Yesterday I was up at Harvard’s JFK School of Government for an eGovernment project charrette (you can click the link for the wikipedia entry if the term isn’t ringing any bells). It was a joy to be surrounded by very bright people who were all as passionate about the possibilities that Information Technology presents to government as I am. The speaker at lunch was Al Essa, CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Mgmt. He gave an interesting talk on Open Code and Open Content. It was very similar to the talk I’ve been giving at government conferences for a few years now except his focus was more on Open Code/Content in academia.

He had a very interesting formula towards the end of his presentation:
Open Code + Open Content = Community.

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d argue that he’s missing a variable there and it should really be:

Open Code + Open Content + Open Services = Community

(note that Christopher Fowler turned me on to the term Open Services. I’d been trying to articulate the principle behind some of the work we’d been doing at the statehouse and that term pretty much nails it.)

Anyway, what’s especially interesting is that the example he used to illustrate his Open/Community formula was Flickr. It’s the same site I use as an example when I discuss Open Services with people. I was a bit surprised how few people in the room had heard of flickr given that it’s all the rage lately among the alpha-geeks. Serendipitously, I decided to try a bit of an experiment earlier this week with Flickr and the results were illustrative of the above formula.

I had a bunch of pictures from PatioPalooza ‘05 that I wanted to share with the people who came to the party as well as a slew of recent pics of the dude that I wanted to share with family/friends. So on Monday, I posted the pictures to flickr and spent about 20 minutes sending out invites to various people to view my photosets. The response rate was just about 100%. More than I expected. But what is very interesting is that by last night several of the people I had sent invites to had posted their own photos to flickr and added other people from my contact list to their friends or contact lists. Within a matter of 48 hours a micro-community of friends and family (very few of whom are particularly geeky) had developed on its own, somewhat organically. This was surprising but natural at the same time.

I don’t think this community of friends/family/contacts will thrive organically without some facilitation. It’s a lot like this blog that requires the occasional pruning and cultivation to thrive. To that end, I think I’ll need to help some folks make connections and add relevant contacts since the process, while easy enough on flickr, isn’t quite as intuitive as it could be. I think the route I’ll take is a willisbros/flickr cosmos page so that people can find other folks up on flickr. Tmrw perhaps.

Update: The willisbros flickr cosmos is now available for your viewing pleasure.

Also, for those flickr users on Macs running iPhoto, the flickr export plugin is invaluable. Happy Flickring!