Best use of 20 minutes

Lawrence Lessig is a hero of mine. He is a libertarian and campaigns for reform of copyright, among many other things, which he argues is being used to stifle our cultural creativity. Watch the video below, probably the best use of 20 minutes of your time today, and think about this topic but in terms of attitude to information sharing within your company.



A couple of years ago I made a series of post to an internal blog on the need for a Freedom of Information policy within the company. Now this as you might expect was slightly controversial but it did get a conversation started. The kernel of the argument was that we should change our mindset from one where the default position was to lock down access to one where the default position was to leave access open. Note this was not forcing anyone to make things open but rather change the default settings on systems such that you had to actively make the choice to lock access down rather than being asked who should have access. This may seem like a minor change but it's impact has been huge and has contributed to the development of an open culture where sharing is the norm. Engendering this change has been central to the success of our effort to adopt enterprise 2.0 tools.