Corporate Culture, meet Free Culture. You guys can be friends.

A little over a month ago, Meitar “maymay” Moscovitz and I gave a collaborative talk about “free culture” online communities, and how corporations can find them and benefit from them without hurting them.

We presented this at Forum One Network’s “Online Community Unconference” in Mountain View, CA. The whole session (which is also available) was about 50 minutes.  Above is a 17-minute abridged version, boiled down to our main points:

• What (and “who”) is free culture?  (“We follow our passions.” “We find value in things other than money.”  “We’re the ones who edit Wikipedia.”  “We give our ideas away for free.” “We don’t let our jobs interfere with our work.” “We are the market makers. We’re creating the trends before they are capitalized on.” And so on.)
• When trying to promote to a community, go to the community itself, rather than to the community manager.
• When trying to sell to a community, don’t start with what your selling. Start with what you know about the community and why your product matters to them.
• Rather than poaching a free culture community manager, support that manager where they need it, and invite them to advise you.
• Rather than try to absorb or adopt a free culture community, set up your shop next door and be a good neighbor.
• You don’t need to be a long-time member of the community to engage with it. But you do need to be familiar enough with the community to engage with it respectfully, in accordance with its customs, values, and norms.
• The point is not that we’re free. The point is that we have a culture, and it’s our own.

(The sound is a little crackly — sorry; I blame the outdated version of iMovie I was using.  If it’s bugging you, go view the full talk instead.)

I’m intrigued by the relationship between corporate and free culture and want to dig up more examples. Open source software is the most obvious one. Threadless also seems like an interesting case study. Any other juicy ones come to mind?