Open source thinking - and practice

Beth Kanter offers both philosophy and a practical demonstration of open source thinking, which she describes like this:

Open source thinking is sharing and remixing. You've got to set your ideas free, you can't  control your content. It is a different mindset: "Ah darn, someone  else has got there first" versus "Great, don't have to do that, I can  build it on it!" For me, it's been the ability to think out loud with  colleagues on ideas and topics, share presentations, etc.

Beth explains her task:

Later today I'm doing a Webinar, a briefing on Web2.0 tools for the good folks at NCNA. I'm filling in for colleagues Marnie Webb and Billy Bicket from Netsquared. I'm trying to embrace two ideas here - the idea of open source thinking and wikitation. Both require me to let go of old ways. That's a hard thing to do.

Beth cites Allison Fine's book, Momentum, which has a chapter on Open Source Thinking, and how it is the key to successfully using new  tools. Beth adds:

Marnie Webb's excellent presentation called "Ten Ways To Change the World With Web2.0 Tools" and published under creative commons by/NC license. That means you are free to use as long as you give the author credit and it isn't being used for commercial purposes. So, I remixed it for the audience. I added a lot of visuals, I changed the examples, reorganized and tweaked the steps. You can see my remix here.
My next step is to contribute it to the Np Best Practices Web2.0 wiki that Michele Martin created. Maybe we can add a section for presentations that we can share.
I've been fooling around with alternative ways for share presentations over the web.
You can export jpegs to flickr and create set, you can upload a powerpoint into slideshare or create a wikispace for the presentation or wikitation. I generally like to have visuals, a place for my script, and links. I like having a leave behind. There are some definite pros/cons to the different approaches and I'll write about it later. I'm also curious to see what works for a webinar.

I love Beth's preparedness to share not just ideas and practice, but to do it on the run so you get an understanding of how she is actually trying things - not some cleaned up version at the end which skips the difficulties. Beth was in the UK recently, and it was a great inspiration and learning experience to put together materials for a conference together. You can find Beth's wikitation and the social media game we developed on a wiki I'm developing. More shortly on how Michele Martin - who runs the Np Best Practices Web2.0 wiki - and I aim to collaborate with others on a wiki carnival to populate our space. I'm very happy to give credit to Beth for the idea of how to do that. More open source thinking - "hey, great idea, here's how you could do it". No request for attribution - but of course you do - and that's how open source relationships develop.

Comments

[Beth]

I often wonder when is it too early to share thinking on the run? What is the line between sloppiness too early too premature too unbacked ideas and the collaborative spark?