by Clay Shirky is a professor and a keen observer of how technology is changing society. This talk at TED on how open source may change government is an interesting overview of some of the changes the Internet has already wrought and how unpredictable more changes will be to us.
In particular he focuses on Git which was developed to manage the messy process of open source development. His buzzword is “cooperation without coordination” or rather I’d say a tremendous reduction in the cost of coordination. Shirky looks at Git as a new form of argument and puts forth that changes in how we argue are momentous moments for society.
