Supernova 2007 (the main conference) opened provocatively as promised with the “Provocations” session, featuring Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky.

First up: Denise Caruso talking about risk and innovation

She said, Innovations beget risk, and you can’t calculate the probability of something that’s brand new. The most important predictor (descriptor?) or failure is the set of assumptions you make about what’s risky. For example: With nuclear energy, the assumption was that it was completely safe, until the problem of human error proved the assumption wrong. With DDT, antibiotics, the “too much of a good thing leads to bad ends” factor wasn’t predicted beforehand.

Regarding the Internet, the assumption has been that the freedom to operate has been critical for innovation. No taxes, borders, regulations have all sparked innovation — but there have been nasty unanticipated consequences such as hacking, net neutrality, id theft.

So, Caruso said, the way to anticipate these issues is to have a conversation. Convene experts and stakeholders…ask what are all the possible outcomes that matter to you… investigate how would deployment affect these outcomes…then decide together how to proceed

She pointed to some of the good results that have come out of just such conversations. Breakthrough products such as Xerox Star; better, safer decisions and investments, such as the chemical weapons disposal issue in Oregon.

So far, so good – and I would add here that in terms of innovation theory, this could be construed as using “risk” to frame an innovation challenge. Framed challenges always results in more robust innovation.

Back to Denise Caruso – people are stopped from having these kind of innovation-building collaborative conversations because of fear. Fear of losing power, or advantage, fear of extra costs, fear of showing your hand to potential competitors.

People themselves don’t have experience with the benefits of collaboration. And while Internet tools and culture exacerbate collaboration, they also preclude it in some ways. Targeted search = no serendipity. Blogs allow comment, not conversation. Social networks = people like us. Sometimes, it’s not so much social media as anti-social media/

“The nature of our society strongly affects the nature of our technology,” she quoted Bruce Sterling, and said that the opposite is also true. So the problem becomes how can you automate serendipity and build social networks of people who aren’t like us so we can have these crucial conversations?

Next up was Clay Shirky, and essentially, what he said was “All you need is love.”

He talked of “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process” while showing an image of a Shinto shrine. Community and the love that binds a community together are a stronger and more solid edifice. Twelve years ago, “we get our support from the comp.lang.perl.misc community” didn’t make any sense to the AT&T’s C++ engineers from AT&T….even though the community answered a posted question within an hour.

Solidity, he said, is on the side of evanescence. A dozen years later, comp.lang.perl.misc is still going strong while AT&T has been through troubles. Shirky said, “Perl is a Shinto shrine that exists not as an edifice but an act of love, because millions of people woke up this morning loving Perl and loving each other in the context of Perl.”

“We have a set of tools for aggregating things people care about in ways that increasse scope and longevity …. tools that turn love into a renewable building material.” Business models, he said, are not as good at predicting a business’ longevity as are people who like the business and what it does and use it to take care of each other.

“Priests would love Linux which gets rebuilt every night by people whose goal is to make sure it exists the next morning.”

Key, he said, is that we must be willing to get people together outside the profit motive…many of future commercial opportunities will be inextricably intertwined with those kind of people and those kinds of groups.

We have always loved one another….we’re human but up until recently the radius has been small…with social software, now you can do big things for love.

So. Risk and love. The discussion afterward focused on ways to turn risk into love (a gross oversimplification, but I don’t it’s wrong).

One point brought up by Chris Meyer: We don’t have a reliable sociological metric for diversity vs homogeneity within groups, although you can often tell by how tightly people are clustered.

Denise Caruso pointed out that people position themselves, but often no one sits down and says we need to solve a problem and we need to leave our position at the door. It takes a big shock to get people out of the groupthink rut. It’s also necessary to get past fear and hysteria, and unfortunately the transparency that social software brings can sometimes increase hysteria.

So perhaps, said Shirky, we should throw out unanimous conclusions on the theory that they can’t have resulted from a serious look at a problem.

Chris Meyer — people are also tribal (in addition to loving each other), so it’s critical to understand the level at which people can come together and can not come together. He cited work by social psychologist John Haidt at the University of Virginia, and a quick look at his web page showed that his work is grounded in the positive psychology movement, which I follow and makes me want to know more about this guy and his work.

Finally, David Weinberger noted that sometimes the conversation has to be face to face…”social software isn’t better than the real world – it’s better than nothing,” says he. Denise Caruso said, sometimes the best social software is Expedia! And noted that sometimes it takes a f2f conversation to get things started….after f2f you can use social software tools to continue the conversation.

Then someone from crowd whose name I did not get commented that social networks are in general incredibly dynamic and the point of social software tools are to help speed that up – once it starts. So perhaps the best thing is to exchange phone numbers, have a meal together, know who to call when something goes wrong….then continue the connection with social network tools. And, of course, this is in part the premise of Facebook, LinkedIn and some of the other social networking tools.

Last word to Tish Grier: Social software should promote innovation in social structures. Perhaps those who make social software tools have a responsibility to make tools that promote diversity and innovation in social structures. Consensus from Shirky and Caruso, I think, was yes.

And, we’re off!