Loosely tying together a couple threads on permanence, ephemerality, flexibility, collaboration, the Big Shift and how creating virtual, physical and human application programming interfaces (APIs) could allow people and companies to leverage collaboration as a core competence.

Consider:

• Chris Timmerman, A Movable Foodscape:

  Apart from the sense of place so often imparted by a food truck’s wares, the other half of their appeal is wrapped up in their ephemerality; drag your feet, and you miss the goods. … [Kogi's] Twitter feed brings together food, commerce, and geography – an entertaining read, even if you are thousands of miles away (like me) – and the constantly-updating stream of locations seems to add cache to the restaurant’s product, as something uniquely specific to the city.

  So, it’s fun to think about the ties between food and place; as the WSJ notes, the combination of Twitter’s emergence and the ongoing economic downturn (to which I would add growing interests in walkability, local food, and a curiosity about urban& transformation, out there in the ether) are, interestingly enough, spurring a food truck boom.

  But, as Chris points out, it need not stop there:

  A Worldchanging piece by Julia Levitt considers what this combination of impulses could yield for the fixed parts of the built environment. In the same way that Kogi and its counterparts harness social networking to do business – making the urban fabric more dynamic while doing so – consider how private, fixed spaces could transform themselves, if seen through an analogous lens:

  The next time you’re waiting at an intersection, look around and imagine how much of the built (and furnished) environment stands empty and unused at any given time. Cafés in the financial district are closed at dinnertime; restaurants that specialize in dinner fare are silent until mid-afternoon; parking lots that fill during the workweek are largely vacant after 6pm and often on weekends.

  This idea, however, harnesses another kind of embedded energy – by creating meaning, activity and experience where there would have been emptiness, waste or worse. It’s about using up every bit of urban space to its fullest.

  … What I like is that temporary spaces can be both transcendent and practical at the same time. These exchanges enable innovators to grab hold of useful spaces whose owners haven’t previously seen a way to make profitable, and use them to mutual benefit. Even better, they often make our neighborhoods more lively in the process.

• Noah Brier picks up a thought by Robin at Snarkmarket, The Starbucks API:
  

  What if Starbucks was offering up a Starbucks API – a set of hooks into a vast, efficient coffee shop support system with incredible economies of scale? You, the local coffee shop owner, simply plug in, and wham, your costs drop by thirty percent because you’re leveraging Starbucks’ insanely optimized supply chain. You can use as much or as little as you want.

  As Noah notes,

  … there’s something really interesting about the idea of physical APIs. I’ve been thinking a lot about franchising lately, and the interesting ways that the web allows people to pick up ideas and bring them to new places.

  (Followed by a second short note.)

• Me, on online and offline interactions:
  

  … consider how “cheap, ubiquitous interactions” in our “hyperconnected” world are creating opportunities for us to make more decisions using less energy; consider how we can capture, aggregate, benchmark, access and publish online and offline personal data in realtime throughout our networks and communities.

  And continuing on the potential of intellectual services-based “personal APIs” for defining a modularized, standardized interface for collaboration:

  [about “personal APIs”] I’m not only talking about accessing or receiving content, I’m also talking about delivering content and context to people; using the term API is a conceptual approach to thinking about how we can “scale” our time, thoughts and value stored inside ourselves to deliver more (quantity) and deeper (quality) interactions to other people; how can we reduce inter-personal transaction costs of interactions to deliver more value?

• Doc Searls, Dawn of the Living Infrastructure, on the Crunchpad, “personal manufacturing”, constructive customers and vendor relationship management (VRM); an example of a how a pull-driven platform for consumer-packaged goods could work (waiting, of course, for the details about the Crunchpad before making any grand pronouncements).
• Steve Buttry, AP should serve industry interests by shifting from content focus to business solutions (via Mike Masnick).
• Art Wolfe discussing their new photographer-led stock photography agency, an example of how it’s possible to unbundle the stock photography business using Photoshelter’s platform.
• Combined, or in parts, are these signals of the big shift? Quoting John Hagel, touching on three of the big shifts related to this discussion:
  

  From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation. Most companies today will acknowledge the importance of knowledge flows, but they tend to focus on transferring knowledge more efficiently, especially within corporate boundaries. While useful, this is ultimately a diminishing returns game on multiple levels. The greatest economic value will come from finding ways to connecting relevant yet diverse people, both within the firm and outside it, to create new knowledge.

  From push programs to pull platforms. In a world driven by efficient exploitation of relatively fixed knowledge stocks, scalable push programs became the best way to extract value from these stocks. Accurately forecast demand and make sure the right resources are in the right place at the right time to produce and deliver against the demand. If new knowledge creation through effective participation in a growing range of knowledge flows is the goal, push programs become an obstacle by enforcing routines and predictability. Scalable pull platforms become essential to ensure that participants distributed across a broad and diverse range of institutions can effectively access and attract resources when relevant to support their performance improvement initiatives.

  From stable environments to dynamic environments. … If the logic of the Big Shift holds true, we are moving from a relatively stable business environment to one characterized by rapid rates of change with ever more disruptions generating increasing uncertainty and unpredictability. The economic imperatives and the management practices and institutional arrangements required to address those imperatives will lead to more instability rather than less. What we need are management practices and institutional arrangements that can turn that instability from a threat to an opportunity.

There’s a lot left to unpack there. Anyone want to start?

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More on APIs and restructuring core competencies:

• Laura Merling, The Paradigm Shift in Web APIs
• Aaron Chua, The era of API driven startup
• Jonathan Mendez, API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next, outlining the layers of the API stack into content, utility, development and analytics.
• Me, on trends in entrepreneurship and venture capital, touching on how collaboration can be a core competence.