Openness and Innovation
Mark Birbeckhttp://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
Openness leads to innovation
Openness leads to innovation
Open sourceOpen standards
Pooling and sharing allow people to build on others' work. Many
projects would simply not exist if it were not for OSS.
Not just the core code either; projects like Drupal provide high
quality CMS to organisations such as charities that might not
otherwise be able to afford a web presence.
Open standards are like open software, but essentially provide a
rationalisation of some form. Adam Smith argued that division of
labour was in itself a good thing, and standards are similar...even
bad ones.
Innovation leads to openness
By openness I mean 'sharing information'...and innovation can
improve that.
Many kinds of online innovation.
Blogging...
Twittering...
Facebook...
Don't worry too muchthat the contentis rubbish...yet
Ok...so the content isn't great.
Early blogs
After all, perhaps the most significant step in human evolution
concerned 'blogging' about what someone had hunted for their
tea.
So we shouldn't lose sight of how technology can feed back into
the way we think, and what we invent.
'Openness'
By openness I mean 'sharing information'...and innovation can
improve that.
Many innovations have changed the way we think.
Innovate...to share more...to innovate
So I'm not really talking about openness leading to innovation,
or even innovation leading to openness, but actually innovating, to
create better sharing and openness, which in turn could lead to
more innovation.
Imagine if Crick and Watson or Marie Curie had been bloggers or
Twitterers.
The technology we have is actually a pretty good medium for
sharing research, interim results, and information...
...but it still has a way to go.
Current web technology is not particularly useful to these kinds
of people.
Starting to change, because specialists want it.
But they are not benefiting from the broader changes, because
they are not yet specific enough.
RDFa, which allowsspecific informationto be published inordinary
web pages
A small contribution is a standard called RDFa.
I devised it, and I've been working with some very clever people
at the W3C to make this into an open standard.
It's a way to put information into ordinary web-pages, so that
we can try to make the semantic web a reality.
With this, chemists, physicists, doctors, biologists and so on,
can publish their specialist work, in such a way that others can
find it.
A New Manhattan Project?
Not exactly an example of 'openness' in the full sense. But an
illustration of what can happen when information is shared across
disciplines. The MP employed over 100,000 people, including
physicists, chemists, engineers, doctors, and so on.
Summary
Openness is crucialfor innovation
But we need moreinnovation inthe mechanicsof openness
References
Me: http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck
My blog: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com
RDFa: http://rdfa.info
