Ssssshhhh!
by Paul Miller
I started off with a couple of stats about how the knowledge based economy has grown. The second half of the 20th century saw a growth of the service sector in the UK from 45% of the workforce in 1950 to 70% in 2000. And how the creative industries are increasingly important � the UN estimates that they account for 7% of global GDP and are growing at 10% per year.
What this does is makes learning more and more important and increases the demand for it. John Grant, a former ad exec at St Lukes writes about what he sees as the learning ethic in his book After Image
. He points to rising numbers of people going to university, the proliferation of specialist magazines, the rise of the Discovery channel and programmes like it, the increasing complexity of computer games and TV (also see Steven Johnson�s excellent Everything Bad is Good For You).I also talked about the things we learned doing the Pro-Ams project, about how passionate amateurs don�t get their knowledge through professional or academic training but from their friends, from the web, from magazines and books. They learn because they want to. Their appetite for knowledge is insatiable. So learning is the right business to be in and libraries (at least in theory) should be well placed to cater to this demand.
The second half was about how creativity is becoming more distributed and social.
I gave three examples from the internet but I think there are loads of real world examples as well (book clubs and recycling groups are just two). The way that the internet is changing has even found a new bit of jargon to explain it � Web 2.0.
First up is Wikipedia, perhaps the best example of successful distribution of the creation of knowledge. Rather than a team of professional encycolpedia writers, it relies on a mass of amateur wikipedians. And it works. 660,000 and counting articles and that�s just the ones in English.
Next is Flickr which I use as a way of organising my photos and sharing them with friends. But lots of other people do too and the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of active users has some strange side effects. It means that it�s easy to find photos of particular things or events and it also means it�s easy to find really good photos. The quality of photos that have high interestingness is very close to professional.
Finally I mentioned the Codex series. These are films made using the online Xbox game Halo 2. After scripting, auditions and rehearsals online, the film is recorded and then distributed through the web. They get tens of thousands of downloads of the films each day.
What these all show is that mass collaboration is emerging as a possible methodology for creating economic and social value. Swarms of passionate amateurs can create things that are just as good as (and increasingly make as much money as) professional products and services. Eric von Hippel calls it Democratising Innovation
.And then I was completely upstaged by Richard Grant (aka The Dreadlockalien) who is currently Birmingham�s Poet Laureate. He was brilliant � I�m just glad I didn�t have to follow him.