DISPATCHES FROM DAVOS
Brian Behlendorf’s daily dispatch from the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
“The Power of Collaborative Innovation”
2/2/2008: “Absurdities and Beethoven”
Danah Boyd nailed it: Davos is, indeed, absurd. But I find a subtle logic to its absurdities. Here's a town that's essentially stuck in Lake Tahoe in the 70's, turned upside down once a year by a massive operation resembling a temporary convening of the UN. It's like the opposite of Burning Man - where once a year a barren dry lake bed two-hours' drive from Reno is turned into a Rorschach-like fantasyland. Instead of a dry lake bed, we have a cozy ski hamlet; instead of trying desperately to stay hydrated, you try desperately to stay warm and upright while skating the road ice between hotels and sessions; and instead of a ban on commercial activity (except the sale of ice and coffee at Center Camp), you have the biggest industrialists in the world coming to proclaim both the triumph of and the end of traditional capitalism, and the coffee, wine, and champagne are free.
For those who think I've stretched that metaphor too far, follow me now as I twist the ends around and connect them. For there is more similarity between Burning Man and Davos than differences. Both are, at their root, a manifestation of Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone" concept, a suspended-reality time and place, where new ideas can be given enough headroom to emerge, evolve, and possibly survive the return trip to everyday life. Both events are chaotically scheduled, with people dashing from one thing to the next at first, and then eventually learning to give up and be surprised. The audiences are wildly different - I suspect that there are fewer than ten of us who have been to both. But when each event is at their best, the result is the same - people go with the goal of being challenged with new ideas, to meet people they wouldn't otherwise meet, and to think about the long term and one's behaviors in the short term. It's a hassle to get there and a hassle to be there; but those hassles tear down our manufactured exteriors. Those who understand this well - and that includes many of the programmers of the official WEF events - seem to understand this pretty well.
After a late night at the grand soiree the night before hosted by France and Turkey (yes, there were mimes, handing out champagne glasses from behind curtains), it was a real effort to drag ourselves back to the Congress Center for the last session of the event. The same stage where on Tuesday, George Soros and John Snow debated whether the U.S. banking system had gone out of control, and on Saturday, the Iranian foreign minister pounded his fists over the lack of credibility and respect his country gets from the world... on Sunday morning played host to a wonderful talk and performance from Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. Why not, we figured... it probably wouldn't suck.
Of course it didn't suck. It was amazing. Zander took us through Chopin's Prelude... explaining the composer's false endings, and then playing it again asking us to imagine someone from our lives who had recently passed away. A piece I had heard countless times was suddenly transformed into the sound of a soul finding its resting place... amazing. Others were in tears. He went on to talk about his thoughts on teaching and on leadership; how he told his students at the beginning of a semester to write a letter to him from the future, explaining how they'd improved during the course of the class and thus deserve an A, and that's what they'd be graded on at the end of the year, how closely did they live up to that. Very cool. Then he led us through a singing of Beethoven's Ode to Joy - in German - and brought the room again to some place magical.
The video was on the www.wefforum.org home page at some point, but isn't there now; perhaps it'll return. Check it out if you can; I'll post here if I find it republished somewhere. What a totally unexpected experience.
The closing lunch up the hill at the Schatzalp was a perfect ending... the absurdity in full effect again, from the sushi in the snow to the band playing "I Shot the Sheriff". The trip home was just like that from Burning Man has always been - hours and hours of cars, buses, trains, as your brain resets to normalcy.
On the trip down the funicular from the Schatzalp I asked someone (who turned out to be a senior advisor to Klaus Schwab, the founder - again, nice coincidence) if it had always been this way. “Nein,” he said - it started as a two-week small get-together, with simple business meetings in the morning and skiing every afternoon. Just as another event began as a simple evening effigy burning on Ocean Beach, I guess. :)
1/26/2008: “Leadership and Transparency”
What happens when you take a 200-odd clutch of U.S. Senators, former or current Bush administration officials, political leaders from other countries, and public policy geeks like me - and put them in a wood-walled dining hall, serve them fine wine, yummy pumpkin soup and schnitzel, and tell them everything's off the record? You get a mix of passionate opinions with gracious humility; you get a conversation you'll never see on the Senate floor or Jon Stewart's Daily Show; and you get articulation of true left-right issues like entitlements, the economy, and the real problems the next president faces no matter who gets elected.
I'm going to honor that off-the-record request. I will say that from a world (open source) where when groups disagree they can simply fork... collaboration is much, much harder, but probably even more poignant and important, amongst a community of those who strongly disagree. What's essential, though, is that everyone still cares about the outcomes. My sense is that, at least amongst those in elected position who came to Davos, the sense of how far America has to go to reclaim its former position of credibility and authority in the world, is deeply appreciated.
Waking up for a 9am Young Global Leaders community meeting after an awesome and way-late-night Google party was, let's say, "ambitious". But nearly everyone made it to the Schweizerhof hotel to talk about our status and our future. The YGLs are a group of about 250 that the WEF identified and sponsored for their first two years; but for the next three we've been asked to pay in to make the program sustainable. The good news is that those of us who have been able to pay have also been able to cover the costs of those employed by non-profit groups, perhaps working in the developing worlds, emerging politicians in places like Zimbabwe and China, and others for whom paying into the YGL program would have been a burden. I feel really good about that - collaboration of a different sort.
It's clear the YGL community doesn't just talk about what could be done. One task force formed to focus on the problem of intestinal worms in the developing world reported their efforts had led to the distribution of 500K doses. The climate change task force is hosting a conference on the consumer research in carbon-offset products. The human rights task force is focusing on preventing "the next genocide" in Ethiopia by putting together a documentary on the topic for free redistribution. It's really amazing - and can easily be overwhelming for someone watching from the sidelines. Time to get off those sidelines....
...which leads to this afternoon's workshop led by a small group within the WEF staff who are building a new social network tool for the Davos set. Their prototype has got the basics - communities, file sharing, discussion tools, profiles - but the session wasn't just about reviewing the prototype. We were asked to role-play the kinds of people who attend Davos - the CEO, the social entrepreneuer, the head of a large non-profit, the domain expert, etc. Divided into groups based on a given role, we were asked to storyboard (and then, eek, perform!) what we want from a social networking tool that would truly perpetuate the kinds of interactions we have here in person. It was cool how each group came across a consistent theme - allow us to simply connect and converse, but also give us a means to have the same sort of serendipitous engagements that you get while waiting at the coat check, in the shuttle van, in the lobby... what kinds of tools would best enhance that? This isn't just about a wiki here or a private-label Facebook there. It's not even just about tools. At the end, we found ourselves truly brainstorming, bouncing from radical ideas to possible implementations and back. I had a lot of fun, and ironically, it illustrated the kinds of high-bandwidth collaboration you can get in person.
Off to the Tokyo reception... mmm sushi in a landlocked nation... :)
1/25/2008: “The Power of Serendipity”
One of the ironic things about Davos is that, despite most of its attendees being incredibly organized and goal-oriented in their day-to-day lives, Davos is a lousy place to come with a list of must-meet-these-people, or must-project-these-messages. The vast majority of conversations take place in the most happenstance of ways - sitting next to someone on the couches in the lounge or at the same big table at lunch or dinner; while in the shuttle van riding around town; or while standing in the hallways and having someone else go "oh, you two should meet!". The best way to get the "most" out of the conference is to simply be as extroverted as possible - unashamedly looking at name tags to make a connection, or just casually smiling and saying something about the session or food or weather. I've had my best conversations by standing in one place and talking literally with anyone I can. It might not be until later, after looking at the card you traded for, that you realize it's a Saudi prince, a dean of economics at an ivy-league school, a human-rights prosecutor, or a popular author.
By late last night, after 18 hours of nearly non-stop sessions and conversations, I was beat. I woke up late and made it to lunch - "My Idea, My Design, but Whose Property?" - a session I felt almost obligated to attend. :) It was a small group - just 25 - but had a variety of tech company CEOs and general counsels, media industry heads, open source types like myself and Mitchell Baker, Florence from the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. With such a small group, we simply had a single conversation across the tables.
The initial voices heard were what you might expect - IP and patent law are important but need reform, uncontrolled illegal file sharing is causing economic harm, etc. But it was the comment comparing Open Source to illegal file sharing that compelled me to stand up and correct that - to talk about the real commercial drivers behind open source projects, to talk about CollabNet's role in launching and managing the Subversion project, and to talk about the need to think about new ways to profit from the kind of sharing culture the Internet unavoidably promotes. Mitchell added more about the broad, industry-wide economic value being created by open source projects that requires measurement by tools other than traditional financial returns. Heads nodded - and follow-up conversations revealed that many of those there were experimenting with ways to involve their users, partners and customers in designing their own future. The best comment came from Bernard Charles, CEO of Dassault Systemes in France: IP law, public policy, and corporate innovation policies should be more focused on optimizing the potential for the future rather than preserving the past. Broad consensus on that point.
But the best session of the day was "Innovations in Leadership", a 2-hour session moderated by David Gergen, with presentations on leadership style from four terrific folks: Mohammad Yunus from the Grameen Foundation, Jimmy Wales, Soraya Salti from INJAZ in Jordan, and Andrew Klaber who founded Orphans against HIV/AIDS. Each had a story to tell about how their organizations make decisions. Mohammad talked about the very local model for Grameen villages in Bangladesh, which always involved small groups of women making consensus decisions, and while sharing reluctance to power, have acted as a means to empower even the poorest women to take an interest in their village, region, even state and nation. Rather than a model for politics being about warring tribes headed by "devils" as the locals call it (as many write off democracy as simply being warfare by other means), which otherwise leads to cynicism and detachment.
Soraya talked about starting an educational organization in Jordan - and then working up the chain from local government officials who didn't understand up to chief ministers who could vouch for her. Andrew talked about working with those most affected by disaster to advocate and educate to stop more victims. What struck me were how common certain messages were, even from those at the same table as I as we swapped stories: transparency, access, training the next generation of leaders, and being completely unreasonable from time to time. Cool.
1/24/2008: “Transformative Forces”
I regretted missing this morning's session with Al Gore and Bono (“Marrying solutions to climate change and poverty”) - the shuttle vans from Klosters ran way over schedule and were full by the time they got to our hotel, so we arrived much later than planned. The premise of their session - that the climate crisis and global poverty crisis are intertwined, and should be addressed collaboratively - seemed in line with the theme of this year's event. Easy to say, perhaps, but harder to think about applying, as the institutions designed to address each are pretty separately defined, and collaboration between NGOs is historically even more difficult to achieve than between for-profit companies, who at least both have the same goal of making profits. Can you convince microfinance organizations to focus on clean water and power projects? Can you convince Tata not to release their new $2500 cars until they get better gas mileage or run on electricity? We'll find out more I guess.
It's all good, though, as I got into a great session (“Future Shifts: The voice of the next generation”) with a group of teens from different countries (Sri Lanka, South Africa, Argentina, Scotland, China, and the U.S.), invited to Davos to talk about the projects they have started and led. The 16 year old from Beijing had started a project called "365 trees", where for the last few years he's led groups of several dozen into upper Mongolia to plant 365 trees each, one for each day of the year. He talked about how difficult it was to convince his peers that the climate crisis was something worth taking seriously - talking about disappearing polar ice or species was too abstract, but talking about Shanghai and most of the eastern coast being underwater in a few decades was much more immediate. While being passionate and articulate were clearly their strengths, what also impressed me was the way each of them could tell that they couldn't act alone - that their role was to be a pivot point, translating concern and worry about a given issue into action and results on the other. A room full of people willing to give them time, money, and most importantly for the kid from China, political cover, was really cool to see.
I was also very inspired by a dinner session called "When Science Meets Design". The premise: science today is generating more data and more "knowledge" than we know how to interpret, let alone use as the basis for further inquest, and that designers - essentially the "engineers of art" to paraphrase MIT professor John Maeda, who led part of the session - can play a key role to work with scientists to create such new visualizations. Interdisciplinary collaboration was the theme... and getting past prejudices about designers simply being about "pretty pictures of information", or scientists simply being eggheads.
The coolest conversation of the day, though, was with economist Joe Stiglitz at a reception hosted by Canada at the Kirchner Museum. Joe had not only heard of open source, Linux, that sort of thing - he realized that it was a transformative approach to business that is moving beyond software.
I missed Bill Gates's presentation, in which I heard he called for a new approach to economics. I don't suppose he meant open source?
1/23/2008: “The Need for Collaborative Resilience”
The first day of the "weff" (as the locals call it) has come and gone.
The financial crises hitting the markets this week contrasted sharply against both the crisp snow resort air and the WEF's traditional role as the place for long-term thinking. This lent an air of urgency to the event's main collaborative session for the day - the "Economic Brainstorming" session, where the attendees split into tables to address the question: "what issue has the greatest likelihood of limiting economic growth in 2008, and what can be done about it?"
Seated in tables of about ten and given about 30 minutes to discuss, propose, and vote, each table arrived at some very different answers.
That was likely due to the incredible diversity of those in the room, and even at each table. Participating at my table were an economic minister from a Gulf state, a microfinance CEO, a Harvard professor on human rights, an Oxford "professional interferer", two central bankers from Europe, and a Dutch prince. Instead of jumping into headline issues like the sub-prime credit mess, there seemed to be a clear passion at the table for the issue of food security, even for 2008. The food supply processes have long been "globalized", but often in ways that have reduced resilience - rises in the cost of transport, disruptions due to weather, and wildcards like a resurgent wheat virus in Africa that could spread globally or the disappearing of the honeybee in Europe and America, could lead to major failures in crops and the delivery of food to consumers in different regions of the world. And if the prices of food rise substantially, that could lead to political unrest, disease outbreak, and more.
For those who think Davos is all about fabulous parties and deep snowy skiing and bankers counting their money, this was a particularly pointed contrast.
In processing this issue, though, we focused on a key word - resilience - and concluded that the interdependence between nations and industries that globalization had brought also meant that, unless managed well, a blow to one sector or one region can cause surprising domino effects elsewhere. Tighter profit margins and greater dependency on monocultures meant fewer alternatives could kick in if parts of the global food supply chain were affected. But this wasn't just an issue with food - we could see similar failures in resilience in water, health, economic goods, and other sectors.
We also concluded that the best institutions to address this were multilateral industry groups who are already focused on enhancing diversity; but that the most effective approaches are likely to be bottoms-up efforts to collect and disseminate information amongst a network of practitioners. Examples were given of Wikis set up to help monitor and coordinate responses to disease outbreak - to help farmers connect with a broader network of local buyers - to help inform consumers on product alternatives. It was even suggested that local knowledge sharing amongst financiers might have checked the bogus credit ratings that led to this "sub-prime crisis".
We ended up with a declaration of the importance of peer-based collaboration and knowledge sharing as a tool not just for long-term thinking but to address even the potential for major issues this year. Whoa.
After wrapping and summarizing, and then voting, the rest of the room appeared to coalesce around more traditionally-phrased concerns: the lack of a coordinated response / leadership in the face of crises; the mismanagement of any response that does happen; the obvious "recession in the U.S.", and a broad-based "collapse in confidence", were over 70% of the votes. But I see the key our table arrived at as underlying many of these concerns.
Later, Klaus Schwab gave his opening speech by underlining the theme of this year's conference - that today's problems are too big for any single nation to solve, and instead require collaboration and coordination. Speeches that followed from Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Rajendra K. Pachauri from the IPCC, and amazingly even Condi Rice, substantiated the need for coordinated responses to the economy, the climate, addressing terrorism (Karzai's speech in particular on this was very effective), and whatever new crises 2008 will throw us.
Where does software fit into all this? Indeed, that was my question in 2006, when it seemed like climate change was more of an economics or materials-science issue. But I've since seen places where it can clearly affect an outcome. Yesterday, I ran into my friend Shai Agassi, whose new company Better PLC recently announced a partnership with Nissan and the country of Israel to bring electric cars to consumers based on the cell-phone business model: subsidized hardware with per-use pricing. He told me he was planning to make open source a substantial part of the solution, since he needs to quickly spin up an entire commercial ecosystem based around common standards for refueling these cars, controlling charging (so that the entire power grid isn't taken down at 5:30PM when people get home and plug in), and more.
There'll be more examples this week, I'm sure. Signing off for now.
1/18/2008: “Davos-Bound”
I'm currently sitting here in CollabNet's German office in Munich, also known as the home of my good friend Dominique, about to board a train for Zurich for the weekend to visit some more friends and then on to Davos, Switzerland on Monday, where I'll be attending my second World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.
My last trip was in 2006, as a new member of the "Young Global Leader" community, which includes folks like Shai Agassi (formerly of SAP, now founder of Better PLC), Gavin Newsom (Mayor of San Francisco), and Kevin Martin (Chairman of the FCC). This is a subset of the broader WEF-attending community, which includes everyone from President Musharraff from Pakistan, journalists like Thomas Friedman and Matthew Bishop, CEOs and Chairpersons of hundreds of companies, heads of NGOs like the Open Society Foundation, and advocate/celebrities like Bono and Angelina Jolie.
What I loved about the event was the format and the serendipity. Most of the sessions tended not to be about a single panel of experts and a multitude of listeners; instead there would often be a theme or concept presented, then the room would break into groups to discuss for 20-25 minutes, and then someone from each group would present that group's ideas and consensus to the broader room. This allowed for a terrifically higher bandwidth set of conversations with people you might otherwise never get to know. Instead of doctrine proclaimed from on-high, ideas could be challenged, alternative experiences revealed, and new unexpected perspectives emerge.
In 2006, I clearly was not the only software personality at the conference, but I was one of the few who were so closely associated with the concept of Open Source. There was significant interest in it, though, everywhere I turned - and even the minority who hadn't heard of Apache or Linux had at least heard of Firefox, and a surprising number understood the lineage to Open Source from prior trends in software, notably open systems and open standards. In these working-group sessions were the usual challenges - from business models, to intentionally provocative statements like "Isn't Al Qaeda an Open Source organization?"
My challenge, following that trip, was to translate my experience that week into something more than just a way to out-name-drop my friends. Conversations with some of the people I met there, like Jim Fruchterman from a terrific organization named Benetech and Richard Jefferson from CAMBIA, led to initiatives and follow-ups that were personally extremely fulfilling; the commercial connections were also rewarding. But the biggest impact lay in bearing witness to very inspirational people and their stories. I was led to a realization, one I had dared to think but had difficulty accepting before, that financial success (either corporate or personal) does not need to "be balanced against" having a significant positive impact on the world. That led me to make a lot of changes over the next few years.
This year, the theme is "The Power of Collaborative Innovation" - and it couldn't be more relevant to what CollabNet does and what I've been advocating my whole career.
Those for whom this theme might be obvious or pablum might want to consider the checkered history of the term "collaboration" over the last half-century, particularly in Europe, as well as the broader difficulties with related terms like "Co-opetition". "Innovation" as a buzzword has traditionally been associated with the lone scientist working in a funded lab, creating patented inventions for the commercial exploit of a single company - and that companies who "innovate faster" (as if it's some crank to turn in a factory), who can lock up more of the knowledge associated with their field, get to reap the rewards.
In the tech field we know today that this is bollocks. Let alone the issues with the patent system, which can be discussed elsewhere - the fact is that today, collaboration is essential to getting any product built, let alone to come up with the context and raw ideas out of which solutions emerge. What Open Source has demonstrated conclusively in the software sector is that two things can shift innovation into overdrive: joint development on a common solution within a community of producers and consumers, facilitated through massively liberalized intellectual property terms on the end result. Open Source doesn't guarantee success (nothing does), but in the long run a well managed Open Source project will produce returns, and companies that work with that flow correctly will maximize returns. The last week's amazing acquisition of MySQL by Sun, and earlier acquisitions of Zimbra and JBoss for similar scales, offer proof points for business concepts many of us have advocated for over a decade.
Now, we're ready to take this concept further, which is why this year's theme is so relevant. Open Source software can be taken well beyond operating systems and databases - today we see OSS for all kinds of software, from voting machines to disaster relief to microfinance. In each sector, Open Source has the potential to not just provide higher quality software, it has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the way those sectors function, which can open the door to a much healthier and pro-user position.
For instance, imagine a voting machine economy where instead of a small number of proprietary vendors with lousy code competing tooth and nail to lock up exclusive contracts, you had a variety of companies both small and large (or even efforts run by local governments) providing the hardware and service around a common body of code. Such an effort wouldn't guarantee a solution to the massive problems with voting machine failures in recent elections, but it would provide an essential transparency into their functioning, allow for deeper and more distributed audits, and make it easier for new vendors or providers to emerge when existing ones fail to deliver.
Software is the red-blood-cells of the world's economy. Thus, a question like "can this Open Source approach goes beyond software" has two answers.
Yes, it can, because we can see communities working together to create other kinds of content online - the Wikipedia (and WikiTravel and other kinds of sites), the collaborations taking place in genetics and synthetic biology, and standardization efforts around the globe. But another answer is, yes it can, because of software's potential to change the economics of the industries that use them - and in a way that does not simultaneously increase the dependencies on third parties or centralization to single vendors, which are new strategic concerns for all businesses in the 21st century.
I won't be the only Open Source advocate in attendance. Mitch Kapor (a longtime attendee), Tim O'Reilly, Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, and John Newton from Alfresco will be here, as will Jimmy Wales from Wikia, and Florence Devourd from the Wikimedia Foundation. Tom Friedman, who's done a lot for public awareness of open source through his “World is Flat” book, will be here too - moderating a breakfast panel on climate change and poverty with Bono and Al Gore. Maybe we'll get open source on /that/ agenda.
So my goal is to tell the people I meet at Davos why I think all of this is so important; and to see how many different threads I can tease out, how many companies are ready to consider changing the nature of their customer and competitor ecosystem, how many interested ears I can snag a business card from, and how many others within the OSS community I can connect to those in a position to make a difference in the world. I'll be reporting here, hopefully each day starting mid-week, about those conversations and about the overall messages or ideas I take out of the show.
And if I end up having another half-hour conversation with Jane Goodall about ecotourism's potential to help protect endangered species, so much the better. Oops, there goes the namedropping!
