The Future's Bright, the Future's Open Source

The team at work went out for drinks last Thursday night and I was asked by a couple of them how the Guardian Recruitment 2020 event had been that I had attended in the morning. I've a questionable memory at the best of times and the extent of my recollection was yes it was very interesting, I found the Futurologist speaker very good and enjoyed the four possible scenario's presented by the Demos think tank research. It was clear as you would imagine that technology and the economy would be at the heart of recruitment moving forward. Of course I also mentioned what mutual friends in the industry I had bumped into which is always nice and of interest to people.

Apart from the insightful quote by William Gibson - "The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed" the one big thing that really stuck in my head and got me thinking was when the key speaker Andrew Curry also mentioned that Procter and Gamble were operating an open source policy for the development of their products.....this really had an impact on me. Typically when you think of open source you think of IT software development. Techies collaborating together on open and available software with the aim of pooling the best talent to produce the best possible product. Democratization of product development and its availability, allowing people to benefit from software without having to necessarily pay for it or at least at a reduced rate. This is often to rebut companies who may exercise market dominance or monopolies over certain products e.g. Microsoft Windows.

Without a doubt the Internet facilitates this ability for everyone to share, work on and review products and information, without it companies like Procter and Gamble would find it difficult to truly benefit from widespread intellectual capital that an open source model provides.

What role does open source play in recruitment? Is this blog a form of open source? – collaborative discussions and sharing of information yes, but perhaps a bit diluted in the desire of its contributors to share our deepest most innovative idea's on what we want to do and are in the process of doing for our clients. Or maybe we need a clearer focus on a specific objective or outcome we aim to achieve.

If I were a client perhaps I would set an objective for the industry under the auspices of an open source collaborative project. Or perhaps why should it be a client who lays down the gauntlet to achieve a wider industry good? Should agencies grasp the nettle? should the media open their products to the great and the good?

One area that would provide real tangible benefits to the industry as a whole would be a forum or regular think tank on tracking in online recruitment. In my experience the ability to prove that online works has always been fundamental to migrating clients online. I've heard people moan about how some clients and some agencies just aren't with it yet, perhaps this could be the way to kick start things.

Any thoughts welcome.

Comments

[John Whitehurst]

Interesting thoughts ... I agree totally that there is a need for an open forum to promote the industry.

Every time i talk to anyone about it - they want to do it first and own it. This sort of goes against the original idea ... everyone is involved in a open forum. You get a collective advantage - this was the idea behind the IAB.

Also the idea behind this blog ...

I am 100% behind this as when you look at previous posts about the relationships between media/recruiter/agency/client it is not always great. Normally because people want to win in the short term (the whole issue recruiting has shot itself with).

BTW ... if you are getting an interest in solution design - read the art of innovation by tom kelley. Just re-reading it at the moment and it is very good - it highlights a lot of the areas we fall down (and get it right) .

The simple fact would be the need for us to drop the I AM attitude.

[Matt]

Great post Sinead. I've been thinking for a while that this blog is a very raw form of open source business. I think it works when you have groups of competing organisations coming together to debate, share knowledge and take things forward for both mutual and individual benefit. To me it works best when the organisations involved are confident enough in their USPs to work in this collaborative way. Agree that focus would help but I do think that formalising these kinds of things and imposing struture can also kill them off. Far better to be informal and organic I reckon

Matt

[John Whitehurst]

do you think we should open up the information on the blog to share even more stuff ? ability to share research etc ...

agree that we dont want a trade association style ... just rules for the sake of rules

[thomas delorme]

interesting ...

just, i think it's ... proctEr.
http://www.pg.com/company/who_we_are/ourhistory.jhtml

[Sinead Bunting]

Thanks Thomas, all corrected now.

Matt, in response to your post, I totally agree that this blog should be kept as it is, Blogs are fluid in nature. I was more referring to an industry wide forum/event where we could focus on online tracking/wider Management information and its benefits to clients and the wider industry. Look forward to meeting up with all you guys and discussing appetite/logistics on making such a forum a reality.