the web-ecology of craft

I was talking to Claudia Clare recently about the community for ceramics in London – would we like to have the opportunity to meet and talk?

I was once part of a really supportive on- and off-line community of change managers  (“New Intermediaries”)  who helped each other on-line and could meet every month – lunchtime at the Festival Hall in London.  The group followed the typical lifespan of any such group – see Clay Shirkey’s excellent paper on this.  So not an unmixed blessing.

So I started to wonder – what’s the ecology of craft on the web? Is there one, should there be one?

from http://emergenturbanism.com/2009/05/11/the-fundamentals-of-urban-complexity/

My experience so far on this blog is that there’s a kind of sympathy that brings people together in the online conversations across blogs, twitter, etc that’s much more delicate and nuanced than a simple categorisation. It reminds me of the uncurling bracken frond, a typical “emergent” behaviour. And one of the characteristics of these systems is that information is passed very, very quickly through the system (can’t find the citation for this yet!).

The good news then, is that this very activity (you reading!) will lead to some new order, that will emerge from the material, the conversations. A bit like the pot emerges from the porcelain, I hope. We all just have to continue to take part.