4 days of intense collaboration have passed. 1 more day left to go. I’m tired.
Networking with new collaborators
Today we have finally got better about receiving external help. When I started to write about GIT vs. SVN as references for collaboration systems I checked out Jonah Bossewitch‘s Versioning Dissonance paper which he sent me after finding my first post in this series and reading that I might be interested in these ideas. I was initially planning to find a nice quote from him, but ended up realizing he basically wrote what I had in mind, only better. Since he licensed it under a CC-BY-SA license I could just copy paste the Multiplicity and Social Coding part of the essay directly into the book. Jonah will probably go into Booki edit it a bit tomorrow, but it is already a very good contribution to the book as is. By the way Jonah is involved in the pretty astonishing work done by NY based geeks hacking for Haiti, read about it on his blog.
We also got a piece about Anonymus from Patrick Davison. Jon Cohrs, whom I originally know from Eyebeam and who now lives in Berlin joined us too and worked with Michael on some of the pieces. Sophie the copy editor joined in person too and helped me edit some of the definition chapters.
My good friend Ela Kagel from Upgrade Berlin who’s one of the curators of this year’s Transmediale was today’s guest of honor. She quite elegantly blended in. It was largely due to the fact that by this morning we knew we are in pretty good standing and that we can allow ourselves to better brief her about what’s going on. Ela decided to write a chapter for the Futures section of the book titled Collaborative Economies and by the end of the day the chapter was pretty much done.. As a teaser for it I’ll quote one of the quotes she used:
“Cities without gays and rockbands are loosing the economic development race.”
Richard Florida from The Rise of the Creative Class
It seems like finding sexy quotes has assumed some game mechanics in our process with Marta constantly trying to one-up me with great quotes. Quotes are great, you get both a sound byte, an amusing pause and some social capital by having smart people passively validate your thoughts. At some point Marta and I stopped competing on quotes and started comparing our beautiful cat pictures from Flickr (M vs. M).
So it’s bullshit, but in what way
From day one Adam and Martha were into having a piece that pretty much says Web 2.0 is bullshit. Adam took a pass at it and started with a few essential bulletpoints:
- Incentivize data-driven network effects!
- Integrate data-driven weblogs!
- Syndicate A-list network effects!
- Beta-test user-contributed web services!
A direct output from the Web 2.0 bullshit generator. We all took our turns giving feedback and context. Mike helped integrate it into the history section and I ended up working on it a bit myself. It seemed like we all agreed it’s bullshit, but each of us had our own reasons. I was glad to see we have finally came to a disagreement that while Web 2.0 is bullshit, Web 3.0 is bullshit too. (it might sound like a rant, but it ended up being a pretty well articulated point)
One more day to go, we are going to make it. For real!