I think that the Internet as a collaborative environment might emphasize what it is to work together and change what it means to be a good citizen but it doesn't fundamentally alter the debate.

But the kind of interactions that we are seeing today wouldn't have happened if it were not for the Internet. For example, the fact that I am talking to you today is, I believe, sufficiently radical.

But has it changed anything fundamentally? Okay, it has allowed us to find each other but there was in 13th century medieval Europe a very rich and complicated network of traveling scholars, who would travel from university or monastery to share each other's ideas, they would exchange text. It was at a smaller scale, it was much slower, and it was at a lower level but was it fundamentally different to what we are doing in the blogosphere or with communications like this? Just because there is more of it doesn't mean it is automatically different.

Let me move on here to a related but different topic. I imagine that the techniques which have been developed around this distributed model be applied to a variety of different places. For example, lessons from open source movement can be applied to how we do research. Can lessons of the Internet be applied elsewhere? Certainly alternative forms of decision making are emerging within companies. Is the Internet creating entirely new decision models and economies?

That’s quite a big question. There's a sort of boring answer to it which is just that more and more organizations and more and more areas of human activity are reaching that third stage in their adoption of information and communication technologies.

First stage is where you just computerize your existing practices and the second stage is where you tinker with things and perhaps redefine certain structures but the third stage is where you think, okay these technologies are here so let's design our organizational processes, structures, and functions around the affordances of the technology, which is a very hard thing to do but something which more and more places are doing. So just as in the 1830s and 1840s, organizations built themselves around the capabilities of steam systems and technologies and in the 1920s they built themselves around the new availability of the telephone, so now, in the West certainly, it is reasonable to assume that the network is there, and the things it makes possible it will continue to make possible.

So you start to build structures, workflow, and practices, businesses, and indeed whole sectors of the economy around what the 'net does. In that sense it is changing lots of things. As I said, I think that’s a boring insight. That’s what happens! We develop new technologies and we come to rely on them. It’s happened for the past five thousand years. So while it may be a new one, it’s the same pattern. Joseph Schumpeter got it right in the 1930s talking about waves of 'Creative Destruction' and everybody is now talking about that in the media but fundamentally there is nothing different going on there.