Inspire

Lawrence Lessig, Vint Cerf and Jonathan Zittrain on Authors@Google on the Future of the Internet

A great historic, knowledgeable, funny and original overview of digital media in general and how they thrive. Now and in the future. Open/generative or closed systems ? In case you are interested in the evolution of the internet, this video is for you. But also in case you want to protect your privacy or if you are a developer for Facebook. Based on the book Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain. Highly recommended!

Croquet Video Demonstration

A few years back I wrote a blog post on Croquet, still in its early stages (this link on Croquet). Now we can see more clearly how it works.

Book Recommendation: Theory U from C. Otto Scharmer from MIT

I am reading a remarkable, high-impact, deep, original, inspiring and profound book from MIT called Theory U written by C. Otto Scharmer. It is difficult to summarize this outstanding book due to its enormous richness but in my view and experience it is in the league of the works from Jared Diamond, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. It is a spiritual, personal and business journey combined. Very special indeed. And it resonates with an incredible amount of my own experiences and observations, especially within my intensive Twitter community as a transformative, open ended journey since March this year.

I just can't stop reading it, every page is so full with ideas. Some hints on topics: blind spots, growth, spirituality, innovation, creativity, leadership, change management, web 2.0, globalization, communities, learning, smart mobs, evolution of organizations, democracy, capitalism, open source, emergence, complexity and many examples from private life, politics (Iraq) and business.

Referenced leading authors are among others (be prepared for a long shot): Brian Arthur, Argyris, Senge, Brand, Carr, Castells, Christensen, Coase, Collins and Porras, Dalai Lama, de Geus, Florida, Friedman, Fukuyama, Gladwell, Goethe, Habermas, Hagel, Hamel, Handy, Hawken, Heidegger, von Hippel, Maslow, Minsky, Mintzberg, Morgan, Nietzsche, Nonaka, Peters, Prahalad, Putman, Sen, Sheldrake, Soros, Steiner, Tolle,   Sun Tzu, Varela, Trompenaars, Weick, Wheatley and Wilber. And all combined in a structured and new way...amazing.

Highly recommended ! This clearly is my favorite book of 2007, no doubt about that :-D

The Impact of P2P and Peer Production on our Economy, Society and our Digital Media Future

Just discovered a new inspiring speaker via the blog Smart Mobs called Michel Bauwers. Below his presentation with a 50 minute timeframe on P2P, peer-to-peer networks, communities, co-creation, mass collaboration, open innovation, FabLabs, wikinomics and peer production.

Highly recommended as this is one broad overview of key trends in our economy, society and digital media infrastructure. It is all-encompassing and thought provoking in many many ways. And it is clear. It integrates the views from Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Don Tapscott, Henry Jenkins, Neil Gerschenfeld, Chris Anderson, David Weinberger and Alex Steffen in a new way. However, I do miss the impact of biotech and nanotech on his vision of peer production.

My 2 cents concerning this video:
- I do believe that open source, commons-based, non market peer production will grow the coming decades, both in the immaterial as well as material world (using Web/FabLabs).
- I like the distinction between hierarchical systems, decentralised systems and distributed systems and its impact on self organisation and fluidity (reminded me of David Weinbergers' latest book on categorisation). As the world clearly is moving at the speed of light towards to innovation, agility and flexibility, the distributed (web and P2P) model seems to become the dominant model, both organisationally as well as technically.
- I support the idea that the increasing autonomy and empowerment of individuals and their social networks/peers will reverse the power balance. Sources of trust are in peers, no longer in key institutions. Strong institutions with power are relevant and effective in situations where individuals are not empowered (enough), these are increasingly a thing of the past. Indeed, Eamonn Kelly - CEO of Global Business Network - wrote a piece on the impact of the emergence, self organisation, bottom-up culture on global issues. Additionally, Paul Hawken recently made the growing impact of NGOs explicit in this book Blessed Unrest.
- I dig the idea that peer production is about intrinsic motivation, authenticity, love and passion. And that's precisely why these initiatives thrive, both economically as well as ethically. If you self-select a project, YOU are in there with your whole mind and heart, including all your social and ecological values and norms. This means in my view that key improvements in our ecological and social agenda worldwide will be driven by these peer produced projects and not primarily by for-profit organisations (e.g. WiserEarth, WorldChanging etc.).

My Own Presentation on Trends, Digital Media, Marketing, Digital Marketing and Communication: Why Identity, Authenticity and Creativity Will Dominate Our Lives

Here is my presentation on different trends, digital media, web 2.0, web 3.0, marketing, digital marketing and communication/branding. Dutch only as yet, English one will follow soon. Focus is on different technological, environmental, economic and political views (macro perspective) as well as psychological, social and cultural views (micro perspective) and how they intersect, converge and reinforce in many different ways on different levels of analysis.

Key take away: Identity (knowing your intrinsic motivation, purpose and talents), Authenticity (being) and Creativity (doing) as reinforcing themes and values in the emerging and increasingly open space of the next web(s), biotech and ubiquitous computing where the all-encompassing and increasing availability of more granular and personal data of all sorts make the invisible visible and explicit to the benefit of ourselves, our social network, our peers and the market/global brain/humanity as a whole. The essential used to be invisible to the eye....until now and it will bring about massive transformations for the benefit of us all.

Hope you'll enjoy it.

Paul Hawken on The Great New Transformation, Environment, Community, Spirituality and Immune Systems

Below you can watch the presentation by Paul Hawken on Fora.tv in The Long Now Foundation section. His latest book - Blessed Unrest - is already a bestseller.

Without any doubt this has got to be one of the best presentations I have seen so far. Style, form, content, originality of video inserts, it's all there. Inspiring and recommended ! The Q&A part is also very interesting due to questions on singularity, communities, natural capitalism and growth limits.

Take-away: right now there are more than two million separate environmental-social justice organizations around the world with 100 million people dedicating their lives to humanity. WOW ! More on the website WiserEarth. Soon I will be actively involved in one of the key Dutch initiatives to boost sustainability. So expect me to post more on environmental issues coming months. 

On BANG Convergence and Three Other Key Value Drivers in the Coming Decades

Global Business Network is one of my favorite sources. To me Peter Schwartz, Stewart Brand and Eamonn Kelly are leading thinkers. In this short PDF document Eamonn Kelly - author of the highly acclaimed (futuristic) book Powerful Times - sheds some light on four key drivers of value creation in the coming decades.

The reasons for posting this one are the importance of the Gift Economy (see also the recent remarks by Kevin Kelly, Yochai Benkler and Don Tapscott), the revitalization of the Physical Infrastructure Economy (creative new insight) and most importantly the coming BANG convergence. BANG convergence is bigger than the current Digital Convergence and it relates to Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes. This is one of my favorite topics for a very long time as a result of reading the book Complexity. A life changer to me ! After reading this book in 1993, I was lured to the Santa Fe Institute as an inspiring knowledge platform for BANG convergence. It inspired me to read great books by Stuart Kauffman and Ilya Prigogine. And when we watch all those outstanding videos on TED we can see by our own senses why the BANG convergence is the biggest value creator of our times. 

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) : Milestone For All Of Us

Sometimes a new website is launched touching every cell in my body. Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is such  a website. As a nature lover I believe this is an excellent resource. Thrilling, exciting, moving, inspiring, important, enchanting and above all transcending as this is a milestone for the world, ecology and humanity. Great ! Thanks to E.O. Wilson and TED. The video below shows it all...

"Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity."

On Citizendium versus Wikipedia, Digital Maoism and the Difference between Wisdom of the Crowd and Collective Intelligence

A fantastic post by Larry Sanger on Edge on Wikipedia and other forms of mass online opinion. It is about subjectivity and objectivity, about equal access and authority, about meritocracy and reputational systems. Sanger is co-founder of Wikipedia and started a competitor called Citizendium (Wikipedia with real names and experts-integration). Sangers' deepens my previous posts on journalists and bloggers, on who controls entries on Wikipedia from a PR point of view and on Jaron Laniers' Digital Maoism. Highly recommended reading and watch out for Citizendium to grow rapidly !

"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.  An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with.

But that's exactly what happens on wikis, and on Wikipedia.  To be able to work together at all, consensus and compromise are the name of the game.  As a result, the Wikipedian "crowd" can often agree upon some pretty ridiculous claims, which are very far from both expert opinion and from anything like an "average" of public opinion on a subject.  I don't mean to say that the Wikipedia process is not robust and does not produce a lot of correct answers.  It is and it does.  But the process does not closely resemble the "wise crowd" phenomena that Surowiecki is explaining.

The desire for fairness creates hostility toward any authority—and not just when authority uses its power to gain an unfair advantage, but toward authority as such. That is, the most radical egalitarians advocate that our situations be made as equal as possible, including in terms of authority.  But, in our specialist-friendly modern society, expertise can confer much authority not available to non-experts. Perhaps the most important and fundamental authority experts have is the authority to declare what is known. This authority, then, should be placed in the hands of everyone equally, according to a thoroughgoing egalitarianism.

I support meritocracy: I think experts deserve a prominent voice in declaring what is known, because knowledge is their life. As fallible as they are, experts, as society has traditionally identified them, are more likely to be correct than non-experts, particularly when a large majority of independent experts about an issue are in broad agreement about it. In saying this, I am merely giving voice to an assumption that underlies many of our institutions and practices. Experts know particular topics particularly well. By paying closer attention to experts, we improve our chances of getting the truth; by ignoring them, we throw our chances to the wind. Thus, if we reduce experts to the level of the rest of us, even when they speak about their areas of knowledge, we reduce society's collective grasp of the truth.

It is no exaggeration to say that epistemic egalitarianism, as illustrated especially by Wikipedia, places Truth in the service of Equality. Ultimately, at the bottom of the debate, the deep modern commitment to specialization is in an epic struggle with an equally deep modern commitment to egalitarianism. It's Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I'm on the side of Truth."

Bloggers, Journalists, Flow Organizers, New and Old Media, Convergence and Mass Collaboration

I couldn't agree more with the quotes below from this post from Bruno Giussani (one of my favorite bloggers). Amen !

It even applies to the corporate environment...professionals will increasingly be enablers, knowledge integrators and less experts, leveraging their networks of experts and the ideas of the mass. Mass Collaboration by Don Tapscott in terms of the Wiki Workplace.

"At a recent conference in California, Ethan Zuckerman, the Harvard-based co-founder of GlobalVoices
was asked whether newspaper and television editors were still relevant in these days of participatory, "citizen" journalism. He offered the best answer I've heard so far on that question: "Don't speak. Point!" By which he meant: the days of journalists and editors "speaking on behalf of people" or "speaking to people" are over. "Point to people and get out of the way," he said.

A pretty radical statement. But Zuckerman didn't mean that the days of editors and journalists are past. He was rather suggesting that with facts, information and opinions circulating freely and broadly, their role is changing into that of facilitator, coach, flow organizer.

The new power of editors and journalists will depend on their ability to take on new tasks: to animate a group of people; to develop ways to organize how information is gathered and used, with the participation of what used to be called "the audience;" and to help people navigate an information landscape that's increasingly crowded and constantly shifting.

The direct implication is that the newspaper and the television/radio channel are no longer a mere product --and that they have to relinquish their self-representation as "beacons" or "heralds." They have to become places. Places where people from the community converge, stop by, make connections and come back again to build a common future. Places where most of the social, informational, entertainment and economic value is created not by the journalists and publishers, but by the members of the community. Encourage the exploration of ways to connect communities using digital media. Because, of course, the most powerful content of all, is people themselves. A key role of the media in the future will be to provide the places—to become the platform—for people to link what they know with who they know, and to expand both their knowledge and their network.

What does all this say about the future of journalism? At least three things. First, journalists will be around for a long time. Secondly, they need not fear what's coming because it will be exciting and vastly expand their possibilities. But, thirdly, they will need to reinvent themselves as a skilled part of a crowd rather than as lecturers, to become more tolerant of ambiguity, to become fluent in both the tech innovations and the shifts in social dynamics that are driving the development of media."