I’ve just been invited to be a presenter at the Banff Centre New Media Institute’s Fall Summit, titled “Participate/Collaborate”.
From the program description:
Banff New Media Institute has held a series of summits on collaboration. This year, we focus on participatory design and social networks. “Collaboration” is used to describe a large set of current experiences and forms of organization, from multi-player games, to community blogs, to high performance computing grids. Is collaboration a new term for simply working together, or can it mean something more — the potential for new ideas, forms of social organization and even new discoveries?
Blogging and social networks are just two expressions of the ongoing peer-to-peer revolution and a clear indication that audiences are now participants. Expanding wireless capabilities enable ad hoc networks, location aware devices and semantic maps. Links are the currency of the present. Values are expressed through decentralized collective will. Participatory design, which is, working with the end-user to create a new product or process, is a growing approach in new media production. The summit will consider the ways that individuals and groups are included and engaged through collaborative and participatory structures.
What are participatory design methods? Can participatory design ensure a market for products? What economies and rights models work in collaborative creation? Can we link peer-to-peer systems to more traditional forms of organization or media?
This summit will launch an international collaboration studies network.
What fun ! I get to hang out for a week at the Banff Centre – a beautiful learning centre peopled with interesting and lively humans from (usually) all over the planet – and yak, listen and learn about one of the most interesting, to me, social and cultural developments of this era.
I feel like a lucky guy today.
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