I came across a couple of TED talks the other day that I thought really complimented TJ's recent TEDx talk on collective intelligence. TJ talked about CI in terms of our project here at Beams, and in a variety of other contexts, and I think both these talks continue to fill out that story. They both make interesting points around how modern institutional forms can only produce certain things given the costs involved with running such organizations. Social production on the other hand has advantages that these modern institutional forms simply can't touch. They also emphasize the shift of the general population from being passive consumers to producers, which is actually quite profound and holds exciting possibilites for new societal forms and social relations to keep emerging going forward.

These talks are from 2009 and 2005 respectively, so for some they'll be old hat, but I'm still learning and deepening my understanding of this stuff so I figured some others would be in the same boat too. First up is law professor and author of The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler:

And the second is by Clay Shirky, a "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies". (Shirky has been featured on Beams once before).