Sat down for brunch yesterday with my good friend Ryan. He runs his own medical bio-tech company out in MA. He’s in town visiting for the weekend, and it was a great opportunity to hang out in the LES, break bread, and exchange ideas about how to further streamline the internal admin processes of our respective businesses using open source communication.

Here is a basic example. Say that you want to set up a conference call amongst you and 4 other co-workers. The old way to do it would be to email all 5 people (including yourself) to check their availability, then wait to hear back, then coordinate and negotiate a proper time. Its not implausible for hours or days to pass before being able to determine a workable time. Then say, after 4 people chime in, you manage to determine a feasible call time. The 5th person finally chimes in to say that he can’t make it. The whole thing is a wash. You have to start all over again. And the company just lost hours of productivity.

Now, with Enterprise 2.0, you can set up company viewable personal calendars that make everyone’s schedule public to their fellow co-workers. Its easy to spot when people are busy and when people are free (even what they are doing, if they so desire to share that). So now, if you want to set up a conference call, you can go on the main calendar, click on an available slot, tag everyone on the appointment. People can freely exchange their information about scheduling, simultaneously, and you can all work together to determine a time, easily, quickly and with minimal effort. No back and forth emailing. No waiting. Just pure productivity.

Yes. There are pros and cons to Enterprise 2.0. It can be a bit “stalkerish” when you know exactly where everyone is, and what they are doing, at all times. But if that is a personal concern you have the ability to limit which individuals can see exactly what kind of information. It also sort of reminds me of the cautionary tale of the Metal Gear Solid 4 “SOP” system, i.e. the system that links all the soldiers senses and information to one another. But at the end of the day, I believe humans are social creatures, and work best in groups, not individually.

The practical applications for this communication technology extend beyond business & science, and well into the creative realm.

Creative ideas are almost always time sensitive. The value of a creative idea decreases exponentially the slower it gets exchanged, and the slower it is executed. Timing and execution should be always prioritized, and with an open source form of communication you can expedite the process of both arriving at a good idea and seeing it through to reality.

To quote creativity education expert Sir Ken Robinson, “Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, comes about from the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.” If you are all truly on a team, being able to see through your teammates eyes is invaluable. Everyone can see each other’s notes, computer desktop views, schedules and activities. This essentially takes a group of creatives, synchronizes their brains and allows them to function as a single organism.

Here’s an example of a possible use in the professional creative field. The amount of logistical coordination required to produce a photo shoot is headache inducing. As a photographer, I’ve had to synchronize entire armies of people, clients, art directors, models, modeling agencies, lighting crews, location scouts, location managers, fashion stylists, make up artists, hair stylists, production assistants, rental houses, etc. etc. The list goes on, ad infinitum. If I make the shoot schedule and general logistics openly viewed by the appropriate members of my team, I could cut down on the amount of time spent on making phone calls, scheduling and sitting in meetings. And I could use my energy on what really matters, taking photos.

Here’s a less business oriented example of how it applies to the creative process. Imagine all the coordination that is required of the art director of a film shoot. Say the art director is shooting a film that requires a set that looks like a dilapidated abandoned old house that was originally constructed circa 1958. A lot of information exchange goes into achieving this. She would have to get feed back from architects regarding accurate 1950s design, then she’d have to talk to experts at construction to see what materials were used, then scientists to discuss how such materials would age over time, then with set builders to discuss potential ways to replicate the look, and producers to determine what falls within budget, etc. If you can “wiki” the ideas amongst your creative team, meaning, you could see through everyone’s eyes, and leverage everyone’s brain power simultaneously, then you can pin point all kinds of creative ideas in a heart beat.

Enterprise 2.0 essentially sets up mini-social networks amongst your co-workers & employees to free up the flow of information: Skype chat / audio / video conferencing, online company calenders and bottom up idea streaming. It draws from the newly emerging community models of social media (Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc.). Instead of companies being run from the top down, “push” information models, Enterprise 2.0 encourages employees to freely exchange ideas.

For the less techy, less computer oriented types of creatives, these new forms of expression might be rather difficult to grasp. But I attempted to make a case for the benefits awaiting those who put in the work to learn it. The next generation of artists, the ones who are now children that were born with a laptop and a smart phone in each hand, probably already get all this intuitively. It makes me wonder about the future of creativity (pretty exciting stuff).

To end, here’s an informative video from Google tech talks. It describes some of the potential waiting to be unlocked by open source visual knowledge exchange. The irony (of course) is that the presentation is made entirely with bullet points, and it has no style or visual flair what-so-ever. (Because it is made by a tech-company businessman. lol) It’ll be a good look once artists start using this technology regularly.

The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management