Be2camp - chaos, community and collaboration

Be2Camp last Friday ended a frantic week. The phrase out of acorns springs to mind in relation to this venture. We’re not talking a mass community yet but I get the feeling that the issues that were bashed around during the day - how the web will revolutionise the way we work - will become more significant by the week for both the industry I directly work in, media, and the industry I write about, construction. The event is a reflection of the phenomenon that is described brilliantly in a book I’m halfway through - Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I saw half of a speech by him at a web 2.0 conference last month and was intrigued by his comparison between the period when London was hooked on gin in the 1800s and now (I won’t try and explain here). His thesis is that new web tools will herald massive social change, from the way we live, socialise and work to how organisation, businesses and political systems will function.

Here are some choice quotes so far that go some way to describing where he’s coming from:

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race
Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people

The genius of wikis and the coming change in group effort general is in part predicated on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance.

Wikipedia invites us to do the following disorientating math : a chaotic process with unpredictable and wildly uneven contributions, made by nonexpert contributors acting out ofvariable motivations is creating a global resource of tremendous daily value.

Social tools don’t create collective action – they remove the obstacles to it

You read it thinking “yes, this is what’s happening”. Be2camp is an example of a couple of things Shirky is getting at - a community of practice, where like-minded individuals amass (from both here and beyond) to share and add to their pool of knowledge, and to act. And there’s no real order to how this happens and to the individuals that make up the group. For all the people you would traditionally expect at such an event there was a blogger from Liverpool interested in technology, a guy who works for a carbon footprinting software outfit, a technology journalist from the Guardian, a blogger on online communities who’s also fascinated by the pyschology of cats etc etc. It fits pretty well with Shirky’s description of wikipedia and I’m confident that momentum can build behind this movement.