Co-Op world - 8am Thursday.

everyone said that day three was when 'it all comes together' and that was certainly the case for me.

(photo: Yochai Benkler on the TED stage... building a case that what happened in open-source software is on the verge of happening in content creation. )

Yochai Benkler's work is both staggeringly complex and brilliantly simple. He's taken a scholarly look at the underlying drivers of peer production... pointing out the there are both social and business components of the way that open source software is created, maintained, and embraced that point to a revolution with far reaching impact. Which is not to say that the impact isn't far reaching already. He showed a slide comparing the Apache open source web server to Microsoft and other commercial web server software applications. The success of Apache towers over the commercial software.

What Benkler suggests is the peer production is both emotionally and economically satisfying - that peoples motivations for contribution and participation are far more complex and variable than simply what they are paid (or could be paid). The implications of his thinking for other creatively driven industries (film, tv, journalism, print, publishing, radio...) seem both apparent and inevitable. He's published a number of his pieces on his web site and if you can, read Coase's Penguin - also very pertinent.

The second speaker of the morning was Jimmy Wales - who's Wikipedia is another one of those amazing 'it can't be done' creations.

It's almost like the first time, as a kid - you saw a magical levitate a girl over the stage. You saw it - but it just doesn't compute.

Well both Yochai and Jimmy are in the space (Yochai as a connector of dots, Jimmy as someone drawing dots). What makes Wikipedia so interesting is that in hindsight, the idea that a group of self-selecting individuals could make a encyclopedia that is deeper, better, more quickly corrected, and accurate than a commercial enterprise is STAGGERING. If you don't believe me, test it out. Pick an obscure subject... try it with Britannica or any other commercial encyclopedia, and then go to wikipedia. It's just BETTER. And part of what makes Wales so interesting is that he's both in charge of the revolution, and in many ways being pulled along by it. Much like the 'community' of eBay... Wikipedia is driven by content (auctions or articles) over which they have no control. The space is there... but the input is entirely depended on the community having control. Says TED: " With a vision for a free encyclopedia online, he assembled an army of amateurs, gave them a wiki, and is creating a self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, and addictive encyclopedia of the future." all true.

And then - Clay Shirky. Somehow this trio of thinkers all seemed to have planned their talks together (though know they didn't). Shirky's world view is all about collaborative content creation... he began with images from the Coney Island mermaid parade, and how though Flicker and tagging he was able to get a street level view of events... the emergence of citizen journalism (or just shared information). As Shirky tells the story, the emergence of open networks as opposed to institutions clearly puts the advantage to quickly organizing net based networks. He told a story about sequencing SARS, with the Chinese government setting large, institutional systems will Canadian scientists used an open source solution to share the work and speed the solution.

Benkler. Wales. Shirky. Together their examples, stories, and stats all tell the same single story. User-content and peer production solutions will emerge as the single most powerful and unique development that we've seen in the new connected networked world. The impact on knowledge, science, art, and communities is fast moving, and world changing.

wow.