PD.com is Cognitive Surplus.

[Kai]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu7ZpWecIS8

ETA: He comes down pretty hard on stuff he sees as throwaway, unfortunately.

[Remington]

Yep. The problem begins when you start to run a deficit.

On a more serious note, I love TED. It's like having condensed, college-level education injected directly into your brain. I was particularly interested in that day-care experiment; I think it shows how important social debt (between persons, etc) is in relation to human behaviour.

[Kai]

My question then, is

is it communal, or civic?

And do we care?

[Freeky]

Well, I think we have both. A lot of the communal stuff, but we also have a lot of civic stuff (namely certain projects in OM).

This video was awesome Kai!

[Captain Utopia]

He introduces the Cognitive Surplus concept a bit more thoroughly here:
   http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

   "I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college,
   way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing
   that the critical technology, for the early phase of the
   industrial revolution, was gin.

   The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden,
   and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to
   manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.
   The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin
   pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

   And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective
   bender that we actually started to get the institutional
   structures that we associate with the industrial revolution
   today. Things like public libraries and museums,
   increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders
   --a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of
   those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and
   started seeming like an asset. "

My question then, is

is it communal, or civic?

And do we care?

It's mainly communal with civic aspirations like the BIP and Chao te Ching?

Thing is though - lolcats is a different sort of "community" from PD.com, and we're not a civic/goal-driven group of people like Ushahidi.  Either one would be limiting - being not able to agree on which one we would want to be, is liberating.