Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration

I viewed this talk from www.ted.com

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

Clay Shirky focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to peer, wireless networks, social software, and open-source software. New technologies are enabling new kids of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done.

Coordination costs - How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is coherent and of lasting value instead of just being chaos? The economic framing of that is called coordination costs which are all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output.

Currently, we use institutions to coordinate the output of a group. This is a costly proposition. However, recently the costs of communication have fallen through the floor and this was previously a big part of the coordination costs. The falling communication costs have allowed us to put coordination directly into the infrastructure. This allows us to coordinate the output of a group without the infrastructure.

One of the issues with the communication is a coordination problem. How do we get the answers to those who need them? This is accomplished with Tagging. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure that enables cooperative classification. (For example, the categorization of photos on FickR so they can be easily found.)

This new coordination allows us to take the problems to the individuals rather than taking the individuals to the problem (institutionalization). Traditional things like planning are replaced with coordination. We can coordinate the group effort and decide as we go.

There is something called the Power Loss Distribution (80/20) that occurs when people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they want. Typically less than 1% of the participants will contribute as much as 25% of the content, but that doesn't make the contribution from a onetime participant less valuable.

This is a revolution that represents a profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. This revolution will result in a change in equilibrium. One example, web blogging, allows you to publish what you think globally. In addition to the upsides of these abilities, there are downsides. Currently, the normative goals come from the infrastructure. In the future, a support group can consist of a group that wants to maintain a way of living without reference to the traditional institution imposed normative goals.

How will society be informed? What does the future look like? We are going to go from Point A to chaos. During the next 50 years, there will be loosely coordinated groups with increasingly high leverage. Institutions will come under more pressure. The more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure will be. The forces are general and the results are specific. This requires a massive readjustment now to get better at surviving in this environment.