Power to the Community

"Power to the Community" was the title of one of the main sessions prior to Rod Beckstrom's presentation on the Starfish and the Spider at the "From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0" conference in Utrecht last wednesday.

I liked this presentation, not because Patrick Savalle is a Sogeti colleague, but I like his way of thinking. It was what you could call a boardroom wakeup call. The essence of the presentation was moving the crowd from version 1.0 to 2.0.

One of the things to churn on was explaining the Peter Principle which often occurs in centralized organisations (the spiders) which pionts out that a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

His second thought focussed on emergent behaviour; In a crowd we all do things we wouldn't do as individuals. We've all been suckered into buying things we don't need by early marketing guru's like Edward Bernays who laid the foundations of mass manipulation and crowd control.

His final thought was called Social (web-) Design. When looking at social networking sites you have to find what makes these things attractive. How do you build communities? It's in little things, it's in poking, it's in listing events, in smilies, profile pictures or tweets: all these little things are a frameset in which the crowd interacts and grows into a collective community. This collective community will eventually return to emergent behaviour so we have to be carefull. Edward Bernays, much like his uncle Sigmund Freud, wasn't all that happy with what he did to humanity. Maybe in 20 years we'll have a generation of social webdesigners looking back at how they manipulated the masses.

In my opinion that's a pretty spooky thought. Walk along that path and we might even end up with Asimov's famous Psychohistory;

The basis of psychohistory is the idea that, while the actions of a particular individual could not be foreseen, the laws of statistics could be applied to large groups of people and used to predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy - known in physics as the Kinetic Theory. Asimov applied this concept to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two postulates:

• That the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large
• They should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.

So my question to Patrick would be: Shouldn't the title be "Take power from the community" instead of "give power to"?

Why Starfish can’t jump

Ogogolio’s Trevor Smith posted a nice comment on the Starfish presentation:

Thanks for posting the videos. I'm a bit surprised that you can grok his message but choose to work in the spider verse of SL instead of contributing to one of the starfish.

Second Life is controlled by a single corporate entity, hosted on centralized hardware, governed by a single legal structure, and is fundamentally structured around the centralized idea of One Big World.

In this analogy, Linden Lab is the spider head and if you chop it off then Second Life is dead.

I think I have to disagree with Beckstrom then, I guess ;). And I really do.

The thing Rod says about Starfisch companies is that they are decentralized but in order for this to function, there needs to be a very very clear set of operational protocols.

In this, each organisational cell has to have the maturity to operate autonomously within the main ideology. But what happens in unforseen circumstances? Who makes the decisions when a company comes into a crises? It is impossible to have a full starfish company. What happens if we’re in a hostile take-over situation or a scandal? Who will have to pick up responsibility in the end? What if two decentralized cells or organisational units have different interests, or even conflicting interests, who mediates or puts out strategy in the end?

An example of this would be typically Dutch churchlife. In the Middle Ages we had the Catholic Empire. Super centralized and only the clergy had Bibles, their handbook, protocol set. That didn’t really work and Calvinism rose and in the ages past dozens of religious factions appeared. Each having their particular organisational model. Some with centralised governing bodies, others decentralised. The particular set I go to is kind of decentralised. Locally governed churches. Each member of the church has his/her own handbook nowadays and we’re all considered to be really smart intelligent people. There are occasions though that Elders put out a different gospel, to keep with the handbook, a cell leader that thinks the set of protocols needs to be altered a little, or other issues that can’t be solved at a local level. For this occasion there’s a national assembly every four years to judge these things. Consider changes or addenda to the protocols and make a ruling in cases where protocols have been violated, or challenged.

Optimal performance is a cross between Starfish and Spiders I guess, or every rule has its mandatory exceptions.

Now when it comes to Second Life, is it really a Spider company? In part it is, it’s true Linden Lab brings us Second Life. It’s true they’re responsible for many things. But in part it isn’t.

Linden Lab itself isn’t a spider corporation. There’s the tao of Linden which allows each unit or individual employee incredible freedom in picking his / her own priorities (LL should be more Spider in this regard). De grid is spread over several hosting locations, yes true, all LL owned. Take out part of the grid, the other part lives on.

Ogoglio of course is different. It’s open source and if we chopped off Trevor’s head (that’s a no-no) Ogoglio would live on. You can run it at home. Great stuff, and very very Starfishish.

There’s a wide range of variety though. Second Life is open, decentralized sometimes even anarchistic when it comes to user generated content. If we’d cut off Philip’s spikey head (also a no-no) would content creation stop? We’ve got tens of content development companies and we’ve got an active, contributing community. This can’t be said for a range of other platforms, even when the are enterprise platforms and you can run your own version of it, you’re still by far and large dependable on the platform owners for content creation.

The Starfish and the Spider

Heliview organised a web 2.0 seminar today at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, titled "From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0" It's keynote speaker was Rod Beckstrom, author of the Starfish and the Spider.

Below is the presentation he did at the Next Web Conference, which is pretty much the same story and same slideshow. Sit down and enjoy. It's good stuff.

Part 1: The Starfish and the Spider

Part 2: Geronimoooooooo!

Part 3: From centralized to decentralized business