Clay Shirky Quotes

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

Wikipedia is kind of extreme, where a very, very small group of people contribute pretty much everything.

Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.

You launch a site, and you see what works, and you continue to make it better.

Although engineers want always to make everything better, they cannot make anything perfect. This basic characteristic flaw of the products of the profession's practitioners is what drives change and makes achievement a process rather than simply a goal.

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

A company can set off in one direction, figures out that it's not the right way to go, and then go in an entirely new direction. Over time, the product or service improves, and the company gets better at executing and delivering.

You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.

We try lots of stuff. We throw it against the wall, and the stuff that sticks stays in the movie.

Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers - and at some point the distinction should become meaningless.

Learning has replaced control as the fundamental role of management.

Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

The future is a process, not a destination.

Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.

To be successful in a knowledge economy firms need to create learning organizations.

We overestimate the event and underestimate the process. Every fulfilled dream occurred because of dedication to the process.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.

Things can change. Life is all a learning process.

Every enterprise is learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels, training and development that never stop.

To create a usable piece of software, you have to fight for every fix, every feature, every little accommodation that will get one more person up the curve. There are no shortcuts. Luck is involved, but you don't win by being lucky, it happens because you fought for every inch.

The widespread availability of information is the only basis for effective day-to-day problem solving, which abets continuous improvement programs.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.