BarCamp Seattle
15 06 08 - 00:25 Welcome to all from BarCamp Seattle!Today I facilitated a (previously unplanned) discussion at BarCamp Seattle titled "The Impact of Design Efficiency on a Sustainable World," beginning with this outline:
- Open Information
- No Fear
- Social Recognition
- ??????????
- Profit!!!
As you can see, this is the Underpants Gnomes theory of sustainable business -- but the application is much less simple. Before you say 'duh', please read on for a wider explanation. The majority of the talk was about the efficiency of different business models and their sustainability. I originally intended to discuss choices that designers can make to provide the most efficient path to information (which is more of my specialty), specifically regarding web technologies. However, in the spirit of BarCamp the diverse group that gathered had more wisdom to impart from many different areas of business -- and I learned more than I could have asked for.
To summarize my opening:
- Open Information
- Information wants to be free. It is inevitable. We are in the 'information age' and many businesses believe the ideal model is to be the sole owner/licensor of an amount of information. However, any information in high demand will be eventually be copied, recopied, possibly stolen, re-recorded, and shared. In many ways, this is efficient: less duplicated work, both to produce and to share information, and sometimes it leads to free promotion of a company, product, or idea. However, if IP is your business model this can be very scary -- which leads me to my next point...
- No Fear
- IMHO, the earlier we can accept information dissemination the better. The natural human instinct is to protect a resource for our own survival -- but what if the greater gain is to pool resources and share the work for the greater good? This has happened bit by bit across the ages, and globalization and our (nearly) instant communication technologies allow us to access information and change productivity faster than ever. A good example of this is 'deep linking'. Deep linking is constantly being used on forums, social news sites, blogs, you name it. Often if the host blocks deep linking, whoever's making the post simply downloads (read: steals) the image or content and reposts it for their own purposes. At least hosting the content on the original server provides some sort of credit -- but it can also be costly for the host, as now they are serving content with less ads and pageviews than if the viewer had arrived through the front page of the host's site.
- Social Recognition
- ??????????
- Profit!!!
[More Updates Later Today!]
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