This second installment of my Stanford Human-Computer Interaction course went in a totally different direction. Where the first lecture focused around the efforts and experience of a single individual, this second lecture took a much broader look at changing landscape of technical production. The lecture was titled “Burning Man at Google, A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production?” and was given by Fred Turner.
The main point that I took away from this lecture is that the phenomenon of commons-based peer production is starting to change our industry completely. Products like Wikipedia, Linux, and many others are built on the efforts of volunteers, many of whom are highly skilled and are contributing in a different kind of economy than ever before. Contributors are not paid, and so this is driving a new kind of community where people build on each other’s strengths and skills without thought of compensation. As more companies recognize and start to harness the potential of this kind of production, projects of a different nature and scale will become our new reality.
Here are my sketchnotes.
