This is an absolutely brilliant presentation given by Clay Shirky (author of the new smash hit on organizing Without organizations called “Here Comes Everybody“) on the topic of “Where do they find the time”. You hear this phrase, usually in response to some report of silly activity or massively time consuming hobby. We Clay knows and soon you will too. It turns out that even a fraction of the time we devote to passive entertainment (e.g. Television) can, when applied to productive activity, equate to massive collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia).
I will let Clay explain. Do not miss this.
The transcript is here.
Incidentally, he mentions a Brazilian professor who has set up WikiCrimes, a wiki google maps mash-up that allows users to plot crimes on a Google map with descriptions and other information. I wanted to do exactly the same thing back in 1998, when I lived in Clapham in London. I even went so far as to register a domain and researched how one requested crime data from police. In those days it was simply too hard to do it alone. I would have needed serious developers. There were no web mash-ups and the Semantic Web was mostly theory.
Other ideas I had at the time, like a civil volunteers to take care of neighbourhood old people were also impractical because of technology limitations and legal threats. I think I may just have to crack open that old Someday maybe list and see what might be more doable now in the Web 2.0 era.
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