 Hello everybody I'm really excited to do this today this is I've done a number of these talks and this crowd is is actually I think extremely applicable to to what we do with hit record and And in fact sort of the the open source and freeware Movement is in many ways a loose inspiration for how we make art on hit record So I'm really really interested to talk to you guys And see what you think of some of these ideas Because I think you'll probably have spent more time thinking about these kinds of things Than most crowds that I talked to about this kind of stuff. So I'm thanks for being here. I'm excited to do this And thanks to the Linux Foundation for the opportunity all right, so When I was six years old, I started working as an actor. I looked like that And I was working TV and movies and stuff and I loved it. I always really loved it even at that age And and I I feel lucky that I got to keep doing it throughout adolescence. I was working in stuff and Then when I was 19, I quit so that I could go to college And I did that for about 20 minutes and then When I wanted to get back in the acting I couldn't get a job No one would give me a part and this was actually really painful because I wanted to be creative But I couldn't be and and at that point I realized that I needed to take responsibility from my own Creative outlet. I couldn't wait around for someone to give me a job I had to be able to express myself and make things of my own volition and And I even came up with with a little a little phrase to sort of encapsulate this idea and That phrase was hit record because I always had a thing for like the the red circle record button on the video camera and And it became a sort of symbol to me to push that button to hit record meant to you know to get started and buckle down and Do it make something So I did I started, you know writing stories and making little videos and recording songs and And then when I wanted to share some of the stuff of the world My brother helped me set up this tiny little website and we called it hit record.org Okay, so now this is where this work is interesting as People started coming to this website, which at this point was it was just a little like you know one of those PHP prefab message boards But even at that small scale what we noticed was There were some people who came just to check out the stuff that I had done And then there were some people who wanted to just post the stuff that they had done But then there were some people Whose natural tendency was to make things together Both with me and with each other and and my brother and I thought now that's that's cool That's something that like wouldn't have been possible any other time in history before the internet and And this is what I want to talk about today, right is how people can form a community online to be creative together You guys know a lot about this if you're writing code together But in in my world of sort of art whether it's making videos or music or creative writing etc most creativity that happens online isn't isn't like that because a Lot of what happens online when it comes to creativity is sort of people sharing things that they've made on their own But what I'm talking about is people making things together that they couldn't have made on their own so that was ten years ago that that we set up that little PHP message board and Since then hit record community has it's grown quite a lot, and we've done some really cool things I do say so myself You know we've we've screened our short films at film festivals and we publish books and we put out records And we put on live events and venues all around the world and we made a television show that won an Emmy and Whenever one of these productions turn to profit we paid our contributing artists fairly and So over the years, I feel like I've learned some things about what it takes for an online community to be creative together And so today what I want to do is talk about some of the things that we've learned And here's the thing. I love the internet. We all love the internet Obviously the internet is you know an incredibly positive thing for the world in many many ways But I do think there are some things about today's online culture that limit our Abilities to come together and be creative and again. I think it's important to distinguish today that when I say online culture I'm not talking about the online culture on github. I'm talking about the online culture like You know on say YouTube or you know more I guess General culture on the internet So I want to bring up three sort of Things that happen on the internet a lot. I'm gonna call them sort of like pillars of today's internet and they are the crowd free culture and Socializing All right, so let me dive into each of these First of all the crowd. Okay, so obviously we've all heard of crowd sourcing. We've all heard about the power of the crowd I'll bring up two main kinds of crowd sourcing happening today First kind I'd call big data driven crowd sourcing, right? So this is where a huge number of people provide their data without it costing them any effort sometimes without them even Realizing that it's happening and then a computer program is able to take all that data and do something useful with it, right? So like ways for example that amalgamates massive amount of user-generated data to provide traffic information Okay, so that's one kind of crowd sourcing And and this kind of crowd sourcing it can be very useful for sort of high volume technical tasks like providing traffic information But it's not really good at anything creative All right, the second kind of crowd sourcing is what I would call an open contest And so this is where there's a task that needs doing and anyone can submit their attempt at achieving that task And then someone picks a winner and then the winner gets some kind of reward One example of this is the company X price and they've accomplished some terrific things definitely creative things like they created Reusable suborbital spaceship or they were you know working on innovative solutions to cleaning up oil spills and things like that so and they do this by offering big cash prizes to the winners of their competitions and It's it's wonderful that they're getting stuff like this done Now obviously contests like this they've been around for ages right and using the internet to run a contest like this That's a step in the right direction because a greater number of people get to contribute but The limitation is that all those people They're not really working together. In fact, they're working against each other So if one person over here has a good idea that doesn't help this person over here, right? In fact, it harms this other person because it hurts their chances of winning the contest So what this doesn't take advantage of is what would happen if all these people could put their heads together in an organized way And could they accomplish something greater than they could on their own? I think they could and you guys know that they can because again the open-source software Movement is really the best example of that ever happening So that's what I would call the crowd Next pillar of the internet I want to talk about is is free culture. This is something. I'm sure all you guys think about a lot It's a given now, right all of the world's culture art literature science journalism, etc It's all available for free online, which is obviously awesome And the biggest example of this is of course Google anything we want to know or see or hear You know we can just Google it and there it is right away for free But again, I Do think that this kind of free culture it put some limits on our ability to be creative together online and now I Acknowledge that the laws surrounding intellectual property And copyright in this country are antiquated I think they are and they probably need reform and in fact the phrase that I'm using for this section of the talk free culture At the title of a book maybe you some of you guys have read by a great legal thinker called Lawrence Lessig Who's very critical of today's copyright laws and and I agree with him however, I Also firmly believe in a basic principle that if someone does some work and Create some kind of intellectual property and then that intellectual property is able to generate any kind of revenue Then that creator deserves some of that money Seems like common sense to me I know not all of the licenses in in the open-source movement work that way. I think some do and some don't That's my personal take on it is Again, if if someone does some work and that work generates money, I Think the person who did the work deserves some of that money Unfortunately, this is often not what's happening online today in the context of free culture and and again I'm not really talking about The open-source software movement I'm talking about free culture like all that journalism and art and literature and stuff that you get for free online When you Google something Because there's there's another book about this kind of thing So I don't know if you guys have read but this is to me a really interesting book you might like It's called who owns the future by Jaren Lanier and what mr. Lanier says is All that stuff that you Google and that Google is sort of serving you up for free. Well, it's not really free Because there's money being generated in that transaction because at the same time as it serves you the free content It's also serving you advertisements, right? The problem is that none of that ad money is Going to the creator of the content that's being served all that money is just going to Google Now this business model has pretty much decimated the music industry granted the music industry sort of had it coming in a lot of ways, but The truth is it's a lot harder nowadays to earn an honest living as a musician than it used to be Same things happening in the field of journalism right especially more long-form investigative journalism as local and regional news organizations all over the world are Having a harder time staying in business than highly skilled professional journalists are finding themselves out of a job Mr. Lanier predicts that this damage won't stop with the music and journalism industries and as more and more industries become More and more based in digital information as they inevitably will Those industries will be just as damaged by this notion that intellectual property is supposed to be free because if you spend your time and effort making something but the only ones getting paid for your time and effort are a Few giant tech companies. I think that's going to disincentivize your creativity Obviously that's Complicated and there are more incentives for creativity than just making money and this room of people understands that probably better than anyone but still I think if we're gonna figure out how to kind of move forward in this kind of future of Making things together. We have to figure out how to get people paid for doing good work So that's that's free culture, right? Third third thing I want to talk about third pillar of the internet today's internet is what I would call socializing And again, just like the other two there there are huge upsides to what goes on via social networks or social media I Always feel a little like cringy just saying the word social media but There's there are real upsides to it right people are able to connect with each other from all over the world and And share their lives and their perspectives with one another and and it can be really beautiful And of course the prime examples of this are like Facebook Twitter, etc. Other things like them but as Legitimate as the upsides are I Also think that this kind of socializing online. It's limited in its ability to facilitate substantial creativity Because these platforms aren't built for that Get hub is built for that Facebook is not You know, they're they're they're built for socializing They're not conducive to elaborate or Complex or nuanced processes or interactions like when you check your feed on Instagram for example, you're just scrolling You're scrolling from one thing to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing You're never focusing on anything for very long and by the way, that's how these companies make money, right? The more items you scroll through the more ads you see More money they make so it's in their interest to keep your attention span short Facebook's landing page invites you to connect with your friends and the world around you And again, I think people connecting with each other. That's a great thing. It really is my question is are there ways to take it a Step further past just connecting with each other and towards creating together And of course, I think so and I think you guys know so if you're participating in You know the create the open-source creation of software together You're doing stuff online. That's more than just socializing. You're making stuff together and that to me is is really exciting so Now we talked about these three sort of pillars of the internet the crowd free culture socializing and again There's there's more than these three But these three are just three prominent things and I want to re-emphasize I really do think that all three of these things are positive in their own right But given their limitations that we just talked about when it comes to collaborative creativity. I want to propose three alternative pillars And they are oh and I should say I'm not just making these up, right? These are these are sort of three principles that we've arrived at organically over the years in building and running hit record Okay, so first instead of thinking about the crowd. What if we think about community? Second instead of thinking about free culture What if we think about fair compensation and third Instead of socializing what if we think about collaborating? So I'm gonna talk about each of these principles and and then I'm just gonna show you a bit about how we apply them on hit record So first community as opposed to the crowd All right, so to me the biggest difference between a community and a crowd is Every member of a community is a unique individual So the strength of that community someone went Appreciate that The strength of a community is less about the quantity of the people and more about the quality of their contributions and their interactions Now on hit record community is is the most important thing to us in fact sometimes We get called a crowd-sourced production company and I'm always like I prefer to call it a community source production company and I know that's sort of a tiki-tak difference, but To me I just I just feel kind of rude calling our community a crowd It feels like you know, I'd be failing to acknowledge all the unique individuals and their unique contributions that make our company what it is So We can go back to the two kinds of crowdsourcing that I was talking about earlier And we could see the hit record doesn't really fit into either one of these. There's the big data-driven kind of crowd sourcing But at least for now there aren't any number crunching algorithms deep enough to match human creative expression You know counting the number of the likes can't replace a talented curator with good taste So again for now, and I say for now because I know there's you know Probably a lot of AI fans in this crowd. They're like it's gonna happen. There will be robot novelists And they're probably will be But for now they're not here yet and You know a big data-driven algorithm can't do what our community does Other type of crowd sourcing that we talked about was what we call the open contest and On hit record we say it all the time. This is not a contest. It's a collaboration And we really try to emphasize that we're all working together towards a common goal One of the most important ways we do this is with a methodology. We call remix. This would be something very familiar to Coders. This is exactly what you guys do when you use. Okay. I'm gonna take someone else's I'm not technical enough. I'm not a coder someone else's library someone else's function Someone else's class. I don't know is that like old anyway? What do you call it now? And you use it to make something of your own right that's what we call a remix So like on our site one way that that would happen is someone like uploads a simple drawing and then someone takes that drawing and Turns it into an animation That we would call a remix Drawings gonna come up and then that drawing is gonna turn or did it already happen. There's the drawing This is something that happened on our side and this kind of thing happens all the time, right? Someone will take that drawing and then turn it into an animation. That's that's that's how we make things together So like Someone's personal story for example that could get remixed into a script and then other artists like actors or illustrators or animators Musicians they might build off that script to produce to produce a finished short film And then that short film might become part of a television show Etc. That's that's how we make things and this how a bunch of smaller contributions from different people can all add up To finish products again I know I keep saying this you guys inherently understand this most crowds that I talked to you are like wait What how how could a whole people from whole bunch people from all over the world actually work together to make something? You guys understand that So This process of people remixing each other It's quite different from a contest right in our community if someone if someone over here has a good idea well then this person over here can build on top of that idea and You know, maybe they can build on top of that idea in ways that the first person never anticipated Everyone's working together So when we finish something on hit record like a short film or a song or whatever, you know It's not just a winning entry from a lone competitor all of our finished work It's been touched by lots of contributors and they're all remixing each other. They're all on the same team They're all part of one community and and that facilitates the kind of creativity that I've been talking about that would have been possible before the internet Okay, so that's The next alternative pillar, I'm gonna call fair compensation, right? And this is in contrast to free culture and again, I know that this is something you guys think a lot about When you're determining which license is gonna go with what project in you know in in the open source context, so I Said it before I think it bears repeating and I know this is probably somewhat controversial in this room But I personally believe that if someone does some work and that works somehow generate some money Then that person deserves some of that money Now on hit record anytime one of our productions makes money everyone whose contribution is included in the final version Get some of that money Now Figuring out what's fair and which artists get how much money. That's no small feat But we have an open and collaborative process for that too and we've been doing it this way for six years now we still haven't been sued and We've paid more than two million dollars to contributors in our community from all around the world There's a great quote is actually attributed to Walt Disney that I like to say when when we talk about money on hit record and I bet This would resonate with you guys too and it's that we don't make movies to make money We make money to make more movies, which to me just says like Just because You're not motivated by the money You know you're you might be motivated because you love what you're doing But I still think there's a place that money has to kind of fit into it just to sustain the thing Because people are happy to get paid in our community, but I honestly think that for most of them It's not about the money. It's the principle It's that they feel that their time and their effort have been fairly acknowledged and compensated. I Think that's a big part of what allows our community to be so productive together so That's fair compensation All right lastly as opposed to socializing I want to talk about Collaborating and what I mean by this is people connecting online Not just to socialize through bite-sized interactions But to work together towards a common goal to be productive to be creative again This is something you guys know a lot about In fact, I would like to learn from you guys about how you do it Because on hit record. This is what we're all about is is collaboration is people making things together On our landing page. We say we're a new kind of online community working together as a production company So one of the biggest ways we achieve this is through our user experience of our web app and our mobile app So when you come to hit record, you'll find some things in common with most social media platforms Like you can post content or you can heart things that you like or you can subscribe to other users But you'll also find a lot of differences Maybe these differences have more overlap with like a github than they do with an Instagram So anyone can issue what we call a creative challenge For example, maybe it's a writing challenge or photography challenge, etc And then writers or photographers they can find those challenges and contribute to them And then you can organize a series of challenges into what we call a project So you can set deadlines in your project or you can send out updates And then as you get contributions to the creative challenges that you're happy with you can cross out those challenges that are done And then we in the creative department at the hit record office. We maintain what we call our project development slate So this is a front-facing list It's a list of outstanding projects that we've decided to focus on as a production company And we categorize these projects into three columns. You can see there's sort of an early stage of development We call concept development then we move it into what we call advanced development and then If in one we're able to secure distribution or some other kind of monetization for the project then we put it into the funded column Now of course the technology alone won't necessarily get people to collaborate Equally important we found is how we as a company use the technology because this whole model. It doesn't work without leadership So The director of hit record is me I think you guys call it BDFL if I'm not mistaken. I just learned that And it's funny because I actually when I heard that what BDFL stood for I was like, oh, that's actually something I say on hit record I'm like, this is not a democracy. It's a benevolent dictatorship And and that's important Because there has to be someone who has the final say when you're you know working on something together And I'm the one with the final say on how our productions turn out, but I don't make these decisions alone far from it There's of course our intrepid staff That's our staff on Halloween And and then we also tap quite a few individual members of the community who've Proven themselves in talent and dedication So there's a people out there who you know don't work for us But are just you know great members of our community and they really help a lot too and between all of us We provide enough direction To make sure that the entire community is working together as a cohesive whole Now do people in our community make friends? Yes, and and do they care about each other? Yes quite a lot But they don't care about each other just because you know They've seen photos of each other's perspective lunch orders from that day They care about each other because they're engaged in an intimate and creative process together And then the fact that they're also friends it only just helps them collaborate all the better So That's collaborating now having told you about all that I actually think the best way for you to really kind of Understand it is just for me to give you an example So I'm gonna briefly take you through one of those short films that we made for our television show and talk a bit about how We made it and then I'm gonna play it for you So this is a short film called first stars. I see tonight It started with a challenge to tell a story about your first time You know could be your first time doing anything. That's what a challenge looks like on the site and So this one contributor told this extraordinary story about her real life about how she was 16 years old the first time she ever saw the stars right I Thought that was really cool. I took her piece of writing and I remixed it made it about half the length And then I issued another challenge for voiceover artists to read her story out loud That's what the voiceover challenge looked like Next we shot actors in front of a green screen Acting out the story and we posted that green screen footage on the site So it's not finished at all We just posted the green screen footage on the site And then we issued new challenges to illustrators and animators to fill in the graphical world around the actors Those are those challenges Last thing we did was issue another challenge to composers to write the score And even after that new challenges For musicians to play the score that had been composed So when it was all finished We had put together 66 different pieces of content out of 1443 that were contributed and it all added up to this beautiful short film that I want to play for you right now so for the moment just pretend we're not at a tech conference and that we're like at a film festival and This isn't too long But it's something I'm proud of I I hope you enjoy it. It's called first stars. I see tonight when I was 16. I Saw the Milky Way for the first time. I Was six months old when I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa I'm lucky. The type that I have is not the most vicious or devastating It means that I'm nightblind That my peripheral vision is slowly narrowing into a pinhole And that my depth perception is gradually flattening away to nothing My cousins and I used to go out and lie on sleeping bags in the back of a pickup truck and watch meteor showers They would watch I would stare up into the black sky and study the seven bright points of light that I could see And wonder what it was like then my dad My father ordered a pair of Russian night vision goggles from a military surplus catalogue He said he wanted to watch his sprinklers at night and make sure they didn't get plugged by debris in the irrigation water But he also knew what a gift it would be for me When the package arrived I spent the day reading the instructions over and over again waiting for night to fall Then finally the sun went down Dad turned off her yard light and we went outside I put on the goggles and looked up into the sky It was a personal miracle Stretching above me in uncountable points of light as bad as I could see there were stars Some of them clustered so tightly together. They made swirling patterns of white against the inky darkness I stared I'd had people describing the stars to me all my life And what I'd come to realize was that everyone tells you something different because they all see them in their own way But none of what they had tried to describe to me could possibly match the glittering arch of that night sky I still wasn't seeing what others would have Even with the assistance of night vision goggles there would be stars too dim for my eyes to perceive Then too there was the matter of that green wash of colour over everything It didn't matter I was breathless under an arm of a milky way that I'd always simply had to take on faith was even there My dad had done what all good fathers promised their children they'll do He gave me the stars Thanks very much so okay so community fair compensation collaboration Those three principles they become central to how we make things on hit record Those things that we make on hit record as you can see is things like that that no Isolated individual could have really made something quite like that And that's the kind of creativity that I think the internet has the potential to facilitate And really what's going on in this room today is the best proof But when I say creativity, I don't only mean making art you guys know about how it can work in in the generation of software I Wonder if it could you know these same principles might might be applied in in other areas in other fields For example You know like perhaps in the field of journalism Right, so there's so many people out there who blog about the news Independently and sometimes it can feel like people are just shouting in an echo chamber, but What if they could form productive communities that that collaborated on larger feats of a substantial investigative journalism or Like a lot of experts agree that that our methods of education really need Reinvention so what if rather than competing against your classmates because the class is being graded on a curve What if students worked on collaborative projects where they all pull together as a team and then what if your team was not bound by the Walls of your classroom, but you know also included online community of kids from around the world Sure, you guys have thought of this because this is the kind of thing you guys do Couldn't school work that way Then of course there's government right which is an area that we're all probably thinking about a lot these days and I think obviously the internet could and should be able to help modernize the people's ability to be truly represented by our democracy and Perhaps a similar process to the one we use to create art or the one you guys use to create software could be used to create policy But if that's gonna work our online culture is really gonna have to grow up a bit I think the one thing that you can say for sure is that as we move forward into the future The internet will definitely impact every industry more and more and the question is what kind of impact will that be? but if people all around the world can come together do more than just Connect and socialize but if we can actually collaborate to create things that that we wouldn't have been able to make without each other When I picture that future I Start to feel optimistic about the future because It's it's not just the capabilities of Technology, it's it's what the technology can make us capable of as human beings Thanks very much You know we've been talking about you know this kind of intersection of culture and code And I think one of the things that these folks know is that the code that they've created that runs most of society these days Has a lot of power and responsibility with it You know we talked about keeping in touch and you know if you can help us Understand how culture how the kind of you know emotion invoking works that you're creating Can be assisted by the code and the power of this room. Yeah, we would be super happy I would love to do that. I'd really I'd love to not only I'd love to provide whatever insights that that we can from what we do and I'd also really I'm sure that there's a Lot that we can learn From how you guys do what you do that could be applicable for our process as well deal cheers man. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, thanks everybody