At big companies like Yahoo!, our ever-loving parent, there are
all kinds of crazy processes to enable decision making and
prioritization, planning and budgeting, resource allocation and what gets focus now and in the coming years.

This manifests itself in powerpoint ‘decks’, and spreadsheets, long
meetings, dashboards … all kinds of things; some valuable and some
not so much. Among them is coming up with the vision and mission
statements.

Coming up with a plainly understandable articulation of
Flickr’s vision was initially something I saw as annoying. The best place to store, sort, search and share your photos? Sunsets, Babies, Kittens, Flowers? Argh. This was time we could be spending fixing stuff, or added needed features.
 

But after thinking about it for a while, the vision was obvious:

Eyes of the World

That can manifest itself as art, or using photos as a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, "personal publishing" or intimate, small group sharing. It includes "memory preservation" (the de facto understanding of what drives the photo industry), but it also includes the ephemera that keeps people related to each other: do you like my new haircut? should I buy these shoes? holy smokes – look what I saw on the way to work! It let’s you know who’s gone where with whom, what the vacation was like, how much the baby grew today, all as it’s happening.

And most dramatically, Flickr gives you a window into things that you might otherwise never see, from the perspective of people that you might otherwise never encounter. This photo taken during the riots in Paris, titled March 23, 2006 – 18:08, from Hugo* is a fantastic illustration of that:

I came across it after browsing the CPE tag, after following a link from a blog post entitled "France: Youth ignore newspaper requests for protest photos; turn to Internet. The message of the article was that even the biggest French newspapers haven’t been able to get readers to send in their photos, but a real time, street-level view of the protests in Paris was flowing into and out of Flickr. These four from Gonzale are another look:

The same day I read the blog post above, the BBC ran a story titled Belarus protesters turn to internet. Anti-Lukashenko protest went largely unseen inside the country since the state controls most of the media, but people on the streets of Minsk were able to show their fellow citizens what was happening:

photos by by2006 (left) and yesfuture on (right)

* * * * *

And, of course, there are a near-infinite number of other things going on all over the planet at any given moment (the page which shows the latest uploads is great to watch and reload every few seconds). There’s just so much. The world has a lot of eyes — here are an assorted dozen photos uploaded today:

It’s funny that a corporate strategy exercise can bring things so sharply into focus. And it’s overwhelming to think of the sheer magnitude of photos captured, people contributing, viewpoints shared, stories told, connections made, places represented. It really is the eyes of the world.

For more:

• Hugo*’s outstanding Demonstrations set.
• The la france brule-t-elle ? / is france burning ? group
• The Global Photojournalism and Photojournalism group pools.
• The Manifestations contre le CPE group
• by2006’s photos tagged with Беларусь (Belarus)
• yesfuture’s photos from March
• The sunset, babies, kittens, flowers photos above from snowriderguy, Bridget x3, JMZawodny and vsz, respectively
• The dozen at the bottom were found while exploring