The $3.97, Mobile, Web 2.0, Infrastructure Appliance

As a consultant who travels a fair amount, this device gets my vote as the single most important discovery this year:

When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).

This little device turns that moment of potential conflict – where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use – into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant – they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)

It’s “just good enough” – carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop – but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.

It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.

It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.

It’s even in RSS orange.

Gartner Open Source Summit Keynote

Just a few quick impressions from some of the sessions at the first day of the 2007 Gartner Open Source Summit.

The opening session was Wednesday afternoon with Mark Driver : Gartner’s Open Source Scenario for 2007: Risks and Rewards for Mainstream IT.

This was the session which led to this Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flame-fest. But both missed what I thought was a perfectly rational set of statements:

1. that commercial software vendors cannot ignore open source as a disruptive innovation
2. that commercial software vendors are increasingly incorporating open source in a non-trivial fashion, and
3. that this trend will continue to deepen over the next four years.

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Yochai Benkler at the Gartner Web Innovation / Open Source Summit

I spent the latter half of this week at the Gartner Web Innovation and Open Source Summits. (Officially two different conferences, but held over the same three days in the same location).

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

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Hyperlocal is People and Technology

An interesting synchronicity (dare I say even a synergy?) presented itself in two different firefox tabs while catching up on my rss feeds the other day.

In one tab, Andrew McAfee arguing that sometimes “It’s not not about the technology”

In the other, Jeff Jarvis arguing that “Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)”

At first glance this might seem like a debate waiting to happen: McAfee arguing that he’s growing weary of hearing people say “It’s Not About the Technology” and Jarvis saying “It’s Not About the Technology.” But if you look at what both are actually saying, a synthesis makes more sense.

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Evolve or Die: The PR Firm in the Era of Conversations

At hubbub, Giovanni Rodriguez posted “Relating to the Public,” a whitepaper he and Paul Rand have written on behalf of the Council of Public Relations Firms.

It’s well worth a read, even if you’re not in the PR world.

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