTML pages comprising a design portfolio, created by hand using deprecated markup and tags
• “multi-ethnic” style-sheets cross-bred and reused for so many different site looks or designs over the past ten years that deleting style references is like playing russian roulette with your user experience
• four or five derelict publishing package installations (MT, WordPress, etc.), spanning technologies from PERL/CGI to PHP RUBY – the Infoverse equivalent of a collection of abandoned and decaying rust belt factories
• hundreds of half-empty shell pages populated with dummy content, created during tests of publishing tools
• multiple sets of overlapping archives, accumulated over generations of upgrades to blogging tools. the trend here is toward increasingly human-readable output files, away from the raw database style naming of early blogging platforms
• a score of miscellaneous documents, audio / video files, and MS Office format files stored on the server for temporary download, now comprising a retrospective of outdated resumes, drafts of deliverables for long-over projects, and backups from system crashes long-forgotten
• numerous design tools and templates, now linked from external publications, and indispensable to unknown thousands of downloaders

Just like the older layers of cities and habitations uncovered during new construction, these cumulative information castoffs tell stories within a larger context: changing career plans and jobs, new technologies and tools, shifts in business and economic climates, life events, aspirations and interests, hardware failures.

What will the information archaeologists of the future find when excavating our virtual habitations and workplaces? How will they map and understand what they find? What meanings will they make, and what insights into our lives will they draw, from the information (waste? pollution? byproducts?) we create at such stupendous rates?

Like so many life forms before us, we are very busy living in the moment, not thinking overly much about the vast deposits of information detritus we leave behind in the course of saving dozens of versions of text files, booking air travel, sharing photos, or obeying regulatory compliance directives for medical archives.

But in the long view, all this will matter in some way. Witness the fact that 10% of the land area of the former Soviet Union is contaminated with radioactivity or industrial pollution.

What is the difference between pollution, waste, and recyclable and reusable matter in the infoverse?

Can we make use of these vast deposits of information in new ways?

The Garamantes of the Sahara relied on deeply buried reserves of fossil water to sustain a brief empire, a culture that flowered and perished entirely in line with it’s ability to exploit finite reserves of irreplaceable groundwater (paleowater)stored in aquifers.

Living off the fruits of past accumulation is a habit we’ve not shaken yet in North Africa (Libya’s Great Man Made River project supplying 6,500,000 m³ of freshwater per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere is the largest engineering effort in the world), or here in the United States, as we drain the enormous Ogallala Aquifer – that supports nearly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle produced in the United States – at an alarming rate.

As (it seems, always…), Sterling has visited this future, in his novel Holyfire, which mentions wildcatters who get rich discovering lost landfills rich in plastics and other rare materials, in former Eastern Europe.

Moving past the archeological horizon brings us to the geologic time scale.

Will future virtual economies depend on the industrial style extraction, processing and mass consumption of these new informational strata we are laying down today, in the same way that we depend upon fossilized forests of the Carboniferous era to power our new hydrocarbon age?

The vast oil and coal deposits that power our economy exist because the bacteria and other decomposer organisms of the time were unable to effectively break down plant cell materials. We recreate this cycle by mining assorted fossil fuels, turning them into plastics that existing decomposers are unable to break down, and then dispersing these new proto-fossilized non-degrable materials widely throughout our own environment (yielding contemporary phenomena such as plastic micro-particulate contamination of tidal waters, and dating of landfills by the plastic materials preserved in them.