It’s going to be an amazing event, and if your in some way involved in the web industry, you should be attending.
I asked Chris a few questions via email the other day, and he was amazing in his quality of response. There are some really amazing thoughts in the answers, and I think it gives us a hint of the quality of the presentation he’ll give next week.
Q: You’ve been involved in a bunch of amazing things, Firefox, BarCamp, coworking, microformats, etc. What’s your most memorable moment?
A: I’ve had the good fortune of being present and participating in a number of fairly significant events in recent years. The most memorable moment for me was probably the closing of the first BarCamp in Palo Alto in 2005. Everyone was pretty well spent from the weekend, but I think we were also invigorated, and even though I was reluctant to acknowledge it at the time, I think there was a shared sense that we had just created something important, and that, if we could share it forward to others, it become something spiritual and freeing.
I don’t mean that to sound trite, but you have to remember that the folks who put on the first BarCamp, myself included, had never attempted something like that before. After Spread Firefox, this was the first time that I personally witnessed the power of social media for bringing people together, in person. That was the difference here.
It was a privilege to be able to design the New York Times ad in honor of the nearly 10,000 individual contributors who helped pay for it, and that, along with my experience with the Howard Dean campaign, told me what the network was capable at internet scale. It wasn’t until BarCamp was concluding that I realized that we could also leverage the same network effects at the local level, and that snot-nosed kids like the BarCamp founders could start a movement using free and open source tools available to just about anyone at the time.
This was also the moment when I realized that open source could be applied to more than just software — it could be used to develop high-quality, relevant social institutions.
That was the moment when I think I realized the power that I had — and that others like me who were willing to realize it also had — to make a difference.
Q: You’re planning on presenting at the Edge of the Web conference about openness. Without giving the game away, do you want to give us a teaser of what to expect?
A: I think there’s reason to be extremely optimistic about the web, and specifically the health of the Open Web. There’s an increasing recognition of fundamental characteristics of the web that help it to
stay robust, malleable and highly resilient.
Whether it’s concepts like “cloud computing” or the fact that Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Yahoo! all depend on and in fact have centered their strategies around the enduring presence of the Open Web bode well for the longevity of the “information superhighway”.
But the Open Web is not without its detractors or threats. We’re seeing crackdowns in China, we’re seeing proprietary platforms like Silverlight and Adobe Air (don’t be fooled by the marketing: these are NOT open technologies) ebbing away at the mindshare the web has.
You’d hope that with something as obvious and as universally useful as the Open Web, you wouldn’t have to protect it, but that’s not the case. With developments like the Open Web Foundation and Tim Berners-Lee new World Wide Web Foundation, advocacy efforts for the web are growing up to ensure that this vital resource that we all enjoy, and to an increasing degree, take for granted, will last, and
will continue to be predicated on non-proprietary technologies that serve both the largest, and the smallest, web citizens.
I can’t say that my talk will cover all of those issues, or any of them specifically, but there are certain approaches that I’ve developed and reused many times in my work supporting the Open Web that are worth taking a look at. I’m not the same starry-eyed internet debutante that I was four years ago. In defense of openness, I’ve got some war stories worth telling, and some insights from ongoing matters that I think might hopefully be of some use of the EotW audience.
Q: How do you think corporate culture is dealing with openness?
A: Y’know, I think those companies which “get it”, especially when it comes to promoting individual freedom while demanding equivalent amounts personal responsibility, will do well.
I think a lot of people are being asked to do the same job they’ve always done, but without the benefits of a lot of the social networking tools that they’ve come to depend on for managing their social lives and interactions. In other words, sites like Twitter and Facebook are being blocked at work because they’re seen as distractions rather than as opportunities to leverage the entire social graph of an organization.
I mean, don’t get me wrong: these kinds of sites can indeed become highly distracting if you’re not careful. But if you are careful, or take on the burden of managing your time better when using these
sites, I think there’s an opportunity for certain types of work, especially information workers, to become more efficient with social networking tools. Or at least that’s the promise that apps like Yammer are counting on.
Look, the “employee” of yesterday that was interested in becoming a “company man” and getting a pension is about as real today as a three-horned unicorn. The corporate environment is going to need to go through some major shifts to deal with the upcoming generation’s manicness, its digital literacy, its time-slicing attention spans, its bursty work ethic, its free agent mentality. Those employers, like Google, that provide an enriching, challenging environment where the individual can grow and do good work among peers, and own the results of their work, in my estimation, will benefit from the changes we’re seeing now, and that we’ve seen, for instance, in the open source community.
For some, work will continue to be a mean to an end; for others, it will be the end in and of itself. Corporate cultures that show a willingness to work with and accommodate the needs of the new workforce should fare well; cultures that also demand more results but also provide a means for trading in accomplishments for local social capital I think will also do well.
Those who are struggling to “get it” need to embrace this stuff. From what I’ve seen, the changes are only going to keep coming faster — it sure as hell ain’t gunna slow down to let you catch up.
Q: Given that my company build recommendations based on people’s behaviour, I get in to a lot of conversations about privacy, and security. Where does that play in openness?
A: Well, you really need to split this conversation down along personal and technological lines.
From a technology perspective, openness can breed security, since by design, you must “show your work”. This has been the story of success in projects such as Firefox, Linux, WordPress and Drupal. Because the code is out there, just about anyone can come along and audit the source, and discover holes. This kind of distributed work can be highly efficient and highly effective, especially when it comes to response times on active projects.
If you’re talking about personal privacy and security, I think you have to approach the question by looking at the “negative space”. There are already countless companies out there that harvest
information about your behavior, cross-linking your credit card and ATM transactions, you travel behavior, your phone calls. I mean, this isn’t like some bad movie: it’s kind of the pink elephant in the room when it comes to privacy. We willingly trade access and the ability to mine this information in exchange for better service. Google’s search recommendations are a point in case here.
In your case, the question should really be: “If you could harvest all kinds of information about your behavior and then leverage it to improve your work, your productivity, your reading habits — you name it! — why wouldn’t you?” And I think this is a novel but emerging attitude. My girlfriend and I were mentioned in a Washington Post article on so-called “self-trackers”, essentially a small but growing
community of people who record random minutiae about themselves in order to better understand their habits, trends, behaviors and the like. It’s like having web stats for your life.
When it comes to thinking about this from a privacy perspective, just like with Twitter, you have to ask yourself: “why am I so vain as to think that anyone else would really care what I had for breakfast this morning?” and second “what on earth did I have for breakfast *yesterday* morning?!”
It’s not that privacy isn’t something that should be considered seriously, and that people shouldn’t make up their own minds about what they’re comfortable sharing. It’s that there’s another side to the debate that suggests that you should start collecting information about your own behavior so that you know as much about yourself — if not more! — than big companies.
Q: There’s always some form of speculation about the future of the web. What’s your current theory?
A: Wow. Well, I think there are two things that I’m most excited about for the future of the web right now: location-based services and personal social networks, cumulatively referred to, perhaps, as
“MoLoSoSo” (mobile local social software).
We’ve seen how transformative Google Maps has been. And now we’re going to see walking directions and street view coming to the iPhone. It’s only a matter of time before you can start mashing up your Brightkite checkins — in real-time — with which bus is going to get you to that cafe where your friends are at. We’re seeing a geo-location API being built into Gears and into Firefox. We’re seeing the development of open web building blocks like OpenID gaining traction (finally).
I think the web needs to get a lot more personal, and lot more local and a lot more human scale to fully begin to realize its potential. Ironically, the web learns how to scale, and the when it scales, it becomes pretty boring as the signal to noise ratio drops, and then things have to shrink down back to the scale of the individual. Which of course is the story of BarCamp and how this whole thing comes back full circle on itself.
Yes, ultimately BarCamp is the future and the past of the web as the Universe inhales and exhales, as it always has.
