Playful Planet Exhibition management will be largely peer-to-peer

To pull this project off successfully by 2013 it cannot have a “top down” structure.  First of all, the core idea of the Exhibition is sharing and that will take lots and lots of direct contact between participants.  That is actually one of big benefits of the whole effort, cross-cultural communications.

Just take the “simple” process of shipping the sculptures.  Let’s say we have 40 participating communities.  Each will have its own importation requirements.  Loading at the freight depot and unloading the sculptures at the sites will have their own issues.  And each sculpture is likely to have unique handling requirements.  Sure coordination could be done through a centralized authority but the task of creating a centralized management team from scratch that can deal with these complexities is daunting.  It is much better to allow the process to start as a peer-to-peer process and add facilitation as the needs become clearly identified.

The same situation crops up when we begin to think about the managing the video feeds from all the sites and their multiple cameras.  The vast interconnected community that will spring up within and through this network will be impossible to manage centrally.

I’m sure there are examples we can draw from.  

 Ideas anyone?