Stowe Boyd visited Eyebees in Amsterdam

Een eerste poging om deze blog in het Engels te schrijven

Yesterday, Stowe Boyd visited Eyebees in Amsterdam. I studied his weblog before attending to the meeting. Wearing a cap, he didn't look very much like the picture on his weblog, but he surely talks about the things he is writing about.

The meeting started with a short welcoming bij Marco Bunge, one of the owners of the start-up Eyebees. Then Stowe Boyd took off with his Powerpoint slide-show. A few words on the sheets, but interesting pictures illustrating what he is talking about.

Stowe Boyd is particulary interested in the phenomena of social networks and social tools. His motto is: your network is smarter than you. What a relief. My meetings with more than 6 people are not intelligent at all. But thanks to Stowe, there might be some hope out there. Although I am familiar with AlwaysOn, Blogger, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut and Slashdot, I still wonder when my memberships will pay off. Stowe thinks it has little to do with the social tools, but far more with a good limited set of grouprules.

Often life during Swarm Time on the internet gives you an empty street feeling. What we need is some kind of bottom-up, self-organizing phenomena. But we don't need a leader. We need a small set of rules which defines our social network on the internet. Social tools make it happen, they make sure you get connected. This will organise people arround you, the best source of information.

Social Network Applications are interesting for businesses too. Bateson once wrote that a business is a network of conversations. So stay online, all day long. It gives you better decisions more quickly. Exploiting your relationships.

It was great fun to listen to someone who really knows something about what he calls "social tools". Although he didn't make any direct references to complexity- and chaostheory, he must be highly influences by what has it's origins in the Sante Fe Institute. This stimulates me to go on with the work I'm doing with collegae's to apply complexitytheory to innovation and knowledge processes.