Sessions Events
Hacking Education
It has been two months since we hosted a great group of academics, entrepreneurs, educators, and administrators at our Union Square Sessions Event, Hacking Education. Fred posted his initial thoughts immediately after the event and in a great example of peer production, Alex Krupp curated the Twitter stream that captured the thoughts of folks inside and outside of the event. I finally found some quality time to spend with the transcript that is now online, and thought I would try to expand on Fred's initial thoughts and develop a couple of the key themes that came out of the conversation....
ContinueHacking Philanthropy - The Transcript
Here is the transcript for the Hacking Philanthropy Sessions event. It was a tough assignment for the transcriptionist. It was a large room where 40 high powered people were firing ideas back and forth without microphones. So despite a heroic effort, Yochai Benkler's work on peer production came out as "bank lenders work on pure production." Even so, I think the transcript will prove to be useful. Just glancing at it this morning for the first time, I was reminded what a great conversation it was. If you were with us for the event, I think you will find the...
ContinueUnion Square Sessions 3: Hacking Philanthropy
Every so often Union Square Ventures brings together a small group for a day-long conversation about the interplay between technology and society. We call these conversations Union Square Sessions. Yesterday, we hosted a conversation entitled "Hacking Philanthropy." Hacking is used here as a term of respect as in "The intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations." See the Jargon File. Our idea was to bring together entrepreneurs who have exploited the capabilities of the web to disrupt markets with people working for positive social change in the non-profit sector to see if the same techniques could improve the...
ContinueSessions
It took a little longer than we would have liked but the transcript of our June 15th Sessions event is now up on the Sessions Wiki. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find it. Or if you'd rather, this is a direct link to the transcript. Jonathan Taplin took me to task early on for suggesting that ubiquitous connectivity was a given. " I'd just like to kind of object in a friendly way to your initial supposition, which was that we're living a world of commoditized infrastructure, and ubiquitous connectivity, and I quite frankly think that's...
ContinueUnion Square Sessions 2 - Public Policy and Innovation
Yesterday we hosted a group of academics, policy professionals, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs for a conversation about public policy and its impact on innovation. We are very grateful to everyone who took a day out of their busy schedules to help us explore this issue. The policy professionals in the room argued that the outcome of the current debate on network neutrality, the broadcast flag, and the proposed extension of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) will have a big impact on the opportunity for entrepreneurs to innovate in large and important areas of the economy....
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Eight - Putting A String On Data
Our sessions event happened almost a month ago and it is starting to fade into my memory. But there is at least one phrase that came out of Sessions that we are still using with regularlity at Union Square Ventures. And it came out of this really interesting exchange between Brad and Tim O'Reilly on the subject of "open data architectures": MR. BURNHAM: I wanted to jump on that one-way aspect, because, for instance, one of the things that if you syndicate a piece of data, you know, do you want to have a string tied to that, at least...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Seven - Less Control Can Create More Value
There was a lot of discussion about the relationship between web service providers and consumers. This relationship is obviously especially important in services where the consumers are also the producers of the service. One thread of this discussion was about control. I hate to lead with Jeff Jarvis again but he is so quotable. “If you give people control, they'll use it, and if you don't, you'll lose it.” Jeff’s point here is that consumers increasingly expect control of their web environment, and that most efforts to control or contain them will lower the value of the service to the...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Six Reputations Are Not Portable
There was a lot of talk at Sessions about trust. The word appears 33 times in the transcript. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it 11 times himself. Here, Jeff makes the point that value is shifting from content to trust. “And so the content isn't what's valuable. It's the trust and relationship that's valuable, and that to me, in a post scarcity -- what the internet does is it takes away scarcity in terms of both content and distribution, and it changes the value essentially to trust. So the friction is still there. The friction isn't "I own the content and you...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Five
One of the insights from our Sessions event was from Yochai Benkler who said the following about peer production: we do have very good research on how adding money undermines social motivations depending on contents I am not sure how to intepret that last part - "depending on contents" - but Yochai's point that "adding money undermines social motivations" is something that ought to be watched carefully. One place we can watch it carefully is Amazon's recently announced Mechanical Turk service, mturk.com. Mechanical Turk is about peer producing HITs. According to Amazon, a HIT is a Human Intelligent Task,...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Four
Here are some more of the insights that we gained from our Sessions discussion... Michael Parekh makes the point that all peers are not created equal… “Another thing, the term peer to peer, one of the things that's implicit, unfortunately, is that everyone is participating in an equal way, and the reality is in terms of all these others people talk about, from Napster to Wikipedia, the number of people that are actually doing -- contributing content, it's typically a much lower percentage. … If you look at the number of people who read blogs versus write blogs, the number...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Three
Umair Haque said something (or actually quoted someone) at our Sessions event that has been rattling around my brain for the past week. Umair said: Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information create?" A scarcity of attention basically, right? So I went to Wikipedia and looked up Herbert Simon and found out that he was a cognitive psychologist who made significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, economics, and philosophy. A more "blown out" version of Umair's quote of Simon is: "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - Two
Social production systems seem to deliver a much higher portion of the economic value created to the consumers than traditional production systems do. As Tim O’Reilly says, "if you look at … Ebay or Google, even though they're very, very successful companies, they're actually pretty generous in creating value for people outside the company". This may be because peer producers could get restless if they felt that too much of the value they created was being appropriated by others. It could also be happening simply because the economics of social production make it possible for people to be generous. But,...
ContinueSessions Top Ten Insights - One
As we get a chance to go back through the transcript of Sessions, we are finding a number of themes that are worth highlighting. We will try to get these thoughts up on the site over the next week or so. Our first observation is that we may need a finer grained definition of “peer production” Since Yochai Benkler coined the term peer production in his 2003 paper Coase’s Penguin, it has been used to describe Wikipedia, Linux, peer to peer file sharing, Skype, Google’s page rank algorithm, Craigslist and many other services. As we understand this phenomenon better, it...
ContinueUnion Square Sessions 1 - Transcript
It took a couple days, but we've uploaded the entire transcript of the first Union Square Sessions, an event focused on the topic of peer production and open data architectures. The entire transcript (all 227 pages) is available as a Word file here. Someone has also created a reformatted version of the transcript which is only 52 pages long. The reformatted version is also available as a PDF file courtesy of the same person who created the reformatted version. We also have created a page on our public wiki where people should feel free to pull quotes from the transcript...
ContinueUnion Square Sessions 1 - Photos
This badge has some of the great photos Mark Andres took at our event. The full set is here.
ContinueUnion Square Sessions 1 - Peer Production
Today we hosted the first of what we hope will be many conversations about the impact of information technology on our society, our economy and on the business of venture capital. The subject of this "session" was peer production. We were blessed by the presence of great group of energetic and experienced, entrepreneurs, investors and analysts who have all been thinking deeply about this stuff for a long time. Our goal, in bringing these folks together was to contribute to and encourage a conversation that is already in full flower in the blogosphere. We won't be able to replicate the...
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