Clay Shirky At The RSA : Fewer Meetings, More Meet-Ups

Yesterday lunchtime, I went to see Clay Shirky talk at The RSA (a client of mine) about his book Here Come Everybody.  It was excellent and you can hear it here.  A few points stood out for me.  One big change created by networked media, Shirky suggests, is a differing view of evaluation and failure.  For a long time we have been used to having an idea and then calling a meeting to grind it through an evaluation process and judge if it deserves backing.  However, as we all know too well, this process often kicks the stuffing out of a new idea along the way.  But cheap web tools and the co-ordination they enable has changed the economics, says Shirky.  When you've had an idea, it makes more sense to just chuck it out there and see what sticks - rather than chewing up valuable executive time assessing arbitrary risk factors.  By way of example, Shirky spoke about his analysis of the giant SourceForge community where people throw up ideas for new software to see if anyone is interested in collaborating.  Mostly the answer is - No Thanks.  However, by keeping those No Thanks displayed to the world, SourceForge has become a wonderful library of failures which gives others clues as to what might fly.  In answer to a question from the audience about how to kick start community online, Shirky observed that once people have signed up the best thing to do is get them all together in a real world Meet-Up.  To illustrate the point, he told a story about an airline which asked him how to use networked media to solve the differences between two far-flung engineering groups.  However, instead of leaping for the social web tool box, Shirky suggested, "airline tickets and beer".  The NYU Professor also spoke about the differences between bonding and bridging capital which I thought was one of the most interesting sections of a very interesting book.  But I'll save that for another time.