Individuals
Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs
Howard Rheingold is a journalist and online communities pioneer (The Virtual Community) whose work explores the emancipatory potential for technology to augment human consciousness and social groups. With his roots in the American 1960s counterculture, Rheingold skilfully blends journalistic accounts of information technology development within an optimistic framework of personal transformation and civilisational renewal. Rheingold popularised the work of early computer scientists like Douglas Engelbart and J. C. R. Licklider in his book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (2000, MIT Press). His recent book Smart Mobs (2002, Basic Books) explores how emerging technologies like mobiles, social networking and WiFi are augmenting self-organising systems of cooperation between dispersed social actor movements. In 2004-2005 Rheingold convened the subject ‘Toward a Literacy of Cooperation’ at Stanford University, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future.
Papers:
Technologies of Cooperation http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Technology_of_cooperation.pdf
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business http://cooperation.smartmobs.com/cs/files/IFTF_New_Literacy_of_Cooperation1.pdf
The Cooperation Project: Objectives, Accomplishments and Proposals http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/CooperationProject_3_30_05.pdf
Toward a Literacy of Cooperation http://shl.stanford.edu/hum202_syllabus.html
URL:
http://www.rheingold.com/index.html
Email:
hlr@well.com
- Pekka Himanen, the hacker ethic as the new P2P work culture
Pekka Himanen is a Finnish philosopher and researcher on the information society, most well-known for his landmark book The Hacker Ethic, which updates Max Weber's classic on the Calvinist work ethic. In his book he shows how network society is both exacerbating the Calvinist work ethic to the point where it becomes immoral and unsustainable, while also creating as a counter-reaction the new hacker ethic, which is based on a peer to peer ethic. The hacker ethic in this broad sense of cooperative working should not be confused with the more specific sense of the ethic of computer hackers.
Website at [1] ; Email him at [pekka.himanen@hiit.fi]
The Wikipedia entry on The Hacker Ethic at [2] A random review at [3]
--203.146.247.4 06:00, 29 Jun 2005 (CEST)MB, June 29, 2005
- Eric von Hippel, user-centric innovation expert
Eric von Hippel is the author of the Democratization of Innovation, and an expert on peer-based innovation processes in business and industry.He is Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Home page is located at [4] Contact email at [evhippel@mit.edu] Online version of his book at [5]His papers are located at [6]
He's a representative quote on the nature of his research on user-centric vs. manufacturer-centric innovation, from the first chapter of his book:
"When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services—both firms and individual consumers—are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others. The trend toward democratization of innovation applies to information products such as software and also to physical products.
The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user’s only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities. In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation. The ongoing shift of innovation to users has some very attractive qualities. It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase social welfare." (([7] )
--203.146.247.4 12:21, 28 Jun 2005 (CEST)MB, June 29, 2005