Hamburg.


The next speaker this morning at next09 is Lee Bryant from Headshift, whose interest is in user-driven companies. Such companies may engage in user-led product design or user-led innovation, for example, and much of their approach draws on the experience of the open source movement. But can we think beyond the 'user involvement' model, where user innovation takes place only on the surface? Examples for existing models, Lee suggests, include Digg as a totally user-driven environment, Dell's Ideastorm which draws in user ideas, and Walkers Chips' exercise in crowdsourcing new potato chips flavours - but even those remain to a large extent on the surface, and is not likely to be enough.

Hamburg.


The final keynote on this first day of next09 is by Matthias Schrader of next09 conference organisers Sinnerschrader, who brings us back to the conference theme 'share economy'. What can we share, what do we want to share, what do we get out of sharing?

In the share economy, what we share are in the first place the tools we use; using (physical, mechanical) tools, of course, has long been seen as a uniquely human trait (although that belief has now been shown to be mistaken - other animals use tools, too). Perhaps the next step from here is the belief that only humans use tools to create other tools - that is, that only humans innovate by combining small, modular, commodity tools into more complex, composite, cutting-edge 'meta-tools'.

Hamburg.


I've arrived in beautiful Hamburg, where I'll spend the next six weeks as a fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research and a visiting scholar at the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research. The major event of these first few days here, though, is the next09 conference - a major conference for the German and European media industry which has drawn some 1300 delegates and operates this year under the title "Share Economy". I'm speaking tomorrow, on "Produsage and Business" (presenting some of the outcomes from my work in the Smart Services CRC). Should be fun, and it's held in a brilliant venue, the converted factory space Kampnagel (which reminds be a little of Toronto's Koolhaus). Videos from all of the presentations will be online soon, too!

Frankfurt.


And we're in the last paper session at Prosumer Revisited, which is kicked off by conference chair Birgit Blättel-Mink whose interest here is in the sustainability potential of online trading using eBay. This work is part of a larger research project which examines the online used car trade in Germany. For the purposes of this project, prosuming using eBay is defined as usage of the site to buy and sell products - a more active form of usage which also leads to the more frequent trading on and trading in of products.

Frankfurt.


We're in the last keynote of the Prosumer Revisited conference, by Kerstin Rieder. She begins by giving an overview of existing research on active consumption - on the societal, organisational, and interactive level. There is currently a fundamental change in producer/consumer relationships, towards consumer labour (or towards 'the working customer', the English translation of the title of her book with Günter Voß, Der arbeitende Kunde). Kerstin notes for example that customers do work for McDonald's by collecting their rubbish and separating it into different waste categories; the value of this labour in Germany adds up to several billion Euro per year.

Frankfurt.


The next speaker at Prosumer Revisited is Patrick Linnebach, whose interest is in trust in prosumption activities. In the first place, however, it is necessary to define markets: they can be described as a group of producers closely observing each other (though not the consumers directly) - this is a form of interaction-free sociality (as competitors do not directly interact, even though they're keenly aware of each other. This is distinguished from direct interactions, for example in cooperation or in financial transactions.

Frankfurt.


We start this second day of Prosumer Revisited with a keynote by Johann Füller (his co-author Eric von Hippel couldn't make it here, unfortunately). He asks whether consumers are able to create strong brands - and points to Wikipedia and Apache as successful examples. Such user-generated brands have as yet not been recognised in world indices of the strongest brands, though.

What's happening here is a move from company brands not simply to brand communities (communities based around existing brands, like Apple or Nike), but indeed the creation of community brands: brands which are created from scratch by interest communities. Such brands can become strong competition to conventional brands, not least because these interest communities also drive brand adoption. Apache, for example, has a 70% market share, and is able to be a leading brand in a market which also includes competitors such as Microsoft.

Frankfurt.


We finish this first of the two Prosumer Revisited conference days with another keynote, by George Ritzer. He notes that social theory has for its entire history focussed on either production or consumption - but that this is a historical error brought about by the (temporary) distinction between the two sides at the height of the industrial age.

The consumer as active worker, as active creator of value, is the much more common model, and indeed sits at the centre of a continuum from production to consumption which also sees any number of different combinations between these two elements. Additionally, of course, it is also important to note the difference between such processes in material and immaterial settings - user involvement in productive processes is much more easily possible in the non-material realm.

Frankfurt.


The next keynote at Prosumer Revisited is by trend researcher and journalist Holm Friebe. He begins by referencing de Certeau, and describes prosuming in the first place as the creative repurposing of existing products; from this, though, we've also moved on to the creation of new artefacts by users. There is a semantic shift in the description of prosumption, then - a shift further towards various forms of DIY production.

What's happening now is that this form of DIY production is becoming a brand in its own right - and this 'DIY brand' may be the most important brand of the 21st century. This is visible for example in 'crafting', the latest iteration of the arts and crafts movement - in effect an extension of online DIY and produsage (and importantly also of its its collaborative, community-based aspects) into the offline world. In the long tail of interests, some of this is becoming an industry in its own right as well, of course - the arts and crafts marketplace Etsy is a clear example for this, and it's even begun to operate its own (offline) training courses.