Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Why Many of Us Shall Become Guild Workers
Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on July 14, 2007
In the future many of us may no longer be employees, but instead craftsmen engaged to collaborate on a sequence of jobs with skills we have mastered through a guild. Today’s guest has organized such a guild where you can learn the techniques required to become a skilled Digital Media technician.
In the full context of history, the practice of working as an employee is a relatively new phenomenon. Five hundred years ago there were few employees. Instead workers learned their skills by joining guilds that taught them how to master a craft.
Next they would contract their labor in a lifetime of sequential collaborative work projects, like building various dwellings, roads, or bridges. The guild was a central resource for the project managers and it also provided continuing education to the workers.
Our guest today believes that the Internet will return us to an era of guilds. Workers from all over the World will be able to collaborate on projects. The project managers will not be limited to the skills of their own (remaining) employees, but will be able to bid for the best trained workers anywhere on the planet.
Not only does our guest believe that this shall happen, he has organized a guild with online training to make it happen. It’s called Pixel Corps. As Alan Kay put it, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”.
Categories: Podcast Audio
Tags: collaboration, Future-of-Work, Guilds, Internet, Online-Collaboration
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It’s pure science fiction. Until a particular skill is reduced to just a handful of teachers, who are unwilling to teach it outside of their niche; it just wouldn’t have the opportunity to be reduced to a ‘guild’.