Charles is an anthropologist. He spent 12 months on the Isles of Scilly, and set up a social entrepreneur consultancy to ensure he was part of the culture, not just an observer. He discovered that semantic triggers activate relaying behavior.

Several points of note (amongst far too many for me to soak it at this stage in the conference):

• The further away two people or groups are in a social network, the higher the threshold the relay behavior is.
• Electronic information systems are crippling useful social mechanisms.
• Collaborative scoring is good in groups of experts, but not in hetrogenius groups.

His company, Trampoline Systems, produces a “a technology that helps groups of people connect, collaborate and manage large quantities of information.”

Again this tells me that technologists are now the wrong people to be dealing with the high-level operation of the internet. Hard core techies should seek out intelligent people in anthropology, sociology, artists, etc. to help them build meaningful systems.

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