Highlighting a couple SXSW panel suggestions I found interesting.

First off, I’ll admit I didn’t go to many panels or core conversations at SXSW 2009 (although I did go to mine, obviously). Second off, I tend to choose panels where I knew little about the subject, taking advantage of the diverse set of subject matter leaders that SXSW brings to Austin every year. *

But I’m still interested in the panels for SXSW 2010 because it helps set the discussion for the event. Therefore, I’ve picked out a couple panels I think would be interesting; click through the links to vote for them if you’re interested. And I’d love to hear about which panel suggestions you find interesting…

• Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play, led by Andy Baio, Kickstarter

  What do Amazon Mechanical Turk, the Obama campaign, the 2010 Honda Insight, and the Nike+ all have in common? They all use gameplay mechanics to turn difficult real-world problems into play. I’ll discuss practical ways to turn any website into a game, and the serious risks of doing it wrong.

• Uprising Tide – Inciting Online Communities into Offline Movements, led by Chris Schultz, LaunchPad, New Orleans
  

  Ready to put your tech community on the map? Some unlikely instigators from New Orleans did just that with little more than passion, a bus, T-shirts, and some duct tape. Let them show you how to create an organic net-roots movement that upends traditional power structures and galvanizes your community.

• Community Building: Organization Without Organization, led by Lloyd Davis, The Tuttle Club (also: more details)
  

  The Tuttle Club began in London as a social media cafe for anyone interested in the social web. It has become the main hub for social media in the UK and is now engaged in consulting work and collaborative writing projects. Lloyd Davis talks about building this ‘organisation without organisation’.

• Social Search: A Little Help from my Friends, led by Brynn Evans, UC San Diego
  

  We’ve got social networks and we’ve got search engines, but is social search merely the combination of the two? Learn what social search is and what it isn’t, who’s working on it and getting it right, and hear expert perspectives on making search and discovery more relevant to users.

• Practical Digital Anthropology: Getting to Know Your Users, led by Marc Vermut, Fine Point Solutions, Inc.
  

  Most modern analytics attempt to boil complex behaviors down to statistics; but is that the whole story? Are your design decisions informed by actual behaviors, instead of near approximations? We present digital anthropology: practical, high-touch techniques that will give you an edge in understanding what really makes your users tick.

• Working Nowhere and Everywhere: Running a Virtual Business , led by Christopher Natsuume, Boomzap Entertainmant
  

  Running a location independent business with a virtual, distributed workforce allows you to define your schedule, concentrate on your core business and free you from the constraints and costs of a traditional business. Following best practices can make it not only a great lifestyle choice but a critical competitive advantage.

  (yes, I’m biased, but it’s still interesting)

• Can Universities Teach Social Media & Online Communities? , led by Clint Schaff, University of Southern California, Annenberg Program on Online Communities
  

  Can you teach someone how to use social media? Or perhaps the best way to learn is by doing? Learn how universities cover technologies, approaches, tools, lessons, implications, risks… Debate “right” and “wrong” ways to teach and learn social media. Decide for yourself just how “social” current approaches really are.

• Too Much Text IV: Google Wave vs. Email, led by Jay Cuthrell, fudge.org (also: more details and conversation)
  

  It is a period of email war. Rebel services, striking from hidden bases, have won their first victory against the evil Inbox Empire. The Empire may strike back but not before nimble waves of XMPP (RFC3920) extended wing fighters fire back with wavelet torpedoes. May the IETF be with you.

• The Cultural Significance of Direct-to-Fan Marketing, led by Ian Rogers, Topspin
  

  For years, artists under contract with major labels have been pressured into creating and delivering “hits” to satisfy unit sales and revenue objectives. With the emergence of direct-to-fan marketing and more artists going it alone, the door has opened wider for artists to create music that will resonate far more with their fans vs. adhering to the cookie-cutter hit-driven model. The cultural significance of such a change in output quality will be incredible.

• Building a Rockstar API Community, led by Andrew Parker, Union Square Ventures
  

  This session will teach you how to foster an awesome community of developers on top of your API. The panelists will share best practices in cultivating the communities around their own APIs.

And of course, I submitted two panel suggestions myself, Everyone Can be a *Professional* Photographer and Personal APIs: Better Living Through Collaboration , two very different topics that I’m thinking will be much more fun to do than to simply talk about.

* Skip to 5:20 in this video where I discuss my strategy for picking panels.

Light Reading, London, England, July 2009

Doc Searls, Beyond Celebrity Obsession:

According to Don Norman, a black hole topic is one that is essentially undiscussable: “Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape.”

… Most of us can’t help falling into conversational black holes. But we can help getting sucked into celebrity obsession.

Unless, of course, we’re making money at it. … But that’s the supply side. What about demand?

In a comment, Eric T. MacKnight:

The ancient Greeks divided human nature into three parts—appetite, will, and reason—in a triangle diagram with reason the smallest and highest part. Consumer culture, less than 100 years old, appeals to our appetites and our laziness, encourages us to ignore our reason, and most radically succeeds in getting us to define ourselves not by what we make, but what we buy. Which suits the government, too.

The Greeks would not be surprised to learn that 2500 years later most people, most of the time, are ruled by their appetites. Why are we?

Because we’re human. Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m hopeful that culture will reshape the economics of media…

Continuing on the subject of ambient intimacy…

Flooding space and time.
Leisa Reichelt in receiver magazine on Ambient Intimacy:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

Ambient is for the lightness, the atmospheric, non-directional and distributed nature of the communication. These are communications that are one to many; they’re not quite broadcast and yet not exactly conversational; they flood over a somewhat defined space. Within that space is intimacy: the closeness, familiarity and warmth that this kind of communication can create and the ever-present network of friends available wherever you can access the internet, or even just send a text message.

Triviality is relative.
Continuing with Lisa,

… On its own, such a status update may seem trivial but to examine an update in isolation is to miss the point of the social system that is at play here. These apparently trivial updates are really critical to maintaining connection with a network of often loose ties – a network that can give rich social rewards to those who participate.

… Critics allege that the closeness we feel from this kind of communication is artificial and potentially damaging: that it causes cognitive dissonance, with our brain thinking it is experiencing closeness, when it actually isn’t.

… I’m the last person to suggest that ambient intimacy could, or should, replace the other kinds of intimacy we’re already familiar with and fond of. However, the virtual nature of the interaction doesn’t make it any less real. We may be getting to know people differently and sharing with them differently but something important is happening here.

Please, discard the rhetoric and value judgments: the tools are here, part of our lives, creating new, replacing the old, integrating with the existing, finding their place until they due to be replaced themselves.

Humans have always created massive amounts of triviality; perhaps the biggest change is that we’ve never been able to see if so starkly, in such volume, so easily.

Why?

Supply, meet demand.
Why do we participate in online communities large and small? Lisa references a presentation by Tom Coates on social software, pointing to four key reasons:

• Anticipated reciprocity
• Reputation
• Sense of efficacy
• Identification with a group

In short, we wouldn’t participate if we didn’t get something out of it, and even the greatest trivialities “pay” in some way; the key is to find the communities where the trivial matters.

To think about why we participate in online communities, consider: why do we participate in offline communities?

Humanity survives.
“It’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with” (link); but are we really considering what areas we are exposing and what connections we are creating?

The incentives behind creating groups are hardly new; social software provides new tools and mediums but fills the same fundamental human needs.

As we use online tools, reflect back to how we live offline; humans are trivial, petty, grandstanding, self-promotional, thoughtful, shy, mysterious, interesting, intelligent, idiotic. These do not change; to expect otherwise would be farcical.

And that’s ok. We’re human.

So love the ones we are with, pick our spots to challenge, discard our dreams of changing everyone, and find the right people to love. The transaction costs of connecting have never been lower. Pick your spots and engage on your terms, in your communities, for your reasons. Or don’t. But be happy doing it.

Continuing to think about platforms and trends, let’s start with five frames shaping today’s business opportunities.

I tend to use “frames” and trends to identify opportunities rather than industries or businesses because it pushes the focus away from the present and forces us to think about the larger, systemic trends shaping our futures. Each industry responds differently to similar fundamental forces based on their unique developmental paths and learned best practices, but as old truths and “best practices” fall by the wayside, focusing on fundamental trends allows us to import, export and apply pertinent learnings across industries, business and products. Change creates opportunities, so where are the opportunities?

Let’s start with five frames:

• A renewed look at capitalism, the role of markets and the mix between centralized and decentralized decision-making.

  Society tends to change its organizing principles (feudalism, capitalism, socialism, democracy, et. al.) over time in response to cultural and technological trends; there is no absolute “right organizing principle”, but rather the right principle for the time. Right now we’re in the middle of a massive shift in how we interpret and apply capitalism as an economic and societal organizing principle. Pay less attention to the ideologies (traditionally rigid terminologies such as capitalism, managed capitalism or socialism) than the fundamental trends driving us to re-evaluate how we organize lives and frame incentives; we may come out the other end with a very different set of economic rules and cultural expectations from five to ten years ago. Remember that the true turning points of our lives are revealed not in the moment, but in hindsight.

  Honestly I can’t begin to explain the full ramifications to do this topic justice; I just know we’re underestimating the full impact of current economic and geopolitical events.

• Entrepreneurship: a revolution or a fad?

  Revolution:

  … startups may represent a new economic phase on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. … People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups … and that scale of improvement can change social customs.

  Fad:

  “When I was in college, guys usually pretended they were in a band,” comments one observer. “Now they pretend they are in a start-up.”

  Entrepreneurship may be the sexy thing getting all the attention today, but the fundamental, underlying question is really about how people will organize themselves to create economic value.

  Vertical integration and horizontal integration may have fallen by the wayside, replaced by circles of small organizations, but the underlying economics shaping these organizational strategies aren’t set in stone. Current innovation strategies are based on creating modularized value chains using widely-available data to foster decentralized innovation – microbusinesses aimed at microinteractions – but we will reach a limit in how small each unit of the value chain can be divided until we develop more efficient methods for collaboration, compensation, incentive structuring and legal organization.

  Under-innovation will drive many large firms out of business, but that’s the point: from creative destruction comes creative reconstruction, and the survivors (large and small) will be the ones that find ways to re-orient their internal structures to take advantage of new technological and cultural realities. The economics of collaboration is a driving force behind internal corporate structure as much as external industry organization.

  To think that large companies will fail to adapt is folly; all companies exist in a marketplace for talent, capital and the valuable factors of production, and as the economics behind scale and scope shift, corporate collaboration and integration strategies will change. In short, “small” may be winning right now, but there’s no reason that “large” can’t catch up.

• A new, broader kind of middleman: not merely to execute transactional exchange but to facilitate interaction by aggregating, filtering and delivering relevance.

  Context is still expensive to create, for the simple reason that algorithms simply aren’t good enough (yet). Perhaps the largest opportunity in creating context and delivering relevance is to find better ways to use computing cycles to access “human cycles” through inexpensive, structured micro-interactions.

  As computer cycles get cheaper and easier to access, “human cycles” get more important.

  At a conceptual level, a “personal API” describes how we can create mediums and methods of exchange to reduce inter-personal interaction costs to make it easier for people to exchange more (quantity) and deeper (quality) units of value.

  How can we leverage technological platforms to access “human cycles” cheaper? Besides open-source software and collaboration / communication platforms, try out Mechanical Turk as an early example.

• Converting offline experiences into online structured data to capture, aggregate, understand, publicize and price our actions and externalities.

  How much do we truly understand about the costs and benefits of our decisions and actions? Do we understand the true, full societal costs of our personal lives?

  It’s fairly easy to track and analyze our online lives by piecing together what we tagged, shared and wrote; but it’s still fairly difficult to really track and understand our offline lives.

  Structured data is the required link between intention and action; only by understanding the full impact of our decisions can we hope to change our behavior.

  What’s the opportunity? Creating tools and platforms to unearth, capture, tag, analyze, aggregate (publicly and privately) and promote to price the full impacts of our actions. It’s not a new concept: the theories behind assigning and pricing externalities underlie a wide variety of government regulations (carbon caps, city trash regulations and tax policies just to start); but “scaling down” how we understand and price externalities to the individual level is an innovation opportunity. Scaling down data collection, aggregation and analysis to the individual level allows people to take decision-making into their own hands and offers people the information and control over their lives never possible before.

  But imagine what happens when we use online tools and networks to share, aggregate and benchmark our individual actions and impacts: we create the opportunity to identify new trends, create new solutions and tap into the “hive mind” to create value at the individual and societal levels.

  Examples? Off the top of my head, FitBit, Nike + iPod’s Nikeplus and Google PowerMeter come to mind. Remember at the end of the day it’s about combining the online and offline worlds; if we’re only focused on the online world, then we’re not thinking big enough.

• The enduring power of mystery and the unknown.

  In an “ambiently intimate” world, value is being created through the unexpected intersections and “human collisions” in our loose ties and loose networks.

  Mystery, powered by structured data and serendipity, underlies how positive variable intermittent reinforcement creates the most successful products and business models. We’re addicted to the potential for every click and interaction to create a new insight, connection or opportunity; introducing mystery into our communication, entertainment and work brings out the joy of solving puzzles deep within every person and delivers a richer, more powerful sense of engagement than otherwise possible.

  Why is mystery important right now? Ubiquity and reach is driven by the known, depth of engagement is driven by the unknown. Introducing a bit of mystery into a product or service is the key to creating the dedicated base of users less apt to switch to the new thing simply because it’s better, cheaper or faster.

  Please note I’m not proposing making things hard for people to use or understand, but the opposite: make things simple for everyone to understand and use very easily, but build in attributes and values for dedicated fans and users to discover and use; as people dig into your product and peel away the layers, make sure there are some extra layers there for the dedicated fans and users.

The outstanding question.
Agree or disagree, fire away; but the most important, unanswered question: how can we apply these cultural and technological frames to identify and target intriguing industries and valuable businesses opportunities?

Let’s start the discussion there.

As a side note, I’m trying to figure out a big project to apply myself to; ideas and thoughts are appreciated…

Related:

• What trends can entrepreneurs leverage to create new businesses?, Nov 24, 2008.
• What is the next platform for new businesses?, Dec 8, 2008.
• Value is created at the edges but captured at the hubs., Jan 29, 2009.
• Ten Frames (+1) framing the future of venture capital and entrepreneurship, March 15, 2009.
• Relationship “contracts” need to be based on our inability to predict the future., April 8, 2009.
• What’s free today may not be free tomorrow., May 15, 2009.
• Ambient Intimacy: Creating Archetypes from Avatars, May 19, 2009.