I caught up on a few TED talks while descending into San Diego (Thanks, Virgin America!) One of them was the latest from Clay Shirky. Love that guy. In his TEDCannes talk on cognitive surplus, he describes that the world has over one trillion hours of free time each year to commit to shared projects.

Of course, as he describes, much of this shared work doesn’t amount to much more than new LOLCats, but even this, he argues is an important step: any contribution moves a person from consuming to creating, and crossing that barrier is key. More importantly, there are projects that are of true civic value. These, he mentions, have civic value

…created by the participants, but enjoyed by society as a whole…And we can see that organizations designed around a culture of generosity can achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of cultural overhead

This is true for projects like the communally spread crisis-mapping software Ushahidi he describes, and also for any other open source software, one of the reasons we’ve long been proponents of open-source ideals for our work. Beyond this, however, other creation comes to mind: what might these trillion hours be able to do if seized by individuals to map environmental information? Or work to contribute individual portions of a solution to a complex mathematical problem? Or design and integrate individual parts or systems to a grand, crowdsourced engineering problem. I’ve long purported that there are few weapons more powerful in the world of new ideas than copious amounts of free time in the hands of a bored teenager. Groups of them engaged in amazing crowdsourced projects would have the potential to make huge contributions to both learning and societal good.

Watch Clay Shirky’s video below – guaranteed to be among the best 13 minutes you’ll spend this week.