OPEN

This is a lovely video from the KS12 as part of the Berlin Social Media Week 2010 about Open Innovation. Something about it caught my eye, then something about it grabbed my thoughts, and I stayed with it through the ten minutes and was delighted I did.

It got me thinking in a few different directions:

Ideas flow through networks – let go and open up…

There’s some nice articulations of the concept of open innovation and why its important. Because constructs like authorship and how important that has become for us we tend to hang on to ideas a little tightly, think that we own them, that we can stick our little personal brand flag on the top of them and claim them for our greater glory.

Thinking about it, I’ve experienced both sides of this negatively: where people credit you with an idea when you feel you were just articulating someone else’s, and where someone else is talking about an idea that you are certain is your own. In both cases, one should really just relax. It’s important to credit thoughts and inspirations to those you received them from – that social recognition is one reward / reason that keeps our social networks moving.

Our problem is not creating data, but deleting it…

At one point?Ronen Kadushin suggests playfully that we should limit Twitter from 140 to just 20 characters as a response. More useful though would be the ability to put a time-limit on Tweets, to let them fade from view. If not being deleted, what if they had a half-life, falling out of the main search / storage systems, vanishing from the public spaces…

I liked this thought – and it also reminded me to back to the fascinating Delete, by Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger but have since been distracted from by the arrival of the Kindle app and a new clutch of books on that. Delete focuses on the problems we face living in a world where nothing is ever deleted, but stored forever in the (darkening?) cloud. Forgetting is a natural part of human experience, he says. What happens when we can’t?

[This Canadian?radio interview with Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger gives a good precis of the themes of Delete]

Let ideas flow…

Most of all the video has left me with another strong reminder to let thoughts flow, let them out into the world. That’s what this blog should always be about, a public notebook to share unfinished thoughts and things…

I’m grateful rateful to Alison Coward for the point…