Participatory culture

I say the best presentation at Melbourne’s PubCamp last night was from Stephen Collins on “Slouching towards intertwingularity”.

Stephen spoke about the great attraction and value from using social networking tools to connect to, and collaborate with ”…a vastly greater number of people who think like me, do work like me, like the same things I like, than I ever could before.”

Even though some or many of these ties to people – spread over the world – may be weak ties, they are still accessible. These people help to you solve problems, innovate, inform or share knowledge about events and activities you either would not have heard about, or received via an institutional filter some time hence.

Social networking is the means to create or add value in the knowledge economy and to seek new opportunities.The culture is participatory, a culture where everything is ‘interwingled’. I feel this is something that Asian’s get immediately by the way…a sense of interconnectedness…which is why social networking is so popular in countries such as China and India.

In my six years of continuously scanning the horizon and thinking about the future, I’ve had some experience of ’strategic conversations’ with like-minded people (particularly in Vision 20/20: Future Scenarios for the Communications Industry). That experience triggered my interest in knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. I know that other futures thinkers that have a similar passion about the value in networking with people (Ross Dawson, Richard Hames and Stephen Collins, to mention just three…there are many more). The rise of social networking – particularly in the last two years – has really lowered the barriers to experiencing strategic conversations.

An insight that we developed from Vision 20/20 was ‘networked regulation’. Interestingly, there are now signs of this perception taking hold…and again, it’s to do with the Internet. In his closing remarks at the OECD Ministerial in Seoul last week, Secretary-General Angel Gurria said, “We need to enhance support for informal networks that link authorities and stakeholders in a flexible manner that is responsive to the dynamism of the issues…A more decentralised, networked approach to policy formation for the Internet Economy that includes active participation of stakeholders needs to be the norm” (my italics). Indeed, the OECD Future of the Internet Economy project had a useful forum on…The Participative Web. Promising signs ahead.

Stephen’s presentation was a reminder to me is that I must participate…more actively! Let’s hope the message continues to sink in.