Howard Rheingold, Paul Saffo, and Lucy Bernholz spoke out on disruption at today's NetSquared conference. The conversation and Q&A toured a variety of issues, but one salient bit related to the issues of leadership that came up at this weekend's WineCamp.
As Rheingold put it, open source development would be a collective argument without Linus Torvalds, as would Wikipedia without Jimmy Wales. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in Wikia.) As emergent leaders, Torvalds and Wales serve as the last word in their respective communities. These communities can't have completely collective decision-making; you need some small residue of hierarchy that allow focused decisions to be made.
Rheingold also commented on how Omidyar Network drove an experiment in which it gave $25,000 to the community and had the community decide how to invest it. As he noted, there was a great deal of chaos involved, and now the community is looking at what worked and what did not so that it can have another go-around.
These two bits on disruption and leadership feed directly into the ongoing dialogue on how organizational hierarchies and community leadership are evolving in the face of dynamic new organizational models.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys netsquared net2 howard rheingold nonprofit nptech technology
