JMS

I spent some time on the plane home summarizing my visit to SF. January was a whirlwind of meetings and I’m still processing most of them.

The theme was “networks, innovation and social change”. The majority of the invite-only group of 100 participants represented funding organizations, and those of us representing projects were politely told that we weren’t invited for the second day, just funders talking to funders.

See the list of participants.

Howard Rheingold started off the day with a talk about the nature of an increasingly networked society as a dominant form of organization and innovation; the emergence of self-organization, particularly internet-enabled “ad hoc lateral large-scale organizations” (MoveOn, craigslist, Ohmynews); and the need to understand and develop cooperative strategies. The last point was an interesting one, drawing a contrast between competition and cooperation as business and social strategies for advancement, how both have deep roots in biology/sociology/political science, and how nonprofits and philanthropies should push for permeability in the boundaries of their organizations for increased networked cooperation. He now has a site and project devoted to researching this topic: http://cooperationcommons.org/.

The event as a whole was very well choreographed and facilitated by Gunner and Katrin from Aspiration Tech . I particularly liked the show-and-tell session, where 11 projects got 5 minutes each to give an overview of their work.

We didn’t do a PRX show and tell demo, but I was on a panel talking about participatory media and technology which gave me a good opportunity to tell the PRX and Generation PRX story. In addition to being one of the few media/technology projects in the room, PRX in many ways embodies the goals of networked cooperation – from the way we were founded as a collaborative effort of two representative organizations in the field, to the way PRX enables new connections between stations, producers, and listeners. We also have a good story to tell about how funders can cooperate to support innovation.

Larry Lessig gave the closing keynote, mostly a variation of his very effective stump speech. I got a chance to talk with him briefly afterwards, he’s supportive of PRX, gave me his card and said he’s eager to help make the case for public media to embrace a creative commons friendly future.

On day two I set up several meetings around town. I met with Doug Kaye who is hard at work on developing the Conversations Network, using some public radio-like approaches such as listener support and underwriting-style ads. He’s also building a sophisticated digital audio publishing structure and beginning to get new ‘channels’ set up such as Security Conversations, BioTech Conversations, Social Innovation. He’s putting on several podcasting academy training events this year including one at Boston University where I’ll get a chance to present. [Disclosure: I'm on Doug's board]

I also dropped by the Odeo office (they’ve got very cool new digs, textbook bay area start-up style) and caught part of a discussion on mobile media and social activism (which could well have been part of the previous day’s innovation summit, which had MobileVoter as one of the demos). Odeo has shifted away from being all about creating and finding podcasts and is now focused on personal communication, sharing audio and mobile stuff. I love their browser-based recording tools and can’t help start scheming for ways to use them in public radio.