Panel discussion with
Behlendorf, Bob Morgan, Allan
Vermeulen.
Introductory comments: Brian talks about how Apache’s open source model
encourages participation by exposing lots of APIs. Andrew says that
RSS was the giant leap that made weblogs better than other forms of
self-publishing – suddenly it was possible to track lots of
infrequently-updated websites. Bob Morgan says that Kodak is trying to
open more opportunities for photo sharing.
Andrew says that a lot of the value of MT comes from the plugins. Tim
asks, “Whats the difference between open source collaboration and what
SixApart is doing?” Brian: Sometimes users contribute to a collective
work owned by a complany – Moveable Type, Amazon reviews.
Tim: Napster made an architectural decision, and then users contributed
all the data. How do you design for participation. Bob from Kodak
talks about how they encourage sharing, but I don’t see anything
revolutionary in what he’s saying – specifying sharing with a specific
group vs. sharing with the whole world, etc. Seems like flickr is much
more tuned in to the social interface thing.
Brian tells the story of how Blue Note deleted all the anti-Norah Jones
posts by the hard-core jazz fans on their website, which changed them
all from being anti-Norah Jones to anti-Blue Note. Tim asks if there
are other examples of things that can destroy a community. Andrew:
today people care about links, some people try to game the system to
boost their rank. Allen Vermeulen says that Amazon is pretty liberal
with what they allow in their reviews, and they haven’t had a big
problem with spam. The only discussion they’ve had to give up on and
allow to collapse is the Swift Boat Veterans book. He says the goal
should be to think long term – focus on the benefits that come from
giving people more information, rather than the short-term bad things
that might happen.
Tim: How hard is it for people to adapt to a community-centric, shared
mindset? Brian: there are tendencies to shield people from blame. But
these days software has names attached to it, people rather than
companies, “which I think is a good thing”.
From the audience: How can we take the architecture of participation
into the enterprise? Andrew says that companies like SixApart and
SocialText are bringing social software to the enterprise, and that
these tools are successful for knowledge management because they’re
lightweight and simple enough to apply to many situations. Bob from
Kodak says that many real estate people and other professionals use
ofoto.