Last week I had the pleasure of traveling down to Savannah, GA to attend the CSCW 2010 conference. Steve Harrison, one of my committee members, and fellow lab mates Tejinder Judge and Sirong Lin, accompanied me. Steve drove us all down there and back in the family mini van. Overall, it was a great trip and I had been meaning to blog about my experiences for awhile now - here is the first installment.

Opening Plenary Keynote by Clay Shirky

I am kicking myself right now for not taking notes on Clay Shirky’s opening plenary speech, because I thought it was fantastic. The general thrust of the speech, which he also talks about in his latest book “Here Comes Everybody”, was that with the tools provided to people through the internet, groups of people with a common interest are able to self-organize and get work done. He pointed out that there are two types of work, big ‘W’ Work, which is what you do because your boss tells your to, and little ‘w’ work, which is the work we do for pretty much everything else, like interact socially with other people. It takes work to interact and communicate with other people, and when we design software for collaboration we should take the existing processes for getting work and Work done. 

Also, these self-organizing groups of people are creating organizational structures that don’t resemble the ones in more traditional corporate groups, like big companies and non-profits. He illustrated this through several examples, my favorite of them being the Grobanites for Charity who are all fans of Josh Groban and wanted to raise money for charities as well. The Grobanites didn’t want to just give all their money to the Josh Groban Foundation (also a non-profit chairty), they wanted to be in charge of where their money went, while still professing a love of Josh Groban and everything he does. All money donated to the Grobanites goes straight to charity because they have zero operating costs - all the Work (and work) gets done by volunteers.

Furthermore, these groups of people, who share a common interest and have found each other on the internet, are forming communities with their own cultures, values, and governing structures. There are “rules” to participate in their groups just like there are rules to participating in any society we find ourselves in. Again, sometimes their community held beliefs on right and wrong don’t really resemble how the law or larger society would define right and wrong. Regardless, when we design and insert new technologies and structures into these organizations, their existing culture can be supported or “broken”. That is, enforcing a new rule or a new medium of interaction can change their community culture and values permanently.

In my limited experience of conference attending, this opening keynote was one of the best I’ve seen. His book is currently on my Amazon wishlist, waiting for me when I save up my silly grad-student money to purchase it!