Clay Shirky on Social Media Theory and Drupal

Clay Shirky teaches Social Media Theory and Practice at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and was a keynote speaker at DrupalCon Chicago. He gives an overview of the major points that he was trying to make in his keynote, which has to do with how social media is changing websites are being architected and built.

Shirky talks about how Drupal makes this iterative process easier, and how the culture of open source creates a culture of failing faster and quicker so that you can adapt to the changing conditions without over-investing time and energy into failed strategies. He talks about the Drupal open source community, and how his evaluation of some of the qualities that help to make Drupal a successful open source project. He talks about how people in the Drupal community apply the principles of Cognitive Surplus, and finally about the role of technology in social change as well as in the field of journalism.