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Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control?

 

Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.

What sparked my interest in particular was the Dachis Group’s list of Six Social Business Trends to Watch which referenced the phrase JP Rangaswami coined at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: “Design for the loss of control.” His point was more IT-specific, arguing that the combination of pervasive digital infrastructure, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, social software, and smart phones have enabled employee- and customer-driven solutions to a degree that renders top-down IT systems obsolete. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group writes: “Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be.”

No longer in control

The new paradigm Hinchcliffe describes has implications far beyond just IT. For one thing, employees, who are facing an increasingly hybridized work/life proposition, are eager to do what they are passionate about, and they will increasingly find the digital spaces and tools that allow them to do this most effectively without having to ask anyone for permission. Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce.

Moreover, customers, too, seek out relationships with brands that go beyond the merely transactional. Empowered through ubiquitous access to information and therefore radical transparency, through an abundance of choices on the web, as well as the ability to contribute and tap into social networks (and thus social capital) in real-time and on-the-go, they expect brands to offer engagement and collaboration models that match the more distributed and multi-layered mechanisms of value creation through social media.

Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control.

The power of pull

So what can they do besides just bemoaning this loss and passively observing how the new centrifugal forces of the Social, Real-Time Web are disrupting their traditional business and engagement models? Li lays out how business leaders can and (must!) embrace the new rules of openness. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, in the The Power of Pull, provide an actionable framework for how these new forces can be leveraged through “shaping strategies” on the individual, institutional, and societal level.

These “shaping strategies,” as the term suggests, present an exciting challenge for design. If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control, they will have significant impact on how this new economy is shaping up. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to develop what Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison call levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty.

In essence, businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them. This may sound counter-intuitive but the upside is considerable. A deliberately designed loss of control grants companies the only remaining and arguably most critical competitive advantage – access. As long as they enable and facilitate knowledge flows, ideas, passions, skills, and experiences, they have access to them. In fact, if they fully leverage the “powers of pull,” these assets will gravitate towards them.

X-problems and social networks

Openness is no longer just a nice stunt but a fundamental requirement for any business that wants to thrive in the new “pull economy.” Because we’re increasingly dealing with "X-Problems," as my colleague Adam Richardson reckons in his book Innovation X, we need approaches that allow us to come up with creative solutions to problems we may not even know yet. In other words: Solutions that help define the problem. Or as Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison put it: “If you want to find out what it is you don’t know that you don’t know, you need to hang out with other people who might already know it.”

The loss of control enables the creation of more weak ties in a company’s network (inside and outside of the organization), and, as social network research has shown, weak ties are more conducive to transporting foreign ideas, knowledge, and skills – because they move faster from one node to the other as the network becomes more accessible and nimble on its fringes. The further you get away from the core of your network, the less control you (may want to) have.

You could argue that designers have been designing creation spaces, feedback mechanisms, and other participatory experiences for some time now. They certainly have, but perhaps without fully recognizing or deliberately orchestrating the amount of loss of control that their designs represented. It seems like the time is ripe to understand these efforts as part of a broader shift and consolidate them into a series of formats that, going forward, shall serve as blueprints for “design for the loss of control,” across different corporate functions and disciplines.

Frequently, these solutions will involve de-institutionalizing decision-making by removing the intermediary. In many cases, this may imply an act of democratization, but it is also important not to see this as a zero-sum game. Control is not just shifting from one hand to many; rather, it is dissolving and defragmenting and along the way diminishing – or turning into something else, far more valuable: social capital that resides in the public domain and is no longer controlled by anyone. The formats that propel this new mode of collaboration and value creation are emergent and informal, and they typically carry a significant amount of tacit knowledge.

Here are some recent examples:

Open ideation/crowdsourcing: Open ideation (or crowdsourcing) is based on the assumption that the best ideas for new products, services, and business models may come from outside of your organization or from those people inside your organization who are typically (by function or hierarchy) excluded from the ideation process. Like all open innovation efforts, crowdsourcing redistributes control from an elite group of thinkers and doers to a broader group of self-selected participants. By broadening the funnel, companies can harness the accumulated or aggregated knowledge of these voices. Crowdsourcing is usually focused on ideas and insights but can also cover a wider array of collaborations with external parties throughout all stages of the innovation cycle. Dell, Starbucks, P&G, and many other organizations use crowdsourcing. Nike partners with Creative Commons and Best Buy for GreenXchange, a platform that promotes “the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide sustainability challenges.” TED is expanding its reach through TEDx, “independently organized TED events," without compromising the exclusivity of its brand. Furthermore, Victors & Spoils brought crowdsourcing to the world of advertising; and IDEO recently launched its crowdsourcing platform, OpenIDEO, inviting the public to join “creative challenges” that tackle social issues through design. And there are firms such as InnoCentive that specialize in crowdsourcing services for other companies. All these companies not only make ideas accessible to more or less open publics (to some extent, giving up control over IP) but also commit to making the follow-up on these ideas (at least partially) transparent (giving up some control over agenda-setting and strategic planning).

Open design research: frogMob, developed by frog design, is a tool for crowdsourced design research, based on the idea that everyone can be a researcher for a day, just by paying a little more attention to the world around them. frogMob uses guerilla photography and stories to take a quick pulse on global trends, behaviors, and artifacts. Launched internally first – tapping into frog’s eight global studios – we are now expanding frogMob to a broader public. Through frogMob, we are able to “mobilize” not only our internal network around a specific assignment but also external contributors on an ad hoc basis, in a short amount of time (like a Flash Mob). frogMob allows us to provide lightweight, rapid design research for clients who ask for a “trend scrape” that identifies patterns and offers unexpected inspiration. The key here is to tap into existing knowledge flows - in a nimble way that does not require too much commitment from the participants and eliminates bureaucratic hurdles.

Open strategy: Crowdsourcing can also take place as a combination of online and offline collaboration, as demonstrated by NPR and its Think-In on the future of digital media. Supported and facilitated by frog, NPR hosted an open strategy session, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. The Think-In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators, and it developed concepts that NPR incorporated into its organizational roadmap. The event was augmented through live-commentary and streaming via various social media channels. This social augmentation made the workshop accessible for a broader audience, which – like the on-site participants – felt so genuinely passionate about NPR that they committed some serious time to this collective brainstorming. Such passion for brands could also be put to work through a more radical version of a Think-In: a “brand hijack” that convenes customers and other interested parties to explore new directions for a brand – yet with the twist that the brand itself would not participate (but may have the option to co-opt the results of the session afterwards).

Open-source humanitarian software: In the software space, open-source projects have long been an established form of open innovation, see IBM’s Eclipse platform. Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), founded by teams from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, uses open-source methods to “hack for humanity.” It describes itself as a community of “developers, geeks and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world, working to develop software solutions that respond to the challenges facing humanity today.” The group runs “Hackathons,” inviting the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to tackle disaster relief issues with through software applications. The Hackathons are designed as so-called “codejams,” fast-paced competitions that give the participants a set amount of time to solve the challenges they are given. At the end of a two-day marathon of hacking, a panel will review each hack, and the winners will walk away with prizes, as well as the right to call themselves “RHoKstars” ever after. Another example of open-source humanitarian software is Ushahidi’s CrowdMap which displays crowdsourced crisis data on maps as a free cloud-based service.

Open-(source) social networks: Lockheed Martin, the giant defense contractor, built its own networking site called Eureka Streams and released it open-source for the public to use. As Fast Company writes in a recent blog post, “The company's management had recognized that an internal social networking tool could have all sorts of procedural benefits for a large, and geographically disjointed organization. Essentially it lets ‘knowledge workers’ inside the company find and talk with other experts who may have valid input to particular projects, but who would otherwise have zero oversight or input.” Dow Chemical is another example of a company setting up its own social network, in this case to help managers identify the talent they need to execute projects across different business units and functions. Dow has even extended the network to include former employees – a smart move. Closed networks are of diminishing value. A recent McKinsey Quarterly report argues, “In the longer term, networked organizations will focus on the orchestration of tasks rather than the ‘ownership’ of workers’ and advises executives to ‘make the network the organization.’”

Open branding: In the spirit of transparency, design firm Continuum is partly revealing to the public its creative process. The specific challenge is to create a brand identity for the Design Museum Boston, a nomadic institution that exhibits mainly in the virtual space. For six weeks, Continuum is partnering with Core77 on a blog series that will reveal the firm’s process and progress as it takes on the challenge. Readers are invited to comment but it is not quite clear to what degree they can influence the creative work. It’s a non-commercial client and a low-risk project but in any case, making a creative project transparent – even somewhat haphazardly – is an interesting experiment that is worth following. The more radical experiment would of course be to put the creative control over a project fully in the hands of the “smart crowd” and have the creative team steered by a disperse group of “remote creative directors”- beyond just input comprising of insights and ideas. Other, more radical formats are imaginable: For example, sharing a company’s entire communications (some, more or less tightly managed corporate Twitter accounts are in a way a precursor to this) with the public. This would be radical transparency indeed, and an experiment with unpredictable outcome – will the benefit of enabling reciprocal, collaborative relationships outweigh the risk of reputational landmines and IP violations? Is it IP, in the end, as proprietary “knowledge stocks” (The Power of Pull), that serves as a company’s greatest asset or isn’t it rather the ability to attract talent and grant access to knowledge and skills? There’s another, softer benefit to it: Brand personality comes from being personal. The more transparent and the more vulnerable brands are, the more personal, they more authentic they will appear. Transparency is a prerequisite for authenticity – an unmasked and immediate act of communication.

Open social-capital enablers: Small, ad-hoc, start-ups are popping up that leverage the principles of self-organization, which Clay Shirky so aptly described in Here Comes Everybody, to rethink “capital” and reinvent human resources allocation in order to tackle global issues. Originated from the Sandbox network, an exclusive network of young innovators and entrepreneurs under 30, this movement calls itself “Emergent Transformation,” and Max Marmer, one of its masterminds, writes on its group blog: “Lately we have been observing an accelerated movement of ventures that are revolutionizing how we take initiative on a global scale. They can be mostly found in the areas of education, innovation, collaboration, networks, entrepreneurship, and human development: spaces that most likely will dominate the future of value creation in our society. These ventures are leveling the global resource play, unleashing unused & undeveloped human capital and leading to a socioeconomic transformation.” For example, there is Supercool School, an online school platform that strives to give people worldwide access to education by building a new global infrastructure of live online schools. Or Assetmap, an online platform that helps individuals discover and leverage resources directly from the community around them, using the methodology of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). Max Marmer believes “One huge differentiator that sets these projects apart from almost all other organizations is their emphasis on ‘human potential’ or ‘social capital,’ rather than economic capital. The hope is that by creating a clearly defined space for these organizations to work in, there will be more opportunity to share this social capital, allowing them to achieve complimentary aspects of mutually shared visions. Their aspirations are tied to value creation, based on co-operative contribution, and will allow them to fulfill personal passions. Giving new meaning to their work, it’s helping people lead happier lives.”

Open conferences: Un-conferences are facilitated, face-to-face, participant-driven conferences centered on a specific theme or purpose. They are the antidote to the conventional conference format, radically disrupting the delineation between curator and attendees, speaker and audience. The attendees are the experts. Many organizations and groups have begun to use un-conferences to capture and externalize the full breadth of expertise assembled at conferences. Some conferences prefer to incorporate only some un-conference formats into their program – participant-driven sessions that are developed on site in real time.

Open conversations: Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And ad shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky did it. All of them use their corporate web sites as social hubs that curate what is being said about their brand rather than staging what their brand has to say. These efforts are attempts to at least co-opt the conversation on the Social Web before brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of the brand's social universe. In other words, what if a brand faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than the brand itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.com, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information, salary information, and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web. Take a look at how Get Satisfaction’s “community-empowered customer support” plays this – it is not an uncontroversial model, but it is “designed for the loss of control (of brands),” enabling customer-to-customer service. You could also spin the idea of a “social homepage” a bit further and not only curate the social web conversation about your brand but actually give away your whole homepage to third parties and to public service announcements, stories, or art. Give up control – gain social currency.

Open HR: Of all critical business functions, HR might be the one with the greatest potential for innovation. With dynamic, quickly accessible expertise replacing static piles of proprietary knowledge, and companies moving from organization-centric to network-centric modi operandi, HR becomes a key enabler of assets through the nurturing of relationships, developing talent, and fostering a culture of openness and participation. This is not just pep talk but includes new tools and methodologies that radically alter the relationship between employee and firm. A recent study by Birkman International that surveyed nearly 20,000 HR professionals found that 83 percent of respondents see great potential in social media-based HR solutions, particularly when it comes to improving communication, learning, and knowledge sharing. Here at frog design, we have launched frogForward, an open-ended, conversational, and social performance management app that allows our employees to provide 360-degree feedback any time throughout the year (not just during review cycles). Goal-setting is entered as a stream, and the feedback – peer, managerial, and employee feedback – can be shared openly or privately. This new approach reflects the changing realities of work performance, from a task-driven control and coordination approach with quantifiable goals to a holistic view that is more situation-and context-aware, gives the employee significantly more control of the process, and considers intangibles such as tacit knowledge, social intelligence, and relationship-building. frogForward shares this approach with Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee feedback.

All of these initiatives, whether they apply to brand, CRM, product development, R&D, customer service, or HR, exhibit some similar characteristics:

- easy access;

- open platforms that harness the creativity and expertise from people outside of the organization or untapped sources inside;

- open-ended formats that can evolve as the problem statement changes;

- ample room for participation and emergent self-organization;

- easy mechanisms for tinkering and hacking (e.g. through open-source formats);

- small formats that can be easily shared

- strong incentives (ideally intrinsic motivation or social currency);

- real-time visibility (through sharable content);

- tie-ins to dormant or active social networks;

- and distributed decision-making.

Openness as permanent crisis

There is another aspect to this: The most imminent and urgent manifestation of “loss of control” is of course a crisis. And in times where terrorism, financial downturns, natural disasters, as well as catastrophic events on the individual level are a steady companion to our societies and personal lives, designing for crisis has become a default skill, forcing designers to make contingency planning an integral part of the experiences they create. Often, this means developing exit scenarios that are flexible enough to provide a structure for emergent solutions in response to emergencies. (The notion that architects design spaces so they can be escaped from has been thoroughly examined by Stephan Trueby in his book Exit-Architecture - Design Between War and Peace). In other words: an easy way out. And in. Because exits are entry points as well. If you design ways out of the system, they might as well serve as ways into the system.

If you think about it, this insight may provoke a different notion of openness – understanding it as a system where exit and entry are identical. In this line of thinking, an ecosystem on the Social Web could be seen as a system in permanent crisis – it is always in flux, and its composition and value are constantly threatened by a multitude of forces, from the inside and the outside. What if we understood “designing for the loss of control” as designing for structures that are in a permanent crisis? Crises are essentially disruptions that shock the system. They are deviations from routines, and the very variance that the advocates of planning and programs (the “Push” model) so despise. At their own peril, because they fail to realize that variance is the mother of all meaning; it is variance that challenges the status quo, pulls people and their passions towards you, and propels innovation. “Designing for the loss of control” means designing for variance.

One system in permanent crisis that contains a high level of variance is WikiLeaks. The most remarkable thing about the site appears to be the dichotomy between the uncompromised transparency it aims at and the radical secrecy it requires to do so. The same organization that depends on the loss of control for its content very much depends on a highly controlled environment to protect itself and keep operating effectively. But not just that: Ironically, secrecy is also a fundamental prerequisite for the appeal of WikiLeaks’ “there are no secrets” claim. Simply put: there is no light without darkness. And there is no WikiLeaks without secrets.

Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.

These are just some initial thoughts. What other formats and business models can you think of that “design for the loss of control” to everyone’s benefit and increased social value? What other variances can be created and effectively shaped? What design principles must be applied?

Over to you.

Growth Ltd.

While in transit at the Munich airport, which is in many ways the epitome of civilization, I’m watching on one of the TV monitors the live footage of the street riots in Athens where Greek citizens are protesting against their government’s budget cuts after decades-long fiscal excesses. It’s like watching CNN blend with surveillance cameras. Greece, the birthplace of democracy, the mother of all civil societies, recently rejuvenated by new infrastructure for the 2004 Olympics, has fallen prey to greed, moral decay, and poor governance. It is ironic (another Greek invention) that what was once a flourishing empire is now a red number on a balance sheet and a black sheep in one of modern democracy’s most ambitious projects: the European Union. If America went straight from Barbary to decadence, skipping civilization, as the joke goes, then Greece might be on its way straight from civilization to decadence to Barbary. Two people dead, hundreds injured. Police units carrying sticks and tear gas marching on the main streets of Athens. One is familiar with these images, but not with seeing them against this backdrop. It’s like an atavism invading our civilized lives, as a stark reminder of how fragile they are.

Greece is facing an unsettling time of austerity, as it is trying to repair the social contract with its citizens. The bail-out funds approved by the European Union provoke strong resentments on both sides – creditor and debtor – as can be seen by the strained German-Greek relationship. But maybe this crisis will have a cathartic effect, as German journalist Gabor Steingart opined, and finally pave the way for the United States of Europe as a more effective successor to the rather lofty political-economic abstraction of the European Union. Or perhaps, with a more negative spin, the deficit crisis is the precursor of a looming European crisis of much larger proportion that fundamentally threatens the sustainability of the European social welfare model, built and defended by predominantly left-leaning governments in post-war Europe. Gross public social expenditures in the European Union increased from 16 percent of GDP in 1980 to 21 percent in 2005, compared to 15.9 percent in the US. The New York Times comments: “With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes.” The "European Dream" has always been that economic growth would correspond with expanding social welfare systems, and as it turns out this dream might indeed remain a dream.

At least Europe was dreaming with its eyes wide open. In 1972, it was the Club of Rome, back then mainly made up of European scientists, which instigated and framed a subsequently heated debate after expressing strong concerns about finite resource supply. For its seminal “Limits to Growth” scenario report, it ran computational models factoring in world population growth, consumption trends, and the availability of various critical resources, and concluded that the end of growth would probably arrive between 2010 and 2050 (the study has been re-run repeatedly in the years since the original publication, using more sophisticated software and updated input data, with similar results).

Almost 40 years later, in light of the ongoing economic crisis, climate change, and a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the question of the “limits to growth” has risen to new prominence. Wall Street’s irrational exuberance and the growing number of failed capitalist states have shown us that market efficiencies alone cannot be relied upon in unlocking the physical limits of resource supply. “The party is over” views are mushrooming. Richard Heinberg, an American journalist and educator who has published extensively on ecological issues, writes on his blog: “In late 2009 and early 2010, the economy showed some signs of renewed vigor. Understandably, everyone wants it to get ‘back to normal.’ But here’s a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history’s timeline?”

Yet so far growth continues: The IMF is forecasting 3.9 percent global economic growth for 2010, despite the threat of a double-dip recession. And most research indicates that the world in 2050 will be richer than the world in 2010. But the problem is that current projections also show a steady decline in the growth rate and a population of around nine billion by the year 2050. The carrying capacity of the Earth’s ecosystem may then very well reach its limit.

Growth is relative indeed. There are, as economists might say, opportunity costs. The comprehensive report by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern undertaken on behalf of the UK government, estimates the costs of climate change, for mitigation and adaptation, to range from five to 20 percent of global GDP.

In recent years China’s economy has been growing at eight percent or more per year; which means it is more than doubling in size every ten years. China now consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago – the same with iron ore and oil. And it is continuing its growth (11.9 per cent in the first quarter this year!) at the expense of curbing gashouse emissions (after a temporary decline they have risen to unprecedented levels this quarter, causing the largest six-month increase in the tonnage of human generated greenhouse gases ever by a single country).

Speaking of this in economic terms, one wonders what the bottom line of our civilization will look like when the full impact of growth is fully documented and externalized. What will offset the systematic exploitation of natural resources, increase in output, and the accumulation of materialistic wealth? It might be a desirable effort to craft a balance sheet of our societies that would juxtapose the absorption of material and human resources with an accurate documentation of the positive gains: cultural refinement, collective learning, freedom, happiness, spiritual enlightenment, delight, quality of life etc. Will there be scientific breakthroughs that sustain our existence or even extend it to other planets? Whether the accumulation of intellectual equity will ultimately save us from our seemingly inevitable demise, well, that’s a whole other question. At the very best it might possibly prolong the finite life-cycle of our species, and that appears to be a desirable result to most of us.

But perhaps it makes sense that we yet have to find ways to make all these intangible assets tangible, that we have hitherto fallen short of materializing the immaterialistic, as the lack thereof may well protect the very lynchpin of our striving for growth. Because in truth, it is not growth for growth’s sake that we’re seeking, it is hope. Perhaps it is the Calvinistic ethics, revisited and reversed: More than the wealth we're accumulating today it is the debt we're making that lets us persuade ourselves that there is a future. Paradoxically, debt is a warrant, an underwriting of the future, simply because someday someone must still be there who will ultimately have to pay for it all (you'd think).

What is growing, too – at the expense of privacy, as some would argue – is online social capital. More than 50 percent of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and 96 percent of them have joined a social network (“Social Media Revolution”). Facebook’s population represents the fourth largest country in the world. This “social wealth” stands in stark contrast to the “Age of Austerity” many now project on purely materialistic terms. As we mount this social wealth and generate more and more social and creative capital, maybe we can overcome the constraints of materialistic growth simply with our ability to inspire behavior change through the strength of our connectivity and the stubborn power of our imagination. At the very literal end of the day, this, and nothing else, is what innovation is all about.

[image credit: atticwritersworkshop]

“It's Been Like Walking Into a Forest With a Match”

For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.

Q: V&S launched a few months ago. How is it going so far? How many clients do you have, and can you share some of the work that you are doing?

It's going really well. We're working with a half dozen clients and have done a dozen projects, thus far. We've been doing everything from brand strategy work, to developing digital tools, to design projects. We've just started working on a couple of TV spots and an industrial design project. It's been a fast three months. You'll see the work start rolling out the door in the next few months.

Q: I guess it's one thing to have a bold idea like crowdsourced advertising and another to actually do it. What made you believe that this might be a viable business model?

I think what we're doing is bigger than just crowdsourcing. The rise in digital connectivity has fueled new ways to use co-creation, mass-collaboration and open-source innovation as powerful tools for business. I've been a firm believer in these disruptions since I wrote my first book about co-creation, Beyond the Brand, in 2004.

Likewise my career has benefitted from several disruptions. First, the rise of desktop publishing allowed me to start a publishing company, Sports and Fitness Publishing. Without the revolution that Apple started with the Macintosh, along with Quark and Adobe's help, I would have never been able to afford to go into the magazine publishing business. Likewise, the rise of other digital technologies allowed me to build Radar Communications, by combining the worlds of anthropology and journalism to provide a new way to do brand strategy and market research. And now, Victors & Spoils wouldn't even be possible without the communities of talented people that are aggregating online.

Of all the disruptions I've had the opportunity to build businesses upon this is the greatest opportunity in my career.

Q: With Starbucks, Best Buy, and other big brands launching crowdsourcing platforms, some industry observers seem to believe that crowdsourcing has jumped the shark. Is V&S the logical end of the line or are we going to see more crowdsourcing, across other creative disciplines?

I think we're seeing a bigger and deeper change going on in the way we work. Every time a new technology disrupts an industry, there are those who try to protect the current way of thinking. While this current digital disruption might seem like a new and frightening trend to those how hold on deeply to the current paradigm.

Just look at history. During the Renaissance, in the middle of the 15th century, there was a similar disruption happening that was shaking the pillars of the then current media world. The methodology of using movable type on a printing press, developed by Johannes Guttenberg, was spreading like wildfire, making books more accessible throughout Europe, allowing a whole new generation to have the tools that only a few held. At the time, books were produced by an elite group of monks in a few monasteries. These scribes were the media elite of their day. As it became more obvious that the new disruptive technological changes produced by the printing press some felt the need to turn the page back. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, a well-known monastery, wrote, In Praise of Scribes. In it he wrote, "We must preserve the old order at any cost." Yet, he had a problem. If he used scribes to produce the book it might take too long to stop the tide of the disruption caused by the printing press. Instead, he used a Guttenberg press to print In Praise of Scribes, only accelerating the change.

The same thing is going on now. Agencies are trying desperately to protect the old way of doing business while bigger cultural trends are shifting the sand below their feet.

Q: If the crowd turns out to be more creative than specialized professionals, will that be the end of the creative industry?

It's only the beginning. How much creativity was there when only monks could write books? Likewise, Apple and Adobe have ushered in a new age of democratization of creativity. The current trends of mass-collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing, based on mass connectivity are only further democratizes creativity. Just look at You Tube. When digital tools become cheap enough everyone can gets involved. Now, it's a question of what's good content and what's bad content. But often, that's a matter of personal taste.

Q: Some people say that your radical crowdsourcing approach might just be a PR stunt to get some publicity around the launch but that V&S will eventually become a more traditional creative shop or at least a hybrid of crowdsourced and expert services. What do you tell them?

For us, it's been unbelievable. It's been like walking into a forest with a match. Sure, we wanted to start a fire and build a business. The cultural conditions have been right for something much bigger. We've gotten calls from several of the most progressive CMOs in the world. They are tired of paying too much money for too few good ideas. They want change.

It used to be that creative quality and price were diametrically opposed. The more you paid, the better quality you could get and vice versa. It was an "or" relationship. You could get quality or price. Certainly, that's been the way the current advertising and design world works. What we're seeing is the opposite. Two things are happening. First, with our own projects and with projects like Unilever's Peperami's crowdsourced scripts project on Ideabounty, talent rises to the top and wins. Our contention has been that in truly free markets, the best work produced by the most talented people rises to the top. It's not blocked by internal politics or hierarchical competition that can smother the best ideas inside big organizations. And, it's only accelerating, many of the most talented creatives and strategists are starting to play around and do work on the new digital networks that are emerging. We've also found that in an apple to apple comparison with the projects we're working on, clients typically save 75% in their creative fees for the same quality. Projects that used to cost $100,000 now can cost $25,000 (or $1,000,000 is now $250,000) for the same quality. We're seeing that with the same strategic and creative direction, results are very similar. Clients are telling us they want to leverage the power of "and." They want the best creative work and pay the best price. That's what we're trying to do. We're using the latest digital tools to provide the best creative product for the best price. Crowdsourcing is only one of the tools to accomplish that goal.

Q: How do you hire, and how do you manage the crowdsourced creative department? Is it limited to a submission of "big ideas" or do contributors collaborate on projects from start to finish?

The first thing we've noticed is that there are lots of different ways to use co-creation and crowdsourcing to solve marketing and product design problems. We've run projects on Crowdspring, 99designs and GeniusRocket. All of these platforms are good for different things. They get a lot of people involved in a project. But it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of entries. And, Sturgeon's Law, that only 10 percent of any large group of creative output is good, definitely applies. In these large community crowdsourcing projects it takes a lot of creative direction. One of our core principles is "Victors" instead of "Victor" or paying many winners instead of just one. We do this with every project we run.

Another way we've been using the community for projects is by selecting small groups of people from our 500+ strong creative department, a global network of some of the best creatives and strategists in the world. In these projects we've been inviting 50-100 folks to participate in a project, selecting between 6 and 12 finalists to compete. In these cases, the finalists get a fee for participating. There is then another fee for the winner of the competition. These smaller, swat team efforts have been working well with all kinds of projects from more complicated design projects to strategy and brand platform projects. One of the advantages has been the ability to keep projects more tightly controlled confidentiality and the ability to creatively direct more complicated projects. But, unlike the larger public projects, the sheer number of ideas is more limited. There are lots of tools in the toolbox and surely more are coming.

It still comes down to the strategic and creative direction to make sure the work produced by any crowd, either internal or external, pushes the work forward in the right direction to accomplish a client's objectives.

Q: How do you pay your crowd(s)? Do they receive a percentage of the client fees? Are there several layers of contributors with varying payment levels? Do contributors have any influence on V&S' strategic decisions?

Yes. We have many different payment models, as described above, and are constantly developing new ones. People in our creative department have a ranking based on their reputation. And, we constantly ask the department to participate in decisions. This space is bigger than all of us and is constantly evolving.

Q: You previously worked at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), a legendary firm with a distinct brand. With V&S, how can you develop a creative identity over the long term when your creative is crowdsourced? How do you maintain your quality standards?

Working with guys like Alex Bogusky and Chuck Porter was an honor. Alex and Chuck are fearless the way they approach work and life. The attitude is the key ingredient of making CP+B what it has become. Quality and consistency of the V&S brand comes from great strategic and creative direction. My two partners, Evan Fry and Claudia Batten, are two of the best. The three of us spend a lot of time developing the V&S brand. So far, we feel like it's going pretty well.

Q: You write on your blog that "Brands need an alternative to current ad agencies and crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today but one that also delivers engagement, connectivity, creativity, and ROI that crowdsourcing platforms have the potential to deliver." How does V&S measure ROI?

We believe that marketing and product design should be judged on how it affects sales and profits for our clients. At the end of the day, that's what they're being judged on. We do work with clients to develop goals for every project. Each project has a different ROI metric. That said, when clients are saving 75% on their creative investment to start with they can achieve their goals much more easily. They also have the ability to try a lot more creative ideas.

Q: At CP+B you launched a product innovation group, and now you have set out to innovate the entire creative industry. In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?

When Alex Bogusky and I were doing research for our latest book, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves, we noticed that the biggest stumbling block to being more innovative for most companies were the internal silos that have been created. Marketing is a silo. Product Design is a silo. Innovation is often its own silo. To be more innovative companies must knock down the internal silos and start to get everyone working together.

Q: What business innovation are you still waiting for?

I'm really looking forward to even more collaborative digital tools, especially video conferencing technology.

[photo credit: David Sykes for Wired UK)

Lift10: Connected People

Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.

Lift10 will take place from May 5-7, 2010 in Geneva and welcome 1,000 participants from 40 countries to "explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in the techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it's time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the 'connected people.'"

Check out some of the Lift10 speakers that have already been confirmed.

The early-bird deadline just got extended to January 31 – you can register here.

New Perspectives On The Work/(Life) Conundrum

My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. Furthermore, the article refers to a more recent survey by DDI which found that more than half of the respondents described their job as “stagnant,” as in “nothing interesting to do” and “little hope of professional growth" within their current organization. Half of these “stagnators” said they were planning to look for another job as soon as the economy recovered. These survey findings are flanked by several recent cultural events in the US that indicate a shift in the way we negotiate the meaning of work, for example Michael Moore’s “Capitalism – A Love Story” and a whole New York Times Magazine issue on “Anxiety.”

And yet, Americans will be surprised to hear that the most dramatic manifestation of this apparent misery-at-work trend occurred in “socialist” France. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom that occured over the past twelve months, many of them explicitly prompted by stress and dissatisfaction at work, forced the deputy CEO to resign and sparked an emotional national debate about life in the modern corporation.

“You are what you do,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant contended long before we started talking about Work/Life balance. Having always been an idealistic concoction most fervently promoted by those biased towards Life, this balance wouldn’t even need to be promoted if it were indeed a battle of equal powers. It isn’t. Work has invaded every single aspect of our lives, and it has infiltrated our society Mafia-style: controlling and demanding every hour of our lives without appearing to do so. Increasingly, Work is no longer visible as such and is instead embedded into Life, which makes its power even more frightening: If you do things that are work but don’t feel like work, then Work has ultimately prevailed.

With the advent of digital media, the relationship between Work and Life has again dramatically changed. Social computing has turned the workplace into the living room and the living room into the workplace. For the digital knowledge workers of the attention economy, it has become harder, if not impossible, to separate Work and Life. The concepts of live-to-work and work-to-live, often pitted against as a clash of American and European cultures, are too one-dimensional to truly capture the reality of most professionals today. Work is Life, and Life is Work, and there is not much in between. The question is no longer how we can balance our digital lifestyle with our professional lives, the question is: How were we able to get any work done before the digital era? And how did we have a life before Twitter?

The new digital work lifestyle has profound implications for one’s (professional) identity: What do you do when everyone else does everything all the time? With everything and everyone connected, the once clear contours of our existence give way to an indistinguishable maelstrom of stimulation: the story of our life is no longer a curriculum, it is a non-linear stream. You can go swimming, fishing, snorkeling, and sailing in it. You can choose to stay on the surface or take a deep dive. But you can never leave. And you can always drown. With Work and Life being the Big Blend, it is shocking but not surprising that for some the only way to take a break from Work is to take a permanent sabbatical from Life, as in the case of the France Telecom workers.

The borderless Work/Life experience creates agoraphobia, an anxiety about an indefinite space of self-actualization possibilities and one’s position within. As Alain de Botton, the philosopher for the knowledge worker, put it: “It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm and be free of career anxiety.”

The Economist suspects that companies aggravate this anxiety by a new, ill-conceived form of Taylorism: “Giant retailers use ‘workforce management’ software to monitor how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart, and then reward the most diligent workers with prime working hours. The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectorates and performance targets. Taylorism, which Charlie Chaplin lampooned so memorably in ‘Modern Times,’ has spread from the industrial to the post-industrial economy. In Japan some firms even monitor whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers.”

These are all measures that will very likely deter Generation Y workers, the digital natives who have grown up with the Internet and expect organizations to provide them with much more ambiguity and empowerment than these were willing to give to their parents. For the Gen Y’ers, Work is no longer just what you do; Work is another way of Life – a meaningful life. It implies a Work-Life package that reconciles passion and profession, meaning and earning, impact and income. A good job is what you believe in – as long as you can abandon it at will. Sure, Work has become invasive, but so has Life, as work performance is being constantly disrupted by the micro-events in one's digital life feed (email, Twitter, blogging, social networks, etc.). Companies need to learn to convert this distraction into productivity. In fact, this might be the biggest management challenge for the next ten years: Learning how to leverage the tools of distraction to increase productivity – and happiness.

No matter where on the Work/Life continuum you’d place yourself, you will acknowledge the one premise that unites us all: how we are going to work in the future will determine how we’re going to live in the future. Consequently, the Berlin-based creative collective Palomar 5 believes that the best way to find out about the future of work is to let people from different backgrounds work together. Palomar 5 has therefore organized a six-week long Innovation Camp in Berlin that gathers, Big Brother-like, 30 handpicked uber-achievers under 30 to explore (and live together) a vision of work in the digital future. The Camp’s agenda and workflow have been carefully crafted and encompass various modules, guest experts (among them a team from the frog studio in Stuttgart), and collaborative creative assignments that tackle Work/Life as one big design challenge.

In a similar vein, The Internet As Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor will be held at the Eugene Lang College of The New School in New York City on November 12-14. An overview Introduction sets out the seminal questions arising “in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media.” The conference is free, with advance registration required.

There’s no dearth of books on the subject either: If I had to pick two, I’d go with Alain de Botton’s The Sorrows and Pleasures of Work (with a poignant chapter on accountants) and Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital which provides a comprehensive overview of the aspirations and habits of the Gen Y workforce.

Oh, and last but not least, our next design mind issue will be dedicated to “Work/Life” – if you would like to contribute or submit ideas for articles and art, please contact us at [email protected] (we love our work so much we’ll even respond on weekends…).

Power to Prezi!

Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity software.” Yawn. One must not be concerned that the Prezi guys will get trapped by the lowest common denominator – they’re too smart, too opinionated, and too small (ten people).

Suppose, though, Prezi is a presentation tool – as the name (and Techcrunch’s praise: “the coolest online presentation tool”) may well imply – then of course it faces a mighty contender: PowerPoint is the dinosaur in the room. Microsoft's program has been around for 25 years, and by some estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any major company that completely foregoes using it, despite its disputed benefits and “Death by PowerPoint” claims that accuse the software of being an all-too-convenient prop for poor speakers. Edward Tufte, one of the most vocal PowerPoint critics, in a famously agitated essay (“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”) even drew a causal relationship between NASA’s PowerPoint slides and the Challenger crash in 1986.

For PowerPoint haters, Prezi surely offers hope. Unlike Keynote, which is highly popular among designers because it offers higher visual fidelity and a better user experience, Prezi differs radically from PowerPoint in that it requires an alternative mental model: Information is displayed in a non-linear fashion. That’s also true for mind-mapping, but Prezi offers additional linear paths, knowing that “time is linear” when you present, as Adam Somlai-Fischer put it. Users can jump in and out of these paths and are thus given enormous flexibility in storing and presenting information.

This very flexibility, however, presents a serious adoption barrier: Many first-time users, as the two Prezi founders would readily admit, struggle with the challenge of filling a “blank canvas,” as they can become overwhelmed by the freedom (and pressure) created by a level of user empowerment they’re not used to within the strict confines of PowerPoint templates. Prezi is asking you to literally think outside the box, but there is a real danger that the brilliance of the tool can get in the way of your content. I saw several conference speakers rely on Prezi this year, and while some of them used it so masterfully that I didn’t even notice the software, some were deliriously inundated by Prezi’s rich possibilities and went gaga with dizzying “jump cuts” from topic to topic, disrupting their presentation and confusing the audience. At the end of the day, you still have a story to tell, and Prezi’s simple way of putting information anywhere you like can ironically lead to the very information overload it aims to avoid – it is just too tempting to create mega-maps and add more and more data to them. But that’s just a minor concern, and some training and (self-imposed content discipline) will make you easily forget about PowerPoint.

Prezi has a lot going for it. Backed by TED and solid VC-funding, with a soon-to-open new office in San Francisco, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as advisor, and a ton of media buzz, the company is poised to aggressively grow adoption in the mainstream corporate world. Power to Prezi!

http://www.prezi.com

Learn Prezi in five minutes

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated: Anyone Still Striving for Perfection?

I saw the Royal Ballet of Flanders perform William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar" last week at the Rose Theatre in New York. It was a mesmerizing experience: a demonstration of the possibilities of the human body and its bold orchestration as part of a stampeding, Dionysian collective.

As I followed the breathtaking, ultra-structuralist choreography, especially the acclaimed "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" part, I couldn't help but draw parallels to other high-performing teams: Why, I wondered, can't businesses (and governments, for that matter) accomplish the same level of perfection? What is it they lack compared to world-class ballet ensembles (and world-class orchestras)? Why are business organizations so often so dysfunctional? Why do the regimen and the elevated standards of consistent, superior performance that apply to ballet and orchestra not seem to translate to the world of business?

Sure, one difference is that art-performing ensembles execute creativity, whereas business teams need to be creative before and when they execute. Innovation is a key ingredient of their successful performance. But still, the operational rigor and prowess that has long been a calling card of companies like GE -- has that become a nostalgic idea in the work-life balanced world of millennials? Do commitment and attention to detail still matter? Is perfection a desirable goal at all in the accelerated economy of permanent beta?

Without wanting to romanticize, there is something romantic about the stories of Tiger Woods practicing his swings for hours every day in front of a mirror, violinists playing the same note over and over again until they reach perfection, and ballerinas sacrificing their bodies for someone else's imagination.

Today's young professionals seem skeptical about this kind of work ethic: For them, good is good enough. They are committing themselves to doing good and living well rather than living up to a vague concept of excellence. Most of them are not interested in sacrifice and excess and would rather save themselves. But for what?

The Writing Organization: Knowledge Management Made Easy

I have a piece of advice for those who bemoan the lack of knowledge-sharing in their organizations: Make tacit knowledge explicit. Externalize expertise and experiences across all functions, from the office manager to the executive team.

How? Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. Depending on their role, employees can blog about customer experiences, sales tactics, strategy, product improvements, organizational design, competitors, market trends, and even gossip. Potential productivity losses are outweighed by the value of knowledge that is being generated and shared.

And what is productivity anyway these days? "Productivity (...) is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy," writes Kevin Kelly in his "Maxims for the Network Economy": "In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice."

Blogging helps identify the right thing. If you turn your organization into a writing organization, it will become readable and thus more knowledgeable.

SXSW Interactive 2008: Who Will Be This Year's Twitter?

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

Here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Blog Out

Bruce Nussbaum, assistant managing editor at BusinessWeek, had enough:

"I'm going to take time off from blogging to cogitate a bit. I love curating conversations and being part of others but there are times when I have to turn off the input to generate the output. This is one of them. Talk to you again the week of March 10."

It's not the first time bloggers need a break from blogging, but it is a rare case of an A-list blogger asking for more time to pursue "big thoughts." Are we witnessing the first signs of a renaissance of the long form?