The Great Restructure of Everything at next09

Hamburg.
I've arrived in beautiful Hamburg, where I'll spend the next six weeks as a fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research and a visiting scholar at the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research. The major event of these first few days here, though, is the next09 conference - a major conference for the German and European media industry which has drawn some 1300 delegates and operates this year under the title "Share Economy". I'm speaking tomorrow, on "Produsage and Business" (presenting some of the outcomes from my work in the Smart Services CRC). Should be fun, and it's held in a brilliant venue, the converted factory space Kampnagel (which reminds be a little of Toronto's Koolhaus). Videos from all of the presentations will be online soon, too!

The opening keynote speaker here is Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. He begins by referencing the financial crisis, and believs that this is only part of a much greater restructuring of our economy and society; this is also the theme of his recent book What Would Google Do? He also notes that even Google doesn't necessarily know why it does what it does - just that it works.

Among the key lessons here is this: if you give the people control, they'll use it; if you don't, you'll lose them. This is very confronting to companies operating under an old-fashioned business model, however, which simply doesn't allow for users to be anything than customers, consumers, literally end users. The Internet, Jeff says, isn't a medium, but a connection machine, which amplifies and multiplies good or bad commentary and feedback; the logic of the hyperlink has changed everything. (Currently in the US, Associated Press is arguing that linking to their stories is akin to stealing - when in fact it should be seen as creating value. They just don't get it.)

The way to success in this new economy is to create platforms and networks upon which others can succeed. Today, brands are no longer magnets that draw people in; rather, they need to go out to where people are ('if the news is important, it will find me', Jeff sums up this logic). Google can no longer be treated as the enemy - it's the conduit between brands and users. This also leads to a new publicness, which can be scary; you can't connect to others in this network unless you are prepared to share something of yourself.

The challenge for business isn't to create myriads of their own brand communities, to replicate Facebook ad infinitum - rather, it's about connecting to those communities which already exist, and to help make them better. This is also about managing abundance - another major departure from previous models, which are formulated around managing scarcity (and charging users according to how scarce resources are).

And in the process, we're also moving away from the mass market in its traditional form, and towards a mass of niches: platforms for masses of users upon which niche uses and niche networks are built. For some existing players, this may also change what business they are (or should be) operating in - news organisations, for example, should no longer be in a business of selling what they think is 'special' information, but rather in the business of providing the specialist service of organising news effectively.

There's a new ethic here, which understands that things are never perfect - that 'life is a beta', as Jeff puts it, and that there's value in opening up such unfinished material to collaboration with others. This crucially requires honesty and transparency; it needs an even-handed approach to collaboration which adheres as much as possible to Google's motto 'Don't be Evil' (even if Google itself doesn't always get this right). And it may also require organisations to get out of the way sometimes (as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it).

Jeff now takes us through the thought example of a Google restaurant. When opening up the menu, you'd expect to see data on previous customer choices; you'd expect some user involvement in the recipes (but with a chef still in control of making the final decisions, open source-style). Similarly, for a Google car you'd expect that the design process would be opened up to crowdsourcing. These things are possible, even for products which continue to exist in physical form.

There's a whole Generation Google emerging here, Jeff says. Through Google, we can now stay friends forever; we never need to fall out of contact with people we used to know. Through Google, we've entered a new era of publicness; privacy is severely challenged, but this can also have substantial benefits; we have more access to information and conversation than ever before, and we use it; we may be about to experience major changes in politics and government through the drive towards transparency; and more and more of us have become creators of content - a Generation C, as Trendwatching would call it.

Technorati : Google, business, change, future, next09, produsage, sharing
Del.icio.us : Google, business, change, future, next09, produsage, sharing