One of Tim O’Reilly’s favorite quotes goes, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think” (said by Edwin Schlossberg).
Tim’s detected a pattern of success across his long and accomplished career, and it is the ability to detect and annunciate patterns that haven’t yet been named. He frames and contextualizes big ideas and, across his writing, publishing, and event hosting, helps people tie together related threads and see, in a new way, that which was already right in front of them.
Tim’s first successful attempt at framing the dialogue was with open source software. Richard Stallman and others were talking about it, but they were talking very narrowly about Linux and the GNU project and ignoring Apache and DNS and the web, which by that point was in the public domain. The framing and context was a political one, but O’Reilly was able to create a context (and a conference) to help the actors see what they had in common.
After the dotcom bust, they came up with the phrase “Web 2.0” to describe the web’s resurgence. But it was also a way to frame the story about what was different about the class of companies that were surviving. Understanding the web as an operating system was considered heretical at the time, but now makes sense when we pull out our smartphone.
And then there was Dale Dougherty, who saw the first Maker Faire and its clothing swaparama and supercomputers made of recycled PCs, and tied the related threads together to give a name to the many converging parts.
Tim has also become interested in activism around open government, where people have been working around transparency and government use of social media. The notion is that the government needs to act more like a platform, and less like a solution provider. Apple realized that the cellphone could be a platform, and we didn’t have to rely on the cellphone companies’ 10-20 bundled applications.
Critical to Tim’s ability to successfully frame these trends is his habit of taking in a lot of data “with soft eyes.” You don’t always know what the developments you see actually mean when you first see them, you just take it in until a pattern emerges.
Tim sees a global intelligence emerging, and better and better tools emerging to help us access it. He points to the analog norm where decaf coffeepots are explicilty identified with orange handles, and says that today, Twitter and other web-enabled platforms allow us to share knowledge and agree upon shared conventions.
Tim’s current obsession is measuring the positive externalities and hidden value of the open web. In the SOPA and PIPA debates, it was clear that Hollywood had an entire narrative about the negative economic impacts of piracy, all the way down to the farmer who lost money because of the popcorn that didn’t get sold because a movie was downloaded. We didn’t have a corresponding story about the many positive economic impacts of the open internet.
What are the hidden economies we ought to be measuring so we can make the case to policymakers so they don’t mess it up?
[and if you’re interested in this question, check out Netizen Effect]