Open source economics and Meetup politics

I have almost finished reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. If I wasn't writing this, I would have finished it.

It's an interesting book and well worth a read if you are interested in social/ digital media, work in PR or political communication.

Shirky is very good at explaining why the sites such as MySpace and Facebook have made a difference to how people organize things and why this matters.

Two things in particular got my attention. In the latter part of the book he discusses the Meetup phenomena. If you have never used Meetup this is how it works. You go to the website and search for an interest or region. If you see something you like you can join it and meet people who want to chat about the same thing or just hang out with people who have the same taste. You can start your own group if you can't find what you want. Meetup provides the software and technology to allow this to happen. What they don't do is suggest the groups.

I could set up a group for ginger haired men is north London who like Jean Renoir films. Then I would wait to see if there were other ginger haired men who wanted to join. My guess is that this would be a very small group. After all, apart from carrying the same ginger gene why would you only want to talk to red heads about Jean Renoir? But I could set this up nevertheless and it would probably fail. Shirky stresses this point: Meetup allows people to fail. In fact, it does more than that. The way it is designed encourages people to fail so that they can find the right answer.

Organisations can't afford failure. Nor can governments. That isn't to say they don't fail. A large software company could not create Linux because the economics of open source software aren't viable. They aren't viable because failure is part of the deal when working on the project and one person might have a fantasitc idea but every other idea of theirs might be a dud. In a company you don't want to employ someone for one great idea. So you end up employing people who are consistent but don't set the worl alight.

Yet open source has happened because people made a voluntary association. People still need to make money but that doesn't mean that the principle behind this cannot be applied to economic activity. I haven't read Wikinomics but Shirky talks about examples in that book to show how these principles are being applied.

If the Government decided to set up a support network for ginger haired men in north London who liked Jean Renoir films it would fail. Not because it is the Government but because it would fail regardless. But if the Government did it, it would be blamed for failure and have to then do something for this group to show it wasn't abandoning them. And this is the problem for Governments and organisations. Actually, it is the problem for all of us. However clever you are, you only have limited knowledge and information. To try and make things happen based on that limited information will always be flawed. Better to create an enabler that supports the actions that people want to undertake and then let them fail.

After my Meetup failure, I would probably rethink and set up a group in London for people who appreciated Jean Renoir, regardless of hair colour, gender or location in the city. But I'd have had the chance to get it wrong and that would help me get it right.

Politicians from all parties talk about letting people take control of their lives. They talk about the enabling state. I doubt that digital media has all the answers. What it does is points the way to how things could work.

What is interesting is that the underlying principles of Meetup are liberal assumptions about individuals and what governments or organisations can know. And the underlying assumptions about open source activity are all about voluntary association: the key to open markets. Shirky says here comes everybody but very possibly, here comes liberalism.