Between Barcamp und Jeecamp

Sitting in a room full of geeks, small investors and marketing agents is not everyones thing. Especially on weekends it is something that others would want to avoid. But not Kathlyn and me. We where at the Barcamp in Riga which was announced as the “biggest Barcamp in the former Soviet countries” with over 1000+ registered participants.

Humans are by nature very bad in identifying the number of individuals in a crowd. But my best guess is that there where about 400 of them on both days quarreling through the hallways and seminar rooms of the Rivera Hotel in Riga. I have no complains about the (self)organization of such a event but must say that it turned out to be self referential to a degree that is unhealthy. Bloggers talk about the way they blog and how there blogs are situated in relation to the network of blogs - the blogosphere.

One of the most interesting things for me was the attitudes of the participants towards technical developments. According to their view new technologies develop because people share ideas and create products and services. The very process of developing is seen by them as something that is caused by people but not under their control. Nobody can control the way in which new technologies
develop is the attitude of most of the participants. This is reflected in the answers I got when I asked them what they think is the driving force of the internet? What is it that keeps the internet spreading and infiltrating the globe and societies all over? The people, one said. And he belongs to the naive ones. Sex, said another. And he might be quiet right. But this conclusions seems inappropriate to the fact why the internet developed in the way it does and not in others.

If I develop means to make butter out of milk I need first of all milk. Than I need something that performs an action on the milk. For both, the milk and the tool, I need money. And if I do not have money to develop means to make butter out of milk, how am I able to put butter on my slide of bread? Or in this case develop services like blogging platforms, flickr clones and mobile translation applications.

It seems that people are very unaware of the things that totally surround them. It is like with the water and the fish. We do not know who discovered water, but we are sure that it was not the fish.

Once used to the internet as part of daily life, its artificial nature is invisible. It is not, as the naive might think, that people are the driving force of innovation. It is the environment that enables an individual to innovate new technologies and spread it to the community. And this environment is the social, political and economic sphere in which individuals play, communicate and do business.

It is not an accident, that a network of free associations, which evolved out of the “highway of thought”, came into existence and spread out from western democracies towards totalitarian societies and not the other way around. In a feudal state, or what we would now call a dictatorship, the idea of creating a network where every user is equal and can communicate with everybody else about whatever they want, would hardly find any support by those who own the country. And in such societies those who own the country also wish to make the decisions that determine the way the society is running. Decisions over investment for example. In this respect democratic countries have much in common with totalitarian regimes.

So the notion that the internet is something that grows naturally in the sense a flower grows the way it chooses to grow is hard to sustain given the fact that technological development are not subject of natural selection ala Darwin.

One factor that determine technology and its evolution or development is the price. If access to the internet is about the income of a middle class worker in a western democratic society than it will get hard to reach a internet penetration rate of even 20% in such a nation. What made the price for access decrease over the last 10 years here in Western Europe was the liberalization of the telecommunication sector. Competition is the name of the game. A monopoly -state owned or private- would keep the prices up to keep its profit up. Technical development is expensive and investments shrink the profit. But if you have a competitive market with companies forced to innovate and invest in order to stay in the market, prices drop.

Besides the price it is education that determines technical developments. The question here is a rather simple one. Why would someone buy something if not for a reason? The reasons vary depending on what someones interests are. But they vary also to the degree of the skills someone has in order to use technology for a given reason.  These skills are hardly acquired in formal education given the speed and scope of the development of the internet. So non-formal education, life long learning and other forms of skills acquisition procedures have to be in place.

If both variables, price level and education level, are in favor of ideas individuals come up with in an act of creativity and innovation, the practical application of these ideas become them self environments. It is only too clear to see especially Eastern Europe countries lacking behind western Indicators for an innovation society. The reasons for this lack cannot be explained in a lack of creativity of individuals in these societies but rather by the driving factors outlined above.

But the understanding of technology as something natural, which has its own way to grow and evolve, is widely shared among the people I met at the Barcamp in Riga. This makes me wonder what happens if Tim Berner’s Network get challenged by something new and the web as we know it will take a step backwards to make place for a new environment.

Yes, and what I want to say is that in march Kathlyn and me will be in Birmingham at the JEEcamp. 

Posted on February 15, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.