My Pathways to New Paradigms

Do you know the ROI of your mother? Do you need to ask?

2011-04-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

There is plenty of talk on the web about return on investment or ROI, and as an economic development professional it is a cornerstone of our analysis. It should not be the only criteria for a final decision by a community though.

David Armano is senior vice president at Edelman Digital, the interactive arm of global communications firm Edelman and wrote a blog post on this matter The ROI of Your Mother | My Venture Pad
The full quote from From Chris Brogan's blog is in the article. My interest was not only in using community based metrics instead of bottom line financial metrics but also the idea that these metrics only worked one way to assess rather than also influence.

"There were certain things that I did intentionally to help influence a certain behavior; Advocacy. As some of the criticism was documented, a small percentage of "nodes" in the network became activated and advocated on our behalf. Advocacy was the desired behavior. The desired outcome included things like Twitter being pressured to shut down an account which was impersonating me. That was a favorable outcome. Behaviors lead to outcomes—don't forget that."

The first post for this new version of this blog spoke about obstacles placed before people that keep them from participating in their government, be it local, regional or national. The truth is that we can also do it to ourselves, whether as professionals that the community depends upon or as members of that community.

Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy | Video on TED.com

2011-04-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy | Video on TED.com

It takes Dave Meslin about 7 minutes to list 7 obstacles to community participation. The first one is City Hall. Part of this blog's mission is looking at ways of overcoming those obstacles.

2010-05-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

Even when we are being idealistic in our vision, we need to be pragmatic about how we get there. http://amplify.com/u/5pgp

New Connections Online Make For New Pathways to New Paradigms

2010-02-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

I started this whole web journey from this blog with the intention of doing nothing more than organizing weblinks that I came across on a serial basis. Now that role has evolved into being an activist, OK maybe slacktivist since all of this is still only on the web, regardless I am more linked up than I had ever envisioned. My onlineactivities continue to find synergy between the worlds of Web 2.0 social media technologies and social activism through economic development. When combined together they provide effective tools for change-agents to induce change at a grassroots social level that can then be expanded and linked with other such efforts. During this webtrek, my interests and my connections have linked me with a number of very interesting people across the globe, especially on Facebook.

One such person is Dr. Niki Lambropoulos. She is currently in England but hails from Greece. Her site says that she is an experienced HCI Education e-learning expert, researcher, consultant, HCI designer & researcher, and online communities manager. Her fields of interest include Human-Computer Interaction Education, E-Learning, and Idea Management for Distributed Leadership and User Innovation Networks.

Her specialisation (notice the English spelling, one of the efficiencies of the web is getting others to do the research and writing for you) is in Collective Intelligence theory, design and system development and covers the following fields: collaborative learning, co-creativity and community management in Computer Supported Collaborative eLearning (CSCeL); open innovation and user innovation networks in business strategic development; idea generation and distributed leadership in Project Management; and collective intelligence systems design in Human-Computer Interaction.

If one expected an aloof, computer-oriented egghead they would be very mistaken. She is very approachable online and provides a good deal of useful and interesting information. Where I find it easy to connect is that she collects the same type of links that I do from TED and other sources. She also has a strong interest in innovation. What has fascinated me most in learning about the possiblities of the web is the potential leverage it has in communication and collaboration. Dr. Lambropoulos strikes me as being at the cutting edge of this field.

She gets all of this far better than I do being able to deal with it from a meta-level of analysis. Her work with such efforts as the Special issue of Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments: Distributed Leadership & Online Communities for the London South Bank University Centre for Interactive Systems Engineering demonstrates her level of attainment.

One example is her work with Democracy Reloaded a Facebook Group which , an online experiment focused on democracy in Greece, but I believe will have application world wide. She says it is an experiment on Collective Intelligence. The aim is to identify real problems and real solutions by participatory mechanisms. A new platform is going to be released and tested in February 2010.

The difference between our efforts in Democracy Reloaded and other official participatory democracy efforts is that WE ALL produce the ideas and WE ALL make comments/suggestions/corrections.

Democracy Reloaded is a collaborative effort aiming at your immediate participation and involvement at the early stages of governance design even before the decision making. In this way you as a citizen are not reactive but active and proactive in decision making that affects your life. In particular, Democracy Reloaded aims are the following:

Development of the Greek citizens' potential via the Democracy Reloaded platform to faciliate your direct involvement in decision planning and design.
Focus on the the real causes of the same problems that constantly appear as news however, with different names occuring in different locations in different times.
Fill in a gap in contemporary co-governance with the submission and publication of reports that derive from your our articles with your own ideas and comments.

I am waiting with anticipation to find out what she comes up with. I have examined a number of collaborative platforms used by the social development community under my other blog Milestones for a New Millennium but this one interests me because if seems to be a tool for citizen collaboration. If activists are to going to reach a tipping point in bringing about change, they are going to have to go beyond the committed faithful and even the well-meaning slacktivists and engage the general populous. They will need to find means of not only informing them of the issues but also engaging them in the decision process. This might be one tool that could be a help in doing so.

As part of my ever deeper immersion into the Web I am experimenting with Zemanta with this post. Some of the links and the related posts were generated by Zemanta.

Just Found out out The Monuments Men

2009-12-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

Somebody sent me an email introducing me to the Monuments Men. I am making it a blog post and taking advantage of the ability to embed videos. This reminds us that our true cultural history is outside of Web 2.0 and that still takes dedicated people to keep it.

Book Page writes, "an account that moves like a Hollywood action adventure…there are heroes to root for, villains to hiss at and an increasingly pressing race against time…Whether you're a fan of art, military history or stories of real-life heroes, the Monuments Men is a treasure worth the hunt".

I hope your blog will profile these great heroes of civilization and share their story with your readers and supporters.

Thank You,

Robert M. Edsel

www.monumentsmen.com

The Morning Joe Show features a video clip with Doris Kearns Goodwin discussing The Monuments Men!

The Greatest Heroine of WWII, Rose Valland-

Passing the Torch: Touching video clip of Robert M. Edsel discussing his last conversation with Lane S. Faison.

Robert M. Edsel discussing the amazing story of one of nine living Monuments Men, German born Harry Ettlinger.

Deciding what to do next - How to design a career, business or education

2009-11-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

Two article from Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist have been lingering in my drafts for some time. They were good articles, but I was not sure how to apply them to anything I was doing. My last post on design thinking and business got me to thinking about them again. This is still framing the question.

One article talked about how to decide what to do next. The focus is career-wise, which is Ms. Trunk's forte, but it can also be applied organizational-wise. The question is how to bridge and combine the two. Her example is Pastor Tony Morgan, chief strategy officer at NewSpring Church, whose blog mixes careers and church. In his book, Killing Cockroaches, he tells the story of when he was a city manager, and he was in the middle of running a meeting, and he heard a woman down the hall scream about a cockroach. So he got up from the meeting and killed the cockroach.

As Ms Trunk tells us, Really, all time management discussion is about this: How to know when to kill cockroaches and when not to. It's about why we spend time doing small, stupid stuff that is crawling around in front of us instead of the stuff that makes life meaningful. The dichotomy between wanting to make big-picture impacts on the world and being immersed in the more immediate issues bombarding us is a question for organizations and the individuals making up those organizations.What do we teach students about finding ways to make life meaningful, while still being able make it in the "real" world?

ALINA TUGEND wrote Shortcuts: Putting Yourself Out There on a Shelf to Buy in
YOUR MONEY back on March 28, 2009 in the New York Times. The article was about branding yourself in the job market. What caught my eye was Dan Schawbel, author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success” (Kaplan, April 2009), advice that “Finding your niche is the key,” Which means:

Discover your passion and put it together with your expertise; create a “personal branding tool kit” (which may include a résumé, online profile, blog and portfolio of your work) that consistently reflects your brand; pitch your brand online and offline; and update and monitor any conversations about your brand.

At first glance this sounds in opposition to what was said in the last post, but not if we look at how to achieve this through his four-step process —

discover,

create,

communicate,

maintain.

All of which can be applied to hybrid thinking. The question is how do we teach this in classrooms? Ms Trunk points out that perhaps we should first consider changing how to lead in the new millennium.

Her reasons are that Generation Y has a lot of great traits, but classic, top-down leadership is not one of them. This is not a surprise: Because gen Y is the great teamwork generation. They did book reports in teams, they went to prom in teams, and they are notorious for quitting jobs in teams.

This should arguably make it easier to teach today's students the concepts of hybrid thinking and incorporate design thinking into students' career path.

Finally, I am including this TEDTalk (video) featuring Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation which points out that our assumptions about motivation are also questionable. For the same basic reasons he raises in the last post Roger Martin says, What's Thwarting American Innovation is Too Much Science. Dan Pink says that the problem is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Is the same thing true of education?

Thinking (a bit more) about Design | Designing better Thinking

2009-11-14T07:34:00.000-08:00

When I first start this blog, I was surprised at how often the concept of design came up as it was not my usual way of thinking. Although it has been in the background in the musings of this blog and Milestones for a New Millennium, I have not focused on it directly for sometime. Lately though I have been thinking about it from an educational perspective. If we were to integrate design thinking, in its broadest terms, into our economy and culture and wanted to prepare students to contribute to that culture, what would we teach them? This post does not answer that question, it begins to frame it.

Dev Patnaik discusses Mixing Design Thinking With Business with Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management, who argues for a radical idea: to develop business leaders who are well-grounded in multiple disciplines.

The Rotman faculty aim to mold managers who are equally comfortable and adept at using tools and frameworks from business, popular culture, and design to solve the most urgent challenges of the day--what Rotman calls integrative thinkers and what I call hybrid thinkers.

They discuss The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Rotman's approach of integrating design thinking into traditional analytical MBA programs. Rotman believes new ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. At least new for today's analytical mindset. The logical leap of the mind, the apple falling on the head, that you can't prove from past data the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called abductive logic.

Strategy is an act of design.
Highly skilled designers focus on new possibilities rather than the application of existing ideas. Create from data, guts, empathy, creativity, and a little thin air.
Balancing the analytical and the intuitive is key to great leadership.
Analytical thinking prevents them seeing promising new opportunities and driver of growth, but ideas still have to make sense from an analytical standpoint. Great leadership involves bringing both lenses to bear to find better possibilities.
Roger's take on design thinking isn't rooted in design.
Surprisingly designers aren't necessarily good at design thinking. A tremendous sense of aesthetics, prototyping, form, and ergonomics doesn't inherently reflect the ability to imagine previously unseen possibilities.
Templates, not management theory, are the enemies of innovation.
Neither businesspeople nor designers have a monopoly on good ideas because most people, regardless of background, are more comfortable reapplying a formula or using a template from an existing success than generating new possibilities.

Raising Dev Patnaik's question:

If design thinking isn't based in design and the abilities of designers, then the term may need to change. Without any question, increasing any organization's design capability will increase its ability to differentiate from its competitors, to build a more consistent brand, and to create more appealing products. But it's something else entirely to create a culture of innovation. We would do well to make this clear in the terminology we use.

He addressed this question in a previous article, Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking in which he asserts that, The secret isn't design thinking, it's "hybrid thinking": the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.

Hybridity matters now because the problems companies need to solve are simply too complex for any one skillset to tackle. We're in an era when car companies are trying to grapple with massive changes in technological capability and market need, when cell phone companies are trying to own global entertainment, and when snack food companies face extinction unless they figure out how to promote health and wellness. As Lou Lenzi, a design executive at Audiovox, once told me, if you want to innovate, "You need to be one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist."

According to Patnaik, hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team, it about multidisciplinary people. He uses John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar, as an example because he can effortlessly fuse technology, art, and storytelling together to create Toy Story, which is why he is beloved and admired, not because he's good at technology. In the video below from Edutopia Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University makes a similar distinction between cooperation and collaboration.

Jung's Red Book

2009-11-11T08:31:00.000-08:00

This came from my real world/day job persona. Jung was a major influence in my decision to become a psychology major in college. What are the chances that anybody will ever do with the Jung's Red Book what Elif Ayiter did with with Freud's ideas and her Entre Loup Et Chien?

From SmartBrief on Leadership:

Psychology's most famous suppressed work sees daylight
Carl Jung's "Red Book" is finally being published, after being kept under wraps by his descendants since his death in 1961. The book details what Jung called his "confrontation with the unconscious" through 205 pages of elaborate illuminated text and illustrations of mythological figures. Jung worried that publishing the book during his life would undermine his credibility as as a scientist. previously on Yahoo!/The Associated Press (10/3)

More ideas on Web 2.0 and Changing the World

2009-11-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

Now that the Stand Up End Poverty Now! event is over, I am taking another look at the potential impact that the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 tools can have on the world. My latest source is the Fast Company article Can Social Networking Change Our Political Consciousness?

Twitter, Facebook and the many other social networks that have emerged are reminding us exactly how small the planet is, and how seemingly mundane or personal issues (where you live, what you feel) have all kinds of ramifications.

The question of the veracity of this statement has its greatest challenge from Evgeny Morozov. I previously blogged about his Foreign Policy article. This time it is the TED Talk that he gave on the same subject.

TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.

This slideshow on How the Net aids dictatorships is also from the TED Talk. First off, everything Morozov says in the talk is in my view could be and often is correct, but I still disagree with his overall argument. In it, Morozov provides his own version of the Maslow hierarchy hierarchy for Internet involvement on slide 21 going from Have Fun, Talk, Share, Learn, and finally at the apex Campaign.

This can also be compared to the Groundswell Web 2.0 usage taxonomy. The difference is that the Morozov hierarchy is basically group-defined and the Groundswell is individual-defined. The top of Morosov's heirarchy is campaign - a group of people working on a common cause. The top of the Groundswell hierarchy is creator - which on the Internet can become collective creation.

Both also have important differences between the Maslow hierarchy in that both, especially Morozov's hierarchy, though he does not make the point, can be re-iterating. Morosov's Campaigners can use the lower levels of Learn, Talk, and Share. Those at the Learner stage have the potential of moving to the Campaigner stage.

Morozov speaks of KGB in the former USSR using torture to find out the means of communication between rebels. Now, Morozov complains that it is made instantaneously apparent on the Web. It is also, however, ubiquitous and there is nobody to torture or everybody to torture. When one person or a few hold to key to an entire organization that organization it is far easier to stop despite romantic ideas of the activist bravely standing up to the secret police. While it is true that dictators will try to find ways to stop dissidents using Web 2.0 tools, this does not mean that they have become ineffective.

A far more effective argument on this issue is made by Clay Shirkey the author of Here Comes Everybody.

Clay Shirky: Social Media vs. the Dictator

Clay Shirky - Clay Shirky is a professor of Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology.

Full Program

Biggest Science Story Oldest Human Origin Ardipithecus ramidus

2009-10-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

Probably the biggest science story out there right now, Straight from Science AAAS.

In the century and a half since Darwin first published On the Origin of Species, we have learned a great deal about human evolution. Now, as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin's seminal work, Science is publishing a set of papers that provide a new view of human evolution.

Produced by an international team of researchers including first authors Tim White, Giday WoldeGabriel, Antoine Louchart, Gen Suwa, and C. Owen Lovejoy, these 11 papers comprise a detailed and voluminous look at all aspects of Ardipithecus ramidus including one remarkably complete specimen (ARA-VP-6/500) discovered in Ethiopia.

Dated to 4.4 million years ago, Ardipithecus ramidus provides powerful new insights into evolution of both early humans and other close primate relatives (the chimpanzee and gorilla) and helps reveal the nature of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees.

Visit sciencemag.org/ardipithecus to read coverage of this tremendous discovery.

Blogging about Hardship to Ease

2009-09-23T00:15:00.000-07:00

Blogging about Hardship to Ease is a new path that I recently took in collaboration with hal786 on BloggersUnite. The path is new, but as happens so often a number of connections to other paths became apparent. My original intent was to try to write something that fit the theme of the day.

Every person's life matters. We should share their stories, to bring ease to their lives, or know about how they got from their tough life to ease.

Trouble is that my Myers-Briggs in INTJ and I am not personally that good at the pull-the-heartstrings stories. I am though impacted by them and seem to find others that are so gifted and incorporate them into what I am writing about. I recognize the importance of imbuing stories with feeling to create greater connections.

The path hal786 asks us to travel on is a personal one of individuals sharing stories with other individuals, but the commonality of those stories helps bind us together. These stories are like the cells of a living creature in that they have life on their own, but they are able to bring a greater and more complex entity to life. These stories are what some have called the "small pages" of the Internet.

I got the idea of uniting "Small Pages" discovered on the journey from Aira of the blog It'll be alright.

It seems a small thing, I know. But the net itself is made of small pages, like mine and like the web pages of the over 10 thousand bloggers part of the Bloggers Unite. Ten thousand stories and thoughts for giving voice to 40 million refugees, for making known an association that help people for real. And to put in practice an expression I read on the Refugees United’s page and – with its simplicity – seemed to me such fundamental: spread the world.

Another important aspect of this blog has been serendipity. Now I am using the word in a very broad sense, it seems though to best describe the aspect of not only finding connections, but having those connections flow towards me without calling. It is what helps me find new connections. The most recent example is that yesterday my niece sent my wife the YouTube video Children Full Of Life. The video tells of the importance of storytelling as a means of traveling a path from hardship to ease.

"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."

As in the video, the ability of one individual to tell their story of moving from hardship to ease allowed another to start their journey.

This is not my first journey along a path discovered through others demonstrating the impact that individual stories can have. SAUDADES SERENDIPITY from an Orkut friend in Brazil was another.

Ju teaches a very important lesson why people take up causes such as the Millennium Development Goals. It is not always to make massive political paradigm shifts, but finding personal ways to connect through countless small interactions for a better world. It is through the means of first defining ourselves as the path to redefining the world.

My interest is in how we move from the individual to groups and to society as a whole in expressing the story of hardship and more importantly the path to ease. I can see a similar aspect of hardship to ease in the efforts of people to overcome hardships in the world as is seen in the efforts of individuals in their own lives. We just have to be open to it.

Other Paths Showing the Way From Hardship to Ease

2009-09-23T00:14:00.000-07:00

The web journey of this blog has taken many paths and a recent one was agreeing to participate with fellow blogger hal786, an English Muslim girl who writes After Hardship Will Always Come Ease, in her BloggersUnite's event HARDSHIP2EASE DAY which takes place today 23 September 2009.

According to hal786:

The goal is to help bring ease to people who've suffered hardships in life, by sharing their stories and writing stories of how someones life went from bad to good/hardship2ease.

Being ignorant of such matters, I did not realize that the words come from the Qur'an. As is my habit, I did some web-searching to learn more. The blog Far From Home provided greater insight. My sense as an outsider is that this is a very important part of the Muslim tradition of which our Western culture has very little idea. It also strikes me as a very personal idea of finding ease within ones self. The underlining of the quote below is mine.

"With every hardship, comes ease. Verily, with hardship comes ease." (Chapter 94; verses 5-6)

This refrain, echoed twice, stress upon the sometimes "hidden" blessings within a given burden or hardship. In the ordinary words of mortals, "In every dark cloud, there is a silver lining." Sometimes, we are too weary, too burnt out, too depressed to see that "ease", that silver lining. After all, when surrounded by darkness, it is not easy to "see." Usually, we understand the "ease" afterwards and therefore make the mistake that the ease comes after hardship. But note the stress in the refrain of the word "with" which indicates that the ease comes hand-in-hand with the hardship. (Once again, the duality that I was discussing in an earlier note kicks in.)

Another source was Islam.Online.Net Thinking Over the Verses of the Qur'an
Many people read the Qur'an, but the important thing is, just as Allah states in His verses, to ponder on each verse of the Qur'an, to draw a lesson from that verse, and to improve one's conducts in compliance with these lessons.

Those who read the verse [For truly with hardship comes ease; truly with hardship comes ease] (Al-Inshirah 94:5-6), for example, reflect upon it. They understand that Allah creates ease with each hardship, and therefore, the only thing they have to do when they meet a hardship is to put their trust in Allah and find the ease that is with it. Allah's promise being so, we see that giving up hope or being stricken with panic in moments of difficulty is a sign of a weakness in our faith. After reading this verse and reflecting upon it, our conduct will go in line with the verse throughout our lives.

I can't help but find it interesting that my last post on this blog dealt with perception and this blog post deals with concepts arguably beyond perception. When BeyondPerception writes of dunya it brings to my mind the Buddhist concept of samsara. Similarly Far From Home above speaks about duality. The concept of "With every hardship, comes ease", also extends to others. This seems to me to be a concept common across all the major religions. It is not merely a matter of how we see the world, but how we take what we see and the shared story we create to make our world.

Verily, With Hardship Comes Ease (Surah al-Sharh,94) posted by BeyondPerception

In the end, love means wanting the best for that other person. But I truly think love shouldn't end with our family and friends, it should spread to everyone, even a stranger. As result, if you have this type of love for everyone, you should genuinely only want the best for them.

The dunya is ephemeral. Change is inevitable and nothing, including this world is permanent. Relationships will always change, feelings will continue to change and it is all because it is God's will. "Allahu Alam" (God knows best). He knows what's best for you even though it may not be in your favor. All we can do is love one another and pray that Allah will bless all of us with goodness in this life and the hereafter.

I thank Allah for making me stronger in times of tribulation, for removing anger from my heart, and turning my negative emotions into peace.

Here is a wonderful youtube video passed along from another xanga member for those going through hardship. JazakAllah Kairun :)

Exploring Pathways of Vision, Sight and Insight

2009-09-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

This blog started off as a personal trek to explore new paradigms. It has succeeded in doing that for myself and hopefully some few others along the way. These paradigm pathways have a tendency to cross over one another and create opportunities for serendipity. Even though the rule in blogging is too focus on one idea in short narratives, my habit is to ignore that advice and attempt to link different ideas. Two important sources for new ideas are TED and MIT for seeking pragmatic solutions and personal wisdom in redefining one's self as its says in the header.

Recently, I came across four videos from both sources that had a common set of themes, brain, cognition, vision, but also led to other pathways of compassion and social change. All involved understanding, but used different applications of that word.

In this episode of TEDTalks (video) on Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning - Tom Wujec (2009) -

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead, creates a series of mental models through a collection of "Ah-ha moments," or moments of discovery, through various processes.

So making images meaningful has three components. The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. Secondly, making them interactive. And then thirdly, making them persistent. And I believe that these three principles can be applied to solving some of the very tough problems that we face in the world today. Thanks so much.

The next two videos from MITWorld, though longer in length, are well worth watching.

The first continues with the exploration of cognition and vision through - Computers with Commonsense: Artificial Intelligence at the MIT Round Table

Patrick Henry Winston ponders what makes humans different from our primate cousins. His field of artificial intelligence extends that question to thinking about how humans differ from computers, with a goal to "develop a computational theory of intelligence."
"We think with our eyes…vision is the locus of every profound kind of problem solving."

Patrick Henry Winston

The next MITWorld video takes us back to the human and to the humane -

Opening the Mind’s Eye-Learning to See

"Whenever we're asked how the brain does X or Y, the impulse is to work with this beloved creature, the human infant, to see how it acquires different capabilities... But there are challenges: Babies are not interested in being experimental subjects. They'd rather sleep than give us good data."

Pawan Sinha

The reason the Pawan Sinha video goes beyond interesting to inspiring is because

Sinha found these subjects in his native India, which has the world’s highest number of blind children -- more than one million. They are victims of Vitamin A deficiency, congenital cataracts, and absent or atrocious medical care. But salient to Sinha’s research, many of these blind children could be treated. He glimpsed a humanitarian and scientific opportunity, and Project Prakash (Sanskrit for light) was born .

It’s rare to find research that simultaneously advances basic science and brings immediate good into people’s lives, but Pawan Sinha’s Project Prakash does precisely that. An investigator of human visual processing, Sinha is interested in how these brain mechanisms develop, and in treating India's vast population of blind children.

The final video is another short one from TED and deals again with vision, but vision both from the idea of seeing and the idea of envisioning a new world. Both aspects of our understanding are necessary to bring about this new world, the understanding of our world and nature and the understanding we must show to each other.

Atomic physicist Joshua Silver invented liquid-filled optical lenses to produce low-cost, adjustable glasses, giving sight to millions without access to an optometrist. At TEDGlobal 2009, he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute them to a billion people in need by 2020.

Digging through Web 2.0 for Feelings and Facts and Fraternity

2009-09-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

My last few posts used slacktivism to make a point about online activism, but the lesson that I have taken from my blogging and wanted to pass on to others is that Web 2.0 tools can be used to tell the story of a cause not just the facts. The story of a cause goes to the heart or the meaning of a cause and why someone should join, not merely the facts of the issue.

The World Wide Web may have started transmitting only data, but it has evolved into something more and is continuing to evolve.

Change-agent organizations need to understand and adapt these new means of connection, communication and collaboration. It is a balance between pulling on people's feelings and getting them to be part of some larger cause and providing the facts so that they can make up their own minds and find new means of working together.

From the New York Times TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET | August 24, 2009 By ALEX WRIGHT

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

The universe of reviews, ratings and recommendations online open a tantalizing window on the collective consciousness.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Here are two TED Talks featuring Clay Shirky, who in the first TED Talk looks at how the end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics, Iranian protestors streaming news to the world, showing how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news by bypassing censors (if all too briefly).

The second TED Talk examines how the Internet and Web 2.0 can enhance collaboration.

Appealing to the Slacktivists

2009-08-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

In the last post of this blog I made a defense of slacktivists in general, though I ended up agreeing with so many points made by Evgeny Morozov that slacktivists will still not be able to hold their own convention. This post will also be in support of slacktivists, but this time as an essential audience for change-agent organizations.

My last post took the perspective of one who fits into the slacktivist demographic, though I believe that the demographic is more diverse than appreciated. This time I am going to consider the issue from organizations that need large numbers to directly support their efforts through activism and funding, or to support larger scale efforts to initiate change through other government and social organizations. The Millennium Development Goals involve both approaches in bringing them to fruition.

There are numerous organizations struggling to meet the challenges of implementing the objectives of each of the Millennium Development Goals. These organizations often involve professionals on-the-ground seeking to increase awareness and derive support from a larger and usually less expert base. There is also an overall effort to get developed countries to meet their promise of fully funding the Millennium Development Goals. The Stand Up and Take Action event is an example.

The first set and the second set of activism are natural allies. For the organizations seeking to implement each of the particular objectives of the Millennium Development Goals, the struggle to push the larger agenda is no doubt important, but I cannot see it as a defining goal. Whether or not a certain number of people stand up on October 16th, those organizations working in Africa to eradicate typhoid or to provide universal education in India will still be at work. However, for those working in the second category for global political change, which is what we are talking about, having the first group of on-the-ground change-agents is not enough to positively influence the fundamental source of change in the leading developed countries, the mainstream voting majority. This majority cannot be defined by political affiliation alone because no one makes up a super majority. It does have one general defining aspect and that is, for the most part, for most of the time, non-activist.

Here again, I agree with Evgeny Morozov.

Of course, the ideal case here is when one's participation in digital activism doesn't subtract from -- and instead enhances -- one's eagerness to participate in real-life campaigns.

Now that gives change-agent organization two tasks. One to make sure the the true-hearted and dedicated activists don't lose heart and become part of the Facebook generation wasting their time on Mafia wars.

However, it's also quite possible that a significant portion of the activist population would be morally content with the "slacktivist" option alone, preferring not to get too close to more dangerous activities that are likely to get them in trouble with authorities.

I seriously doubt that anybody who was was of the meddle to protest would not because the Internet just made it too easy. The harder task is getting the uninvolved masses on board.

What we are dealing with from the perspective of social or change-agent organizations promoting their cause is social marketing, and as with social-entrepreneurship it takes a degree of business acumen.

It was dealing with issues of marketing, communications and networking the helped to lead me to the Millennium Development Goals. In a previous post on the blog I looked into the book GROUNDSWELL by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff which makes the case that either Your Marketing Is Riding The Wave or Its Under Water.

More importantly for this post it provides taxonomy for Web 2.0 usage on the Internet. This I submit is also the different levels of slacktivists.

“creators”, who blog on their own web pages,
“critics” who post comments,
“joiners” who sign up for online communities,
“spectators” who read and watch, and finally
the unengaged “inactives”

The general understanding of slacktivisits seems to fit under numbers levels 3 and 4, only a small step above the bottom rung of inactives. I still put online creators and critics as being in the slacktivist pool, realizing fully as I have said that writing a blog does not equate in any way from on-the-ground action of groups like Oxfam UK, ONE, Millennium Promise or other similar organizations. Web 2.0 could hopefully help change-agent organizations recruit the unengaged "inactives" and move each rung of the Web 2.0 ladder up, but it is as likely to be other slacktivists higher up on the rungs.

This may fly in the face of our vision of social activists taking a stand like the revolutionaries in Les Miserables, but the concept of effective political change only coming from sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture as opposed campaigning in the virtual space is to my mind false for liberal democratic countries. I do not believe that such actions alone will accomplish the Millennium Development Goals.

As I said in my last blog post, demonstrations and sit-ins can force the discussion into the open, but at some point the message needs to be taken up the the majority of voters in the democratic countries to put pressure on their governments to put pressure on other governments. It is the responsibility of organizations such as the Millennium End Poverty 2015 Campaign and anybody else supporting these goals to lead such as effort.

It is our responsibility as individuals participating in causes of our choosing to avoid become political commodities by understanding that you are commodified when you lose the ability to change things.

A Defense of Slacktivism (Not Really)

2009-08-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

I linked an article critical of slacktivism by Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy to a blog post I did on actions being taken on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi Support getting thanks but not results. Despite having admitted to being a slacktivist, I wanted to look closer at those parts of the article I agreed with which are critiques of my actions and the actions of the vast majority of us.

Morozov provides the standard definition of "Slacktivism" as, “an apt term to describe feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. “

It gives those who participate in "slacktivist" campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group. Remember that online petition that you signed and forwarded to your entire contacts list? That was probably an act of slacktivism

Admittedly this is true for me. A good number of worthwhile online petitions come by email, on which I quite honestly don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time. I would rather spend that time on causes that I have chosen to put more time - the Millennium Development Goals. So I click and move on.

The main point is “that media attention doesn't always translate into campaign effectiveness” was made by my blog post Aung San Suu Kyi Support getting thanks but not results. The web can be a catalyst, but it can not make a difference in the "real" world on its own.

He offers his own argument for slacktivism as a Straw man through the "long tail" argument.

...the dramatic fall in transaction costs of organizing activist campaigns has simply opened up the field to many more participants and issues, there has been no drop in the actual quality and effectiveness of these campaigns.

I also wonder if "nano-activism" for specific campaigns easily thrown up on the web and send to thousands of people, most previously not involved in activist campaigns, benefit from the increased public attention. There has to be more to these campaigns then how the website is designed.

Morozov goes on to write about "activism for a lazy generation”. Again I cannot argue with this on its face. I don't believe that Morozov means the protestors in Iran using both demonstrations for which many meant arrest, beatings or death and Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, but for campaigns such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals there will be a point where they need to reach the mainstream masses of the developed countries. The Millennium Development Goals as far as I can determine are not mainstream in the United States.

Morozov challenges the basic slacktivist narrative by asking the question:

are the publicity gains gained through this greater reliance on new media worth the organizational losses that traditional activists entities are likely to suffer, as ordinary people would begin to turn away from conventional (and proven) forms of activism (demonstrations, sit-ins, confrontation with police, strategic litigation, etc) and embrace more "slacktivist" forms, which may be more secure but whose effectiveness is still largely unproven?

The answer to whether the utility of the very public work of 1000 "slacktivists" equals that of the very quiet and often unattributed work of one traditional activist is that it simple does not.

However, this seems to me to be a very unpersuasive argument. How often has demonstrations, sit-ins, confrontation with police, strategic litigation, etc worked without either a democratic system of change through voting or a sufficiently large militia to bring about the change? Vietnam did not end because the demonstrators convinced the government, but because they finally convinced the voters who changed the government. The demonstrators forced open the discussion, main stream then took it up, perhaps with false turns and setbacks but they made the final decision.

The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the "slacktivist" option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead.

However, I disagree with the idea that ordinary people, of which I am a fairly good example, would be out demonstrating and confronting police if not for the Internet. Today, I worry about family, mortgages and my job while trying to participate when I can through online activism and voting. The young have far less problem doing both online and on-street activism.

If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.

The argument fails from my perspective. This blog and Milestones for a New Millennium have found too many resources and too many connections beyond Facebook to give any credence to this argument. Still in the end, Evgeny Morozov makes a number of points we need to think about, and each of us needs to re-examine what they are doing to determine for themselves if they can do more to make a difference and still live their own lives.

Letting Serendipity Seek You

2009-08-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

DAMON DARLIN wrote in the New York Times section Ping: Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge. After reading the piece, I can only conclude that serendipity is within the traveler and not the pathway. There has been a great deal of serendipity during this endeavor and it has changed my own paradigms.

I also don't believe that Darlin has a firm grasp on what serendipity is in truth. Truth seems a better word than fact. Serendipity is magic without the magician, the third wish without the genie or even the wish. It is more than randomness and blind luck and in its best sense can not be calculated or anticipated.

Darlin gives UrbanSpoon, as one example which depends upon randomness to find a restaurant.

But a funny thing happens with frequent users of the app. They start relying on its search engine or the “Talk of the Town” feature, an algorithm that generates suggestions that uncannily echo local sentiment.

So most of us don't stick to the path less traveled most of the time. Here he is right, the algorithm becomes a high-tech crowdsourcing, substituting for the serendipity that customers are seeking. Trouble is that you cannot seek serendipity. You have to seek, not even necessarily seek, but be open to the unknown and let serendipity find you.

But this does bring up the question of individuals finding new pathways and larger groups finding new pathways. As the TED Talk below shows - The group-think of social networks isn't good at delivering those magical moments of discovery.

James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news
James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news -- and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy. Watch this talk >>

James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, argues that people acting en masse, are smarter than we think with one important caveat.

But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact --and that is that the more tightly linked we come to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent.

One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts.It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon.

Iran and Twitter Shaping A New World

2009-06-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

I have come to the point that many on the web find themselves where I have more resources than I can keep up with. Resources from my Milestones for a New Millennium blog include dgCommunities "a collaborative space for professionals working to reduce poverty and promote sustainable development worldwide", from the Development Gateway Foundation.

Development Gateway is an international nonprofit organization that provides Web-based platforms to make aid and development efforts more effective around the world.

One of their one of the online publications is ict.developmentgateway.org which deals with information and communication.

Recently, though they had a post of the Twitter phenomenon from another member which caught my eye. I have been on the look out for such articles. They have been pretty easy to find coming from numerous sources.

The original article was from Mashable demonstrating how information can be reshaped, in format not content, and used again to help form understanding and policy.

clipped from ict.developmentgateway.org

News #CNNfail: Twitter Blasts CNN Over Iran Election

Twitter users blasted CNN this weekend for a lack of coverage of the Tehran protests, with Iranian citizens claiming ballot fraud and taking to the streets.

Twitter has proven a powerful tool for spreading news of developing events in the country, but it has also taken on the role of media watchdog: thousands of Twitter users adopted the hashtag #CNNfail to highlight a lack of Iran coverage from the news organization.

Language: EnglishSource: Mashable: The Social Media Guide

Added by John Daly
June 15, 2009 Archive Date: June 15, 2009

News of Iran, News in Iran, New by Iran Bringing Change

2009-06-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

The news coming out of Iran has been disturbing and fascinating at the same time. What has been particularly game changing is the use of social media, especially Twitter. My real life/day job persona now has its own Twitter account, though it took me a while to get what seemed to be a fluff application. For many, probably most, it still is, but it can be a powerful tool. This article from the Boston Globe indicates how great of a tool.

News of Iran, edited in Newton - The Boston Globe

The website is called Tehran Bureau, but it is not housed in the Iranian capital. It’s edited from Niknejad’s parents’ living room in Newton

The English-language site has generated a lot of attention over the past few weeks as tensions escalated over allegations of electoral fraud by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. When demonstrators were shot and communication with the West was curtailed in a government clampdown, Tehran Bureau’s stream of news alerts and Twitter feeds became a valued source of information cited by The New York Times and other Western news organizations.

Shows what one person can do with two Apple Powerbooks. The Internet can be an Archimedes Lever for communicating with the rest of the world. The difference is that we can all hold on to the lever. If enough push the same way the world can move. This doesn't mean that Twitter is going to topple the regime in Tehran and I profoundly hope that there isn't a bloody crushing of the people's uprising. Even if the Resistance is forced underground Twitter and other social media tools provide a sieve for the regimes attempts to block information and support from the outside world. Iran is not Burma where one of the primary forms of control is the impoverished conditions of the people. Even though it will not be in the open, people will still be communicating and collaborating in Iran, slowly building up and slowly changing.

There has been a flurry of stories coming out of Iran and the Twitter phenomenon. This blog is not a news breaking resource, but my way of exploring and understanding issues. Particularly those dealing with social media and its affect on our global community. So I will be going back looking at this some more through some articles I have saved in drafts.

Posted using ShareThis

Privacy versus Authenticity Keeping My Online Personae Straight

2009-05-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

I have often alluded to my "real life/day job" when writing for this blog. This blog started out as an experiment and as part of that experiment it was decided that it would be kept separate. One, to see how it fared completely on its own without outside assistance, and two, to keep my "real life/day job" uncomplicated with personal viewpoints. Being in public administration means to a large extent that you put your opinions on the backburner and respect the democratic process that put those making the decisions in power.

Because of personal and policy changes at the "day job" my virtual and more openly idealistic online persona, which was borne of this blog, is now getting short shrift. My day job has its own online persona and is getting benefit from what I have learned during my sojourns into the World of Web 2.0 through this blog. The separation still exists, but now more tenuously. It is also getting harder to maintain because while I still have some desire to maintain the private space there is also a sense of being inauthentic or at least fragmented.

There are points of connection and it is possible to discover one of my online personae through the other, but so far nobody has seemed to have noticed any of them. Do I want to make them more obvious?

Navigating Our Lives, Our Economy, Our World with the Cellphone,

2009-05-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

The cellphone has been a basic tool of micro-enterprise in numerous countries for sometime now. On a local level, it provides a relatively cheap means of communication, organization and control. Now it is beginning to create a new paradigm on a global scale. Two articles, again from the New York Times, provide a contrast between the potential of world connection and the realities of global markets, one although abstract is becoming a reality, the other a reality could change how we think about doing business.

SCIENCE | February 17, 2009 The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives By JOHN MARKOFF
Cellphones have changed how we communicate with others, and now they are changing how we think about information.

The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map. “The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

TECHNOLOGY | April 28, 2009 In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit By DAVID BARBOZA
An industry building look-alike mobile phones for as little as $35 is tickling China's pride in rebellious creativity.

“Five years ago, there were no counterfeit phones,” says Xiong Ting, a sales manager at Triquint Semiconductor, a maker of mobile phone parts, while visiting Shenzhen. “You needed a design house. You needed software guys. You needed hardware design. But now, a company with five guys can do it. Within 100 miles of here, you can find all your suppliers.”

Even Chinese mobile phone producers are losing market share to underground companies, which have a built-in cost advantage because they evade taxes, regulatory fees and safety checks.

There are environmental dangers posed by this black market technology, but their is also a sense of backroom disruptive innovation going on as well.

Some experts say they believe the shanzhai phenomena is about being creative, Chinese style.
“Chinese grass-roots companies are actually very innovative,” says Yu Zhou, a professor at Vassar College. “It’s not so much technology as how they form supply chains and how rapidly they react to new trends.”

Being There, Being Everywhere, Being Where It Counts

2009-05-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

Social media is a the same time both very personal and global in its reach. It provides an opportunity to reach millions, but can connect one-on-one regarding the challenges we face in the world. The two articles below demonstrate the span of influence of this medium, from the poetic to the political. The potential of this medium has not been even glimpsed to my mind. The financial potential is only the tip of the iceberg.

MAGAZINE | February 15, 2009 The Medium: Being There By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN The subtle art of the Facebook update.

“Unlike ALL other walks of life, status updates are the appropriate places for spontaneous bursts of joy and being. You shouldn’t do it at work, you shouldn’t do it in the middle of a conversation, you shouldn’t do it on the street, you shouldn’t turn to a stranger on the bus, you shouldn’t leave it on someone’s cellphone. But on this grand constantly updating Christmas card that we are all free to access or withdraw from at any time, we FINALLY have a polite space for ‘My sponge smells like a hot dog.’ ”

MAGAZINE | January 25, 2009 Revolution, Facebook-Style

As the street protests went on, young Egyptians also were mobilizing and venting their anger over Gaza on what would, until recently, have seemed an unlikely venue: Facebook, the social-networking site. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members.

Boao Focusing on the Financial Crisis from an Asian Perspective

2009-05-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

Although I have a strong tendency to use the New York Times for inspiration for posts, I do read other online newspapers including the China Daily. Although it can be just as or even more slanted it provides a perspective, different from Western journalism, of a rising major economic power. Most of the attention in the West has been on Davos, but Asia has its own economic summit. Both are facing the same issue articulated by the World Bank: Economic crisis turning into calamity.

Boao conference begins with focus on financial crisis

The Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2009 officially opened in Boao, Hainan Province Saturday, focusing on the role of Asian countries amid the global financial crisis.

Here are some other articles featured in the China Daily Wen: Stimulus Package Paying Off $10B ASEAN Fund Banker: IMF Needs Improvement

Reconnecting to Why To Connect

2009-05-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

I have decided to reconnect to why I started this in the first place. It was to learn and share. The learning was whatever interested me with more specific focus on issues being dealt with through the Millennium Development Goals. The sharing was with whomever was interested. It is not going to change the Web 2.0 world, but I was quite happy when Youth for International Human Rights is clicked 61 times, or 36 clicks for the MIT video Technologies Changing Communities, Communities Innovating Technology or 34 clicks for my own post Designing Your Future and Your Success as a Team Effort.

Another aspect of blogging that was enjoyable was seeing people across the globe connect with what I was sharing. People find me through Google. One popular search is "millenium development goals obama", and I take satisfaction that Milestones for a New Millennium comes up on the first page. Another from the UK was "web 2.0 on social impact" at which I was at last look at the number one spot. Now this does not mean I am now taking the Web 2.0 world by storm. Much of this is the fact I focus on areas without much competition, which is unfortunate because they are very worthwhile causes, and luck in choosing the right words.

The other measure is how long people will spend interacting with one of my posts. Most visitors don't even register, though hopefully they read some of it. I figure two minutes on web time, equal to about 20 minutes off-web time indicates some engagement. Somebody spent a couple of minutes at my Making Hope Last Longer Than Hunger that I did for BloggersUnite and then clicked to their site. Which is part of the whole idea, getting others to find interesting, informative and inspiring sites. Somebody from NYU.EDU found my blog Milestones for a New Millennium through Google "Business and human rights: Towards operationalizing the 'protect, respect and remedy' framework", though admittedly not on the first page, and through it connected with the Business and Human Resource Centre. That took them 14 seconds. Somebody in Oklahoma City visited my Milestones for a New Millennium blog. and found TED talks Rethinking Poverty on the site. The trouble has been that I have been getting far fewer of these connections lately and could only come up with a couple of examples to share. That is going to change.

Now a Slacktivist Still Not All That Social of One

2009-05-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

In the beginning the idea was to experiment with this blog to see what could be learned. A good deal was learned including the fact that I enjoyed doing it. Those lessons were then applied to a new blog. Again, it was a matter of learning and sharing those discoveries which was also found to be enjoyable.

Part of the sharing was connecting with other people. Currently I am on Facebook, Orkut, Bloggers Unite, BlogCatalog, Change.org and a number of other communities. Now I am still not all that social. I am a nice person, cordial and all, but getting a thousand Facebook or Orkut friends is not a main objective, even though I have met many very good and caring people. I will usually friend anybody who asks unless it is blatantly obvious that it is just a sales pitch. I will even friend those with subtle sales pitches, be they market oriented or political causes. I just don't spend any time looking for people. I connect with the idea first then the people.

Lately though, I find myself being drawn into the world to the Slacktivist. I do believe that there is a place for Slacktivists in the Web 2.0 Activist World. They are, we are, an essential part of the collective wisdom to bring about change. The professional activists are not going to do it without us. The problem is that it starts replacing the original focus of what I was doing which was learning and creating my own paradigms instead of clicking to respond to somebody else's. I know have 178 action invitations of the whole spectrum of causes. This are from very good people, but it does not leave any time for why I started all of this. So I am reasserting some balance and will begin making my blogs the main focus again.

Using Technology To Help People Change Their Own Community

2009-04-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 and the Internet are a new medium, but they are not an end in themselves. At some point all of this has to come off of the computer screen and go on to the streets. This is all of little use if it only applies virtually to Second Life worlds. MIT has had a number of conferences and seminars on the use of the Web for community building but this particular one is a bit more person on person in its approach. The authentic voice is from the community, helping to find and express that voice can be assisted using the tools of Web 2.0.

Technologies Changing Communities, Communities Innovating Technology | MIT World
“With community-based media projects, you must believe with all of your heart that people in that community have the best knowledge of anyone in the world about their own community.”
Alexa Mills
tags: innovating, MIT, colab, community-planning
- The best way to help a community help itself, say Dayna Cunningham and Alexa Mills, is to enable its members to find their voices and talk to each other. In several projects in the U.S. and overseas, the two speakers are developing methodologies for enabling communities to express and define themselves, so they may become more engaged in a larger civic and political process.
Colab | About
tags: colab, MIT, innovation, community-planning, innovator
- The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for research and practice within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).
  CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities to deepen civic engagement, improve community practice, inform policy, mobilize community assets, and generate shared wealth.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Spending a few minutes of Caring (again) about Social Enterprise -

2009-04-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

One of the original pathways to be explored through this blog was Social Entrepreneurship. I have not explored this area to any great extent for some time, but below are some links I ran across over the last few months. Even though my other blog focuses on the United Nation Millennium Development Goals, it will still be Social Entrepreneurs who will come up with many if not most of the on-the-ground solutions.

Sam Davidson back on February 9, 2009 wrote about being On Board the Social Enterprise.

He links to Wikipedia for a definition of social entrepreneurship and provides one of his own.

This rapidly growing sector is comprised of businesses, individuals and organizations who are actively working to make the world a better place by making sure that they contribute to positive social actions and ideas such as the triple bottom line.

He recommended spending five minutes today reading about social entrepreneurship, and finding a social enterprise to support.

I haven't touched upon this area for a good long while and so will hopefully be spending more than 5 minutes exploring what is out there. Sam uses Wikipedia again to define the triple bottom line. Here is another one from the Dictionary of Sustainable Management.

An addition of social and environmental values to the traditional economic measures of a corporation or organization's success. Triple Bottom Line accounting attempts to describe the social and environmental impact of an organization's activities, in a measurable way, to its economic performance in order to show improvement or to make evaluation more in-depth. There are currently few standards for measuring these other impacts, however. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

The are a number of other definitions, one featured on my other blog is What is a Social Entrepreneur? | Ashoka.org

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Social Entrepreneurship from the Free Management Library

"Nonprofits have to recognize that they're businesses, not just causes. There's a way to combine the very best of the not-for-profit, philanthropic world with the very best of the for-profit, enterprising world. This hybrid is the wave of the future for both profit and nonprofit companies."-- From "Genius At Work" - an interview with Bill Strickland, CEO of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild and the Bidwell Training Center Inc.

Social Entrepreneurship - Change.org provides a Primer on Social Entrepreneurship

That said, it's possible to paint a broad outline of the field based on current practices. Organizations driven by social entrepreneurs (often referred to as "social enterprises") tend to draw strategies from both the for-profit and non-profit sectors and often harness specific economic opportunities in their pursuit of social value. They employ earned income strategies to fund their activities, emphasize social impact measurement, and generally focus on achieving "scale," or adapting their model to a variety of contexts. Perhaps most importantly, social entrepreneurs tend to desire not only to meet a specific social need, but change the way those needs are met, in general.

There is a tremendous amount of information out there on the Web, it is just a matter of getting the time to get to it and digest it.

The Long Tail - Stretching to make Free Profitable

2009-04-27T06:07:00.000-07:00

One of the economic concepts explored previously by this website is that of the Long Tail. It is one of a number of concepts being studied in an attempt to understand how sustainable development and businesses might function. If businesses do not maximize profits by selling with exclusivity to their richest clients or mass marketing to the fairly affluent middle and lower classes, how to they keep in business? Is there a "market" to be found at the bottom billion or does that require a non-ending program of government handouts whether at the local or global level? Bottom-line question can a business model be created out of giving things away for free?

CHRIS ANDERSON, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, and the author of "The Long Tail" and "Free," which will be published in July, explores the concept of The Economics of Giving It Away in this WSJ.com article.

In a battered economy, free goods and services online are more attractive than ever. So how can the suppliers make a business model out of nothing?

The Importance Getting a Single Message from a Social Media Network

2009-04-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about how organizations, and especially what I call change-agent organizations, can use Web 2.0 tools to get their message across with the greatest impact. This combines both marketing and organizational concerns. Social Media involves networks and groups but the agents are still individuals. How individuals collaborate within a group will define the message of that group.

Scott Briscoe on 11/3/08 wrote the article The headline was a no brainer in Acronym. His article links to how it read on The Washington Post website.

"Online social networking sites, or socnets, are changing how people get their political news.

Scott's point, "What the article made me think about was that it's one thing to believe that change is occurring, it's quite another to be doing something about it — what are associations doing about it?"

If political advocacy is a major part of your mission, do you know the quantity and quality of the involvement of people affiliated with your organization in social media? Are they pushing forward ideas that synch with your organization? ... How are you training members to get involved in these areas? The circle of people who are engaging in these online communities has grown too large, and the circle who read without engaging is also larger still. ... In 2008, it's too numerous to count in both large and small ways. ... The next page is already beginning to turn; you need to make sure your organization has something to say about what is written on it.

Relate Posts:

Economic CPR with Web 2.0 Help or Hurt?

2009-04-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

We have an ever evolving relationship with the Internet and Web 2.0, as individuals, as societies and perhaps as change-agent organizations. What the relationship is depends to a great largely, though not always, on how old you are and what is more important where you live. Below are a series of articles from the New York Times and other sources that I have run across over the last month or so.

At Harvard Business Voices Tom Davenport asks the question that seems to be asked by many of my generation, Is Web 2.0 Living on Thin Air?

I have highlighted some points from the article to get to the meat of his argument.

Instead of finding more ways for us to all yap at each other, in this more sober economy we may want to emphasize other priorities. What new products and services will make for better, healthier lives and relationships? How can companies improve their performance? How can teenagers improve their math and science skills, instead of their texting skills?

But it wouldn't be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate. Chatting and socializing are important things, but they're not the only things.

Tamar Lewin's New York Times article makes a counter argument that Millennials are OK and that Teenagers' Internet Socializing is Not a Bad Thing US | November 20, 2008

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

Hanging out online helps teenagers develop "technological skills and literacy," a researcher Mizuko Itoon a new study “Living and Learning With New Media.” said“...their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

What is interesting me more these days is how this works socially to empower people. Because it does have the potential to empower people, governments are wary of it. NOAM COHEN discussed on December 08, 2008, in Link by Link: The Freedoms That Technologies Help Bring. The issue was the Egyptian government demand that Apple disable the phone's global-positioning system, because GPS is a military prerogative.

Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights program of Human Rights Watch, placed the issue in a larger context.

(F)reedom of information as part of the broader, better known, freedom of expression. Transparency about the government’s budget, for example, can be crucial to eliminating corruption and instituting democratic reforms.

(S)econd, he argued that it was important for technology companies to set principles and follow them. “Here is the big question for Apple: Is this an ad-hoc approach or is there a fundamental policy, balancing the freedom of expression and information with the demands of the government?”

The global perspective in regards to economic impact came on November 18, 2008 from ASHLEE VANCE who looked at Computing From Weather to Warcraft

The falling cost of supercomputer systems has allowed a broader range of corporations and institutions to buy them for everything from processing movie graphics to searching for oil.

The presence of supercomputers in emerging nations like China and India says as much about those countries’ growing national ambitions as the changing state of science and business.

Change-agent organizations must and are becoming a part of this new frontier. The question of whether to change is now moot, it is already happening. Defining the change is now the task. There are many seemingly well-established institutions in existence today that are not making the transition which will, I predict, find themselves floundering when younger and smaller institutions use these resources to define the agenda. This in itself is not that illuminating as many others have said the same thing, it is that I work for one of those well-established institutions.

Penelope Trunk Takes the Pressure Off

2009-04-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, OK day before yesterday, Penelope Trunk had a post on Reality check: You're not going to make money from your blog in Blogging, Journalism. I don't follow anyone with twitter-like devotion, but I find a good deal of useful insight reading Penelope.

Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. It's so unlikely that it's a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. It's not. Blogging is a great career tool for creating opportunities for yourself. But here are eight reasons you should stop thinking about money from blogging:

Personally, I am glad she is taking the pressure off. Besides, this blog was never right for making money. I follow pathways that interest me, not the market. I am inconsistent in doing posts and I do more re-editing and reformatting than actual writing since I am basically passing along information I found interesting. Below in bullet points are her reasons and why I agree.

1. Big bloggers come from big media.
Most big bloggers today have a strong background writing for print.

I do try to make my writing at least passable, even it mean coming back again after a few days to make corrections, but I do not consider myself a professional writer. The fact that I get visitors through the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant (links now repaired at left hand column) helps me to pay more attention than I might otherwise.

2. Sure, there are exceptions. But you're probably not one of them.

If we desire that blogs and networks become part of the democratic infrastructure, does it make sense that only the exceptions participate? There are easily over 5 million sites and blogs out there, but 5 million works nicely because it means the first million are the top 20%. According to Alex.com there are a number of blogs, this one included, between the 1,000,000 mark and the 500,000 mark. They may not have the impact of the top 1% like Google and Techcrunch individually, but in aggregate I believe that they can have an impact with venues such as Bloggers Unite For Hunger And Hope or Blog Action Day.

3. Even if you can do it, supporting yourself with a blog is crazy hard.
Blogging to support yourself is a complete full-time job.

When my life gets complicated blogging is the first thing to go, well maybe not the first, but it drops way down the list. I started this two days ago. Recently I have had thoughts as to how this could work for local communities, but I am hesitant knowing the commitment needed to make it work.

4. You probably have to be controversial to make money blogging.
And if you are making good money from your blog, you'll have hundreds of people telling you how you're an idiot. Do you want that? Really?

I find online arguments, unless done by professionals in the field, tedious. I am not interested in proving any point. I would much rather find some new avenue of inquiry to pursue.

5. You can make more money flipping burgers.

I don't flip burgers and I make far more than I could blogging. Even if I made it a component of my work life it would not add to my bottom line. It does have value both for myself and I believe, in aggregate with others in the blogosphere, for the world.

6. Please shut up about your book deal.

OK, would you believe movie deal, how about cable?

7. Blog for better reasons than money.
In the book, Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, Stephane Grenier asked forty bloggers what their definition of blogging success is.

Penelope also tells us about gaining the other benefits of blogging for your career. I am becoming to believe more in the idea of small voice blogs of which I am one.

8. Banner advertising is the mafia.

I actually pretty well suck at this monetize stuff , maybe from lack of really trying, but I have other objectives when I do this.

New Pathways Throughout Southern California

2009-04-19T14:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent the morning at Caltech for the Angling in the Sea of Social Networks: The Future of Venturing in the Community Internet.

The session included: User Community Keynote: Doc Searls

Senior Editor, Linux Journal
Chair of ProjectVRM and Berkman Fellow at Harvard University
Recipient of 2005 Google/O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator
Co-Author, “Cluetrain Manifesto”.

All the speakers were good and I attained a good deal of insight into social media and am rethinking some pathways I was taking in this endeavor. Mainly how fast I can implement this type of system at work.

I did try to elicit some more insight regarding local governments using the Web 2.0 social media universe, but somehow my question either did not register or it is not something that has been thought about to any great extent. I did, however, have a very engaging conversation with one of my fellow audience members. Engaging because I got to go on a long spiel about my perspective as a city economic development professional and using social media for community building purposes and he connected positively to what I was saying as a social web media/marketing professional. This is definitely a pathway I plan to explore more.

In the afternoon I went with family to Otis to help our niece get in. She has attained a full scholarship and is going into Otis Communication Arts - Illustration. So I was able to see the best of California Education from a wide expanse of perspectives. The second trip helped to inform the first trip and get some ideas flowing.

This morning was spent with coffee, croissant and the L.A. Times Sunday paper. Three stories caught my eye in the Images section, Gehry on L.A., art (and Gehry), 'Conversations With Frank Gehry' by Barbara Isenberg and The Hammer Museum gets together with artists, outside the box; and again this helped to provide more ideas to contemplate and pathways to follow. Now I need to let that jumble of ideas settle and percolate a bit.

Some Related Posts:

Assumptions of Living - Good and Bad

2009-04-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

One approach taken in the writing of this blog is finding different ideas on the Internet and see how they can be connected. Sometimes it is obvious, but other times there is just a sense of connection. I found two such sources of interest at TED.

The two TED talks were Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes) - Dan Ariely (2009) and Celebrating work -- all kinds of work - Mike Rowe (2008).

Both speak to our tendency of holding assumptions of how moral we are ourselves , how we perceive others and how those others deal with life, both good and the bad. What helped make the connection was Mike Rowe's tying his observations of the everyday lives of working people to the Aristotelian theory of tragedy. Dan Ariely takes that idea from the level of the individual to the level of community reminding me of the words from Julius Caesar.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves...

Cassius
The Life and Death of Julies Caesar
ACT I.
SCENE II.

China's New and Growing Role at the World Economic Table

2009-03-30T06:50:00.000-07:00

The G20 meeting in London is set for 2 April 2009. One of the relative new and now major participants will be the People's Republic of China. Whatever happens to the World Economy, and therefore to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, will depend to a great extent upon China.

One of my news sources is the China Daily. I took a look over the last couple of weeks to see what they were putting out as news worthy in terms of world economics.

To a great extent they pull what they want from the same sources as we do. Which can mean that their information is as conflicted as ours is, depending upon who is talking.

China Daily (Xinhua) Updated: 2009-03-19 23:07
IMF: World economy to shrink in 2009, first time in 60 years

WASHINGTON - The world economy is expected to contract in 2009 for the first time in 60 years as advanced economies will shrink sharply, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday.

In the analysis, the IMF called on G20 governments to take steps to relieve their financial systems of distressed assets and free up credit.

"Turning around global growth will depend critically on more concerted policy actions to stabilize financial conditions as well as sustained strong policy support to bolster demand," the IMF said.

For a different perspective

China Daily (Agencies) Updated: 2009-03-18 16:46
ECB chief: Growth may resume in 2010

PARIS - European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet said Wednesday that economic growth could resume next year, although 2009 will be "very, very difficult." "2010 could be the year of a moderate resumption of growth, but that depends on us," he said on France's Europe-1 radio.

He said an economic recovery depends on the confidence of governments, businesses and consumers. "The essential problem is not to make predictions in an uncertain world, it is to find confidence again," Trichet said.

That seems to be saying that our only problem is that we have a bad attitude. Others have written about the Europeans refusal to follow President Obama's economic strategy. China seems to be willing to participate with the IMF, but on its own terms. It seems that China now as a far greater ability to set its own terms than it did in the last century.

By Zheng Lifei (China Daily) Updated: 2009-03-28 08:42
Vice Premier: China will aid IMF bond scheme

China is ready to buy bonds issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) if the multilateral financial institution's quota-based contributions fall short of immediate needs, Vice-Premier Wang Qishan wrote in a Friday article for the London Times newspaper.

In an article titled "G20 must look beyond the needs of the top 20", Wang said the IMF should set the scale of contributions by per-capita GDP rather than the size of a country's foreign exchange reserves.

"It is neither realistic nor fair to set the scale of contribution simply by the size of foreign exchange reserves," he wrote, "China is ready to play an active part in exploring ways to raise resources and will contribute to this effort within its ability. We hold that the IMF should mobilize resources through the quota-based system as well as voluntary contributions, striking a balance between the rights and obligations of the contributing countries."

Links to Related China Daily Articles

Blogging to Save the World from My Laptop

2009-03-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

One topic I keep repeatedly going over is why I blog. The basic reason was as a learning tool, which I learned was readily shared with others, which I found I enjoyed doing. My other blog was created in part to apply what I had or was learning to a worthwhile cause.I picked the Millennium Development Goals because I was impressed with the cause and the people who are associated with it. It also provides the maximum potential leverage for my efforts - blogging to Save the World.

Now that brings up the potential of being labeled a slacktivist because my BrianDRPM persona does all of its activism online. The trouble, if you can call it that, is that the more you explore, the more you get drawn in by the good work that is being done by so many others. I do find my conflicted about so many doing good works on-the-ground while I merely provide some minimal support through this blog.

My real life/day job persona does have the potential of doing some good for the community for which I work, but I do think about leaving city government after retirement (which is not that far away) to perhaps work for a nonprofit. Yet I can't help but thinking that Web 2.0 will play a larger role in non-profit activism in the future. Even from that perspective there is still a great deal to learn but fortunately many to learn from.

Those internal conflicts aside, it does seem that Web 2.0 is not only taking a greater role in defining activism, especially global activism, but the this online global activism is redefining or reformulating how we use Web 2.0. So the question seems to be, how do we make Web 2.0 an optimal tool for the causes we wish to support and how do we use it do define our own roles in those efforts?

The efforts of one of my Orkut friends and the person who was essential in putting together the Stand Up and Take Action Against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals campaign in India is summarized below.

He is also competing in the India Yahoo UnCannies and has been nominated under the online advertising category.

Stand UP Take ACTION - social media for social change

View more presentations from Rupesh Mandal

I also checked out some of the competition on Alexa.com.

Adultdost.com has a traffic rank of: 203,381
Pixtelevision.com has a traffic rank of: 187,730
Endpoverty2015.org has a traffic rank of: 268,934

Innovation versus Idiots How to stay on the right road

2009-03-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Still catching up with some of the older pending posts in my draft bin. Found some from Harvard Business Publishing, especially this one by Bill Taylor.

The article of particular interest was Wisdom of Warren Buffett: On Innovators, Imitators, and Idiots in which he provides a hour-long television interview with Buffett in which he talks about the "natural progression" of how good new ideas go wrong. The "three I's":

Innovators, who see opportunities that others don't.
Imitators, who copy what the innovators have done.
Idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich.

Taylor tells us that, the problem, in other words, isn't with innovation -- it's with the idiocy that follows.

So how do we as individuals (not to mention as companies and societies) continue to embrace the value-creating upside of creativity while guarding against the value-destroying downsides of imitation? The answer, it seems to me, is about values--about always being able to distinguish between that which is smart and that which is expedient. And that takes discipline. Can you distinguish between a genuine innovation and a mindless imitation? Are you prepared to walk away from ideas that promise to make money, even if they make no sense?

So if Buffet warns us of the path to economic destruction, but what do we need to do to keep on the right road? Scott Anthony provides another insightful post, again from Harvard Business Publishing in which he discuses the Three Steps to Innovating in Struggling Industries.

Lower the cost of testing.
Creatively tap into outside resources.
Ruthlessly prune the portfolio.

Entrepreneurship Opportunities through Science

2009-03-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

I have been digging through my older and almost forgotten pending draft posts and found some that I still think worthwhile posting. Sometime ago, November 2, 2008, JANET RAE-DUPREE wrote in the Unboxed feature of the New York BUSINESS section Times warning us that It's No Time to Forget About Innovation. The main point of the article and the book is that we need to do some long term thinking. This blog allows me to do some meta-thinking about many of the issues discussed in my Milestones for a New Millennium, as well as those being dealt with in my real life/day job such as economic, entrepreneurship, social-entrepreneurship and innovation.

The sour economy is bad news for corporate innovation and technology, and it could spell trouble for years to come.

“We’re focusing on the short term and we’re not planting the seeds for the future,” says Judy Estrin, former chief technology officer at Cisco Systems and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap.” She suggests instilling five core values to entrench innovation in the corporate mind-set:
questioning,
risk-taking,
openness,
patience and
trust.
All five must be used together — risk-taking without questioning leads to recklessness, she says, while patience without trust sets up an every-man-for-himself mentality.

That still leaves open the question of how do we take the innovative idea on the napkin to commercialization in the market place? These video from MIT World » : Innovation to Commercialization: Using Government Funding to Kick Start Your Start-Up provide some possible pathways.

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION: Hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum, moderator Bruce Gellerman elicits some key dos and don’ts from a National Science Foundation small business program officer, and from tech CEOs who have benefited from the government’s programs.

The MIT Enterprise Forum, Inc. builds connections to technology entrepreneurs and to the communities in which they reside. The Enterprise Forum produces a series of educational programs about entrepreneurship through a network of 24 worldwide chapters. Anyone interested in or involved with technology entrepreneurship is welcome to participate and join together to form the Enterprise Forum community.

The primary objective of the NSF SBIR/STTR Program is to increase the incentive and opportunity for small firms to undertake cutting-edge, high risk, high quality scientific, engineering, or science/engineering education research that would have a high potential economic payoff if the research is successful.

diigo tags MIT, entrepreneurship, National Science Foundation, technology, global, science, SBIR

Still 50 ways to better social media

2009-03-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

This blog started off exploring pathways into the world of Web 2.0 and found a myriad of pathways available through social media which involves learning, experimenting and then using either here or at my other blog Milestones for a New Millennium.

One source of information, insight and inspiration that I discovered during these web-explorations is ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership and their blog Acronym which has been a source of posts for this blog. This particular post by Kristin Clarke was done last year, but the 50 Ways to Use Social Media for Better Marketing still works (I will bypass any discussion of procrastination). Kristin reblogged something that Chris Brogan did, so this is a re-re-blogged post. I could have just connected to the Chris Brogan post, but I wanted to let people know about ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership. I think, as someone who is still learning, that it is worthwhile to remind ourselves of these points when trying to create a media program that takes advantage of the web's connectivity.

I am a longtime fan of the interesting e-newsletter by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and one reason is because of its practical how-to and trends coverage. Check out this succinct piece titled "50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing" by Chris Brogan from the July 14, 2008, WOMMA newsletter. This would make a great education session sometime, now that I think about it. Feel free to post other tips.

50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the next level is another useful post on social media from Chris Brogan.

Technology, Design and especially Entertainment from TED

2009-03-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

The following came from TED for the Week of March 13, 2009. This is another example or re-blogging what somebody else has done. The reason is that I find it all interesting, and at some level interrelated. I am adding a few more links to what the TEDBlog originally provided. This blog is primarily an exploration in what Tim Berners-Lee created and what has grown from it. What he says about numbers will have a profound impact on the world as demonstrated by some of the links to my Milestones for a New Millennium blog.

This blog has also discovered an interest in design and in the MIT Media Lab. Don Norman's three emotional design cues are Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective. Instead of Don Norman's site, when I Googled "design and emotion", with and without the "and" I got Design & Emotion Society. When I did "emotion and design", the Don Norman site was third and design & emotion - Marco van Hout site was first, regardless of the "and". So things can and do change and the exploring is fun. You will understand what this is all about when you watch the video. Below are the selected videos from the TED site.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, music and video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. Watch this talk >>

This demo from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT Media Lab, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry, was the buzz of TED -- and now the web. It's a device that enables a profound, data-rich interaction with our environment. Imagine Minority Report and then some. Watch this talk >>

PLUS: The TED Blog talks to Pranav Mistry (and he answers questions from the TED.com forum!)

Design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at well-designed products that makes people happy, from fast cars to the Philippe Starck juicer. He names the three emotional cues that a product must strike to become a success. Watch this talk >>

Some Related links:

Human Development - The Measurement of Human Endeavors

Understanding a dollar a day could be an invaluable resource for the Millennium Development Goals

Taking the Measure of Chronic Poverty

Simply the Best: Maeda’s the Man at RISD

Making A Come Back - Does This Mean Design Is Not Dead?

Lesson From Philippe Starck "Design Is Dead" Lesson From Hugh MacLeod "The Future Isn't"

Designing What We Live In, Where We Live At , How We Live

Designing For New Paradigms

Avaaz asks Help Free Aung San Suu Kyi

2009-03-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

The following is taken directly from the Avaaz email that was sent to me. Burma, which to me is preferable to Myanmar, has provided both insights and inspiration for this blog and Milestones for a New Millennium. Many times though it is just a matter of helping to get the word out. I am only going to reach a small number of people, but if everyone kept passing this along awareness would increase exponentially. They were at 143,838 participants supporting the Burmese when I signed up. Help them get to 888,888.

Free Burma's Political Prisoners Now! from FBPPN on Vimeo.

Dear friends,

Burma's peaceful pro democracy activists are calling on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to secure the release of political prisoners. Stand with them -

Sign the petition

Burmese pro democracy leader and Nobel peace prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, has spent 13 years detained by the Burmese military junta. She and thousands of fellow monks and students have been imprisoned for bravely challenging their brutal regime with calls for democracy. This week a glimmer of hope has risen for their release, and it's time for us to stand with them.

Risking danger to speak out for their jailed friends, Burmese activists this week demanded the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners and called on the world to help. As the global economic crisis makes aid flows more essential, Burma's generals are becoming more vulnerable to international pressure, but we need a flood of petition signatures to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to make this a top priority. Follow the link to sign the petition, and forward this email on to make sure she and her fellow prisoners are freed:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/free_burma_political_prisoners

The Burmese organizers have set a goal of 888,888 signatures. The number 8 is powerful in Burmese culture, and the ruling junta is extremely superstitious - such a large and significant number might have a special influence on them. But this issue isn't in the headlines, so to build our numbers we need to forward this email and persuade our friends to help.

Aung San Suu Kyi is the international face of the struggle for democracy in Burma. She has been detained over and over again since 1988. She is now under house arrest and is allowed no contact with the outside world.

But growing international pressure is working -- In December, 112 former Presidents and Prime Ministers from 50 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging him to press for the release of all political prisoners, and 20 political prisoners were released in February after a United Nations envoy visited the country.

Sources now say that the military regime is fearful of this unified and massive online call to the UN -- over 160 Burma exile and solidarity groups in 24 countries are participating in the campaign. But it will take all of us and all our friends signing this petition to get Mr Ban's attention. Avaaz has done it before for Burma – we can do it again. Click here to stop the arrests and brutality:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/free_burma_political_prisoners

This is one of those times where if enough of us act we can truly make a difference. Let's join the courageous Burmese democracy activists in jail and in hiding and help end this violent repression.

In hope and solidarity,

Alice, Ricken, Pascal, Graziela, Veronique, Iain, Paul, Luis, Paula, Brett and the whole Avaaz team

For more about the Global Campaign visit:
http://www.fbppn.net/?page_id=582

For more about Burmese political prisoners visit:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46118

Article on torture in Burmese jails:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010201865.html

Some prisoners release after UN envoy visit February 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/22/AR2009022201188.html

Letter from former presidents:
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/index.php/burma/news/Letter-from-112-Former-Presidents-and-Prime-Ministers-to-UN-Secretary-Gener

For more about Aung San Suu Kyi visit:
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/aboutburma/aung_san_suu_kyi.htm

--------------

ABOUT AVAAZ Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people inform global decision-making. (Avaaz means "voice" in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money from governments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based in Ottawa, London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Buenos Aires, and Geneva. Call us at: +1 888 922 8229 or +55 21 2509 0368 Click here to learn more about our largest campaigns. Don't forget to check out our Facebook and Myspace and Bebo pages!

Making Change Making More Change Bit by Bit

2009-03-20T07:34:00.000-07:00

One pathway of exploration that this blog has taken me is global health delivery. It was initially an interest in how business management systems could improve the efficiencies of social beneficial delivery systems such as global health. It has been a fairly frequent topic of contemplation both here and at Milestones for a New Millennium. Over time I have become interested in participating, first by blogging about the Millennium Development Goals, participating in collective actions such as BlogAction Day Against Poverty and BloggersUnite for Refugees and World AIDs Day, and now by participating with Change.org and creating a fundraising page for FightAIDSTuberculosisMalaria. There is still the internal conflict of having so much to do with the "Real World/Day Job" and not relegating one's self to mere slacktivist mode. Below is the more or less official pitch.

Hello,

I am raising money for FightAIDSTuberculosisMalaria.

Please take a moment to visit my online fundraising page and make a donation. It's really easy - you can donate by credit card and receive an immediate tax receipt for your donation.

Thanks and best wishes,
Brian

Here's my page:

http://www.change.org/myfundraising/FightAIDSTuberculosisMalaria

Collaboration As Management Tool= Management as Collaboration Tool

2009-03-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

The group Cool Tools & Ed Tech at Diigo.com introduced me to this article on Explaining Collaboration to Learners. The original source was found at cmduke's EdTechatouille. Although the article is geared toward the educational field, this blog takes the perspective that we are all learners.

Collaboration vs. Cooperation

A cooperative effort usually helps make up for a lack of time or resources; many people work on the task since it would take one person much longer to accomplish it. Dr. Reeves described cooperation as “divide and conquer.” Ultimately though, given time and resources, one person could run an entire assembly line single-handedly.

Collaboration means something very different. In contrast to cooperation, collaboration is more than simply making a contribution to the work effort. In a collaborative workspace, people amplify one another; the good work of one person magnifies the work of another. Individuals enhance the impact of contributions by others on the team; interaction and communication are necessary.

I have basically made bullets below out of the concepts dealt with more throughly in the article.

Apply Key Principles of Improv

“Accept every offer.”
“Make your partner look good.”
“plus something.”
“This is what I have, what can I add to it? How do I make my partner look good?”
Focus on how you can contribute to the conversation.

Be Interested, Not interesting - it’s more important

to be *interested* than it is to be *interesting*
the person that’s interested contributes a great deal more.
an interested person is curious about solutions other than the first one suggested.
An interested person is more concerned about the process than their role in it.
An interested person does more to amplify the people around them.

Communicate, Not Transmit

Communication is more than simple transmission.
Effective communication inherently involves translation, and the
Translation must be done by the communicator, not the listener.

The next set of bullets were lifted directly from the article

So, what do learners need to know to better understand what collaboration really means?

Collaboration absolutely requires the participation of two or more people; if you could accomplish the work by yourself, you’re cooperating, not collaborating.
Collaboration Is enhanced by “accepting every offer” and “making your partner look good.” Focus on what you can add to what others have suggested rather than revising or fixing their ideas or solutions.
Collaboration is facilitated by group members that focus on being *interested* rather than being *interesting* - be curious about others’ ideas, explore the possibilities, enjoy the process rather than focusing to quickly on the outcome.
Collaboration demands bi-directional communication in which your ideas are shaped by the ideas of others; you must work to make sure your ideas are comprehensible.

Diggo Tags:cooperation collaboration

Designing Your Future and Your Success as a Team Effort

2009-03-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

This blog does not depend on late breaking news, though posts are often put out late. Back on October 17, 2008 in the Acronym blog post Design and choice, Blogger Lisa Junker asked Rohit Talwar about the title of the new book he and his company collaborated with ASAE & The Center on, Designing Your Future:

Q: What do you think it means for an association to design its future?

We deliberately chose the word "design," because design is all about making a series of choices, about form, about functionality, and about how you assemble the components. That was very much what we wanted to get the associations thinking about--a design-led approach rather than a formula-led approach. The nature of design is, you ask yourself a lot of questions on the journey, and you make a lot of choices. So, we wanted [association executives] to think about that and to recognize that this was all about making choices, asking yourselves tough questions about every aspect of what you do and then making choices about how you're going to respond. That's why we chose this notion of designing your future rather than implying there was simply a future to be chosen. You could create it, and you have the power to create it.

Rohit Talwar's thoughts seemed to combine well in my mind with Sam Davidson's, A Thought on Leadership: Defining Success. The inspiration for these thoughts goes even further back to August 27, 2008 from The Other Side of the Pillow - Official CoolPeopleCare.org Blog.

Sam Davidson wrote that everyone knows what it looks like when we're successful. What I am finding greater connection with is the concept at CoolPeopleCare, that one key metric for success is the depth of stories that emerge from our work.

We are successful when we hear from people about how our content, products and resources have helped them change the world. Therefore, we all work towards this end, each of us doing our part, performing our tasks in order to help others make a difference. That's the same page we're all on. And we all know it.

What happens many times is that people would be on the same page, if they only knew what that page looked like. Therefore, there's a deep need right when organizations form or start a new leadership cycle to have a candid and open discussion about how success is defined.

Are there any organizations like this in the real world of business? I came back to these concepts because of recent changes in my career and because I discovered one particular exemplar for what has been termed distributive leadership. The MIT Sloan School of Management invited Terri Kelly, President & CEO, W.L. Gore & Associates, who:

provides insights into the W.L. Gore Company, and explains its unique culture that encourages experimentation, risk taking and taking the long view Nurturing a Vibrant Culture to Drive Innovation.

The idea of leading by design through the creation of a common story that defines a role of beneficial change in the world rings true with me and will be explored further.

News from AAAS Chicago meeting: In-Depth Reporting From Scientific American:

2009-03-02T19:18:00.000-08:00

This blog features links to both the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and to Scientific America in the right hand column under Science & SciAm Magazines. Scientific American Newsletters recently sent me an update combining both of these resources. The main link is provided below along with links to some of the articles of interest to this blog and my other blog Milestones for a New Millennium. Starting off though is the video blog from Science News. I especially enjoyed the insights regarding Digg.

In-Depth Report: News from AAAS

At AAAS, Al Gore urges scientists to get involved in climate change debate
"Keep your day jobs, but get involved in the debate," the former vice president said
Climate Change Erodes Marine Reserves
Shifting species may mean less protection for imperiled fisheries
Rise in Malaria Rates, Drug Resistance Tied to Climate
At AAAS, a researcher describes how treating more people for the mosquito-borne parasite could lead to more resistance to drugs
Massive effort underway to save endangered seeds
In many cases, only a handful of seeds remain from rare varieties of barley, rice and wheat whose history can be traced back to the Neolithic era
Global warming seen worse than predicted
IPCC member Chris Field says "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report

It has been a while since I have explored these resources for new ideas and that has been a detriment for me. While it is not blind faith, I still have a great deal of confidence in addressing many of the problems we face today through technology and science, more on that in the future.

New Paradigms Crossing Paths Science and Religion

2009-02-21T13:42:00.000-08:00

This journey was started to find new paradigms. The endeavor to find new paradigms has taken this blog through a number of different new pathways. Two, which are often seen as conflicting, but which both help us to define ourselves are science and religion. Both of the sources cited here are open-minded in their approach. The contrast is enlightening and some commonality can be found even from those who strongly espouse one view or the other.

Edward O. Wilson

Host Robert Wright talks with E.O. Wilson, a self-defined a materialist, a biological determinist, and a secular-humanist, about his thesis of sociobiology and how the idea that the human mind is shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it is by culture influenced his views intelligent design, free will, and how science and religion can potentially come together in order to save life on earth.

Karen Armstrong in Conversation with Alan Jones

Author of "The Bible: A Biography", Karen Armstrong and Rev. Alan Jones, the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco discuss Armstrong's latest book biblical criticism, biblical literalism, and the Golden Rule. Armstrong provides her interpretation of The Good Book and they also confront the New Atheists who have recently attacked the Abrahamic religions.

Finally, this TED talk featuring one of this years TED Prize winners. Jill Tarter: Astronomer and Director of the SETI Institute provides some new perspectives on our place in the universe.

Jeff Sachs Writes, Tyler Cowen Asks, Wired Warns, Europe Ponders and E.O. Wilson Educates About Biodiversity

YouTube From the Self Indulgent to Global Outreach

2009-02-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

One of the more popular social media tools on the Internet is YouTube, which started off as means for millions to upload self-indulgent videos of themselves, has now become both an information resource tool and a means of connecting with others on social causes. The challenge for those who would use this resource to connect with others, especially new converts, is gaining the trust of those you would use to help disseminate the videos through social sites such as Face Book or MySpace without having to spend a fortune. The New York Times published two stories that deal with these issues.

BUSINESS / MEDIA & ADVERTISING | January 18, 2009

Ping: At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool.
By MIGUEL HELFT

YouTube is rapidly morphing into a popular search engine and a new entry point into the Web.And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. (Google, incidentally, owns YouTube.) In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.

BUSINESS / MEDIA & ADVERTISING | December 14, 2008
Digital Domain: Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites
By RANDALL STROSS

Web advertising experts see a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites.

And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that reported that just 3 percent of Internet users in the United States would willingly let publishers use their friends for advertising. The report described social advertising as “stillborn.”

Change-agent organizations do not have the same goals as companies such as Procter & Gamble. They will face similar issues when attempting to get others to put videos or other social media outlets on their websites.

Youtube, itself, has become more of a social outreach advocate than merely a social gathering site. One example is their work at Davos, the location for the world's latest economic forum.

New Videos from the Davos Question

Advanced Blogging For Business (& fledgling activists) Tips - HubSpot

2009-01-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

One of my current interest is exploring how to leverage social media for social causes such as supporting the Millennium Development Goals. Although the target audience of the presentation below is business, the lesson to be learned can still be applied to change-agent organizations.

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Advanced Blogging For Business Tips - HubSpot

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: blog business)

Branding as Commodity Finding Connection Through Leadership

2008-12-28T16:59:00.000-08:00

Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, wrote in the early part of this year on The Shrinking Advantage of Brands in Harvard Business Publishing. His definition is not universally accepted, as can be determined from the comments section of the piece, but it does give me some ideas regarding social media and collaboration.

His definition: What is a brand? It’s a promise: information from a firm promising you a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of a good or service. Brands shape your expected value.

As I posted in my other blog, I have been having an ongoing discussion of leveraging social media on behalf of the Millennium Development Goals in one of the End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA forums. What the discussion comes down to in my mind is, does one both lead and empower through social media in raising consciousness about a social cause and how? Branding a social cause can either be an empowering exercise or a form of propaganda.

What is different from Haque's definition of branding compared to others is that he seems to see it, at least orthodox branding, as an iconic devise used to synthesis the costs and benefits into one object, phrase or idea. The interaction costs are so inexpensive with Google or other online tools, it makes it easier for consumers to find the information that they seek, especially from each other. "The cheaper interaction gets, the more connected consumers can talk to each other – and the less time they have to spend listening to the often empty promises of firms." Haque's point is that information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into orthodox branding logos, or slogans because your audience can debate and discuss their expected values in detail. The trouble is that for social causes most don't, they only connect passively.

Seth's Blog also had a post on the rapid growth (and destruction) and growth of marketing back in October of this year. Seth realizes something that Haque left out in his article which is that brands can also provide a vehicle for social emotion and connection, but it is a vehicle in to which the audience can imbue social emotion and connection rather than depending upon someone else to "feed" it to them.

Social media, it turns out, isn't about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.

The next day Seth's Blog had a post on Leadership is now the strongest marketing strategy. He again "markets" his new book on leadership called Tribes from the post the day before. He thinks of his leadership book as actually being a marketing book and vice-a-versa. According to Seth, "The next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere."

What works is leading. Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they'd like to go. Connecting them to one another. It's enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you. It's enough if your leadership changes things, galvanizes the audience and puts the status quo under stress. And it's enough if the leadership you provide makes a difference.

It is easier to be merely broadcasters, putting together a list of iconic branding devises and hurtling it out at hoped for followers. Louder is easier not better. According to Seth, "People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting. Now we're leaders." It is not, however, the definition of leader in the orthodox sense. Claiming leadership regarding the branding of a cause can be a matter of hazardous hubris, both the branding and leadership require a high degree of authenticity.

It seems to be to be a matter of encouraging collaboration by first providing information, education and then following with avenues of action, but realizing that everybody else can and at least a small group should be doing the same thing. How to encourage them to do so around a specific branded cause may be the true role of leadership. How to specifically do that is still a matter to be further explored .

SAUDADES SERENDIPITY

2008-12-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

I wrote before about being part of the Orkut group End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA and about accepting the small pages status of my blogs. Part of the reason is that there are greater opportunities for sojourns into serendipity. A friend Ju from Orkut by way of Brazil recently led me on such a sojourn and into some small insights into his culture.

Um dia a maioria de nós irá se separar. Sentiremos saudades de todas as conversas jogadas fora, as descobertas que fizemos, dos sonhos que tivemos, dos tantos risos e momentos que compartilhamos...

Saudades até dos momentos de lágrima, da angústia, das vésperas de finais de semana, de finais de ano, enfim... do companheirismo vivido... Sempre pensei que as amizades continuassem para sempre...

Hoje não tenho mais tanta certeza disso. Em breve cada um vai pra seu lado, seja pelo destino, ou por algum desentendimento, segue a sua vida, talvez continuemos a nos encontrar, quem sabe... nos e-mails trocados...

Podemos nos telefonar... conversar algumas bobagens. Aí os dias vão passar... meses... anos... até este contato tornar-se cada vez mais raro. Vamos nos perder no tempo...

Um dia nossos filhos verão aquelas fotografias e perguntarão: Quem são aquelas pessoas? Diremos que eram nossos amigos. E... isso vai doer tanto!!! Foram meus amigos, foi com eles que vivi os melhores anos de minha vida!

A saudade vai apertar bem dentro do peito. Vai dar uma vontade de ligar, ouvir aquelas vozes novamente... Quando o nosso grupo estiver incompleto... nos reuniremos para um último adeus de um amigo. E entre lágrima nos abraçaremos...

Faremos promessas de nos encontrar mais vezes daquele dia em diante. Por fim, cada um vai para o seu lado para continuar a viver a sua vidinha isolada do passado... E nos perderemos no tempo...

Por isso, fica aqui um pedido deste humilde amigo: não deixes que a vida passe em branco, e que pequenas adversidades sejam a causa de grandes tempestades...

Eu poderia suportar, embora não sem dor, que tivessem morrido todos os meus amores... mas enlouqueceria se morressem todos os meus amigos!!!

Vinícius de Moraes

I used Google Translator to go from Portuguese to English and have now made it a permanent widget on this blog, translating the words is only part of it though.

I started by learning more about who was credited with having written the quote (English translation) he sent me. I learned for the first time about Vinicius de Moraes, but I also learned about Fernando Pessoa and found a number of good sites about him, Poetry International Web - Fernando Pessoa and Pessoa's Trunk. Seems that, at least on the web, both men are credited with penning the words.

I am not worried about who actually said it, but it demonstrated to me that those words are a deep part of the Brazilian/Portuguese culture, demonstrating the importance of Friends.

I continued my serendipitous search and found other connections to my Canadian birth and Irish ancestry through some very interesting sites from Germany Biographeme | vita nuova, time4time.blog, onClicknyc · New Media Design and Corporate Design... and most interesting of all Eccentric, which brought me to the Canadian pianist Glen Gould and Irish singer ROISIN MURPHY Fansite. Overpowered, Ruby Blue :: AbsentMinded.

Ju teaches a very important lesson why people take up causes such as the Millennium Development Goals. It is not always to make massive political paradigm shifts but finding personal ways to connect through countless small interactions for a better world. It is through the means of first defining ourselves as the path to redefining the world.

Inform, Engage, and Empower During Your Freetime

2008-12-22T14:30:00.000-08:00

One new set of connections created through my Milestones for a New Millennium blog was through becoming one of the moderators for the Orkut group End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA.

I find that Orkut offers more of a conversation regarding relevant topics than does Facebook. It is an international conversation spanning the globe. Lately the direction of the discussions has been on the best means of directing the discussions. The basic format for the discussions is the web itself and more particularly Orkut, but we are open to numerous avenues of communication. The question is which avenues are best for both open dialogue and advancing the cause of the Millennium Development Goals?

A recently learned term is Slacktivists, basically well-meaning but all too often ineffectual (at least until a tipping point is reached) social activists hanging on and together through social media. At the other end of the continuum are professionals (as in "gets paid for it.") in the social media/Web 2.0 arena. Most of us hope to be somewhere in the middle trying to help when and where we can on a part-time and unpaid basis.

Slacktivists may be those who take no more effort than clicking a button to join a petition, but they are still a step above those that don't know and/or don't care. I try to put a good deal of information on my blog to make it easier for others to connect in the hope they will pursue their own pathways. The basic web connection is information through shared self-education. Then comes engagement which does sometimes mean signing online petitions. There is also the potential, as the Obama campaign has demonstrated, for empowerment.

It is not just the IT-intelligentsia's road, it is a journey for all of us. Ethan Zuckerman discusses Technologies and Emerging Democracies: Building a Better Gatekeeper in an MIT video. I agree with both Zuckerman and others in my Orkut conversations that Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Zuckermans's favorite Reddit among dozens of others offer their own unique impressions regarding their areas of interest, but it also means that the Web is balkanized. Are we "Gatekeepers" or are we attempting to break through the gates?

Is there a way to better leverage the collective wisdom of these international connections being created through these groups? Just trying to keep up with all the information and maintain my two blogs is an effort. Then there is that pesky real world day job. I try to rise above being a slacktivist or at least attempt at being a fairly prolific slactivist. Without the educational background and professional expertise in the Web 2.0 world, how does one best use these online resources to endeavor to connect and make a difference in the world?

I have a good deal of respect for experts in this field, but their professionalism is often related to the medium not the message. The question is how best to connect? One earlier post exploring this idea which I revisited and reedited was Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human.

Uniting "Small Pages" Discovered on the Journey

2008-12-14T17:34:00.000-08:00

My new blog Milestones for a New Millennium continues to grow and find new connections. Depending on how you measure it has now surpassed this blog. Alexa.com has Millennium Milestones at a traffic ranking of 766,539, while this one is at 860,699. Those numbers still put me what has been aptly called "small pages" rank.

I got the idea of "small pages" from Aira of the blog It'll be alright. I had participated in Bloggers Unite For Refugees. Aira helped to organize the majority of the posts under one thread and tied the whole affair together rather nicely in her own post.

It seems a small thing, I know. But the net itself is made of small pages, like mine and like the web pages of the over 10 thousand bloggers part of the Bloggers Unite. Ten thousand stories and thoughts for giving voice to 40 million refugees, for making known an association that help people for real. And to put in practice an expression I read on the Refugees United’s page and – with its simplicity – seemed to me such fundamental: spread the world.

I am not trying for the big numbers any more. It takes me away from what I find enjoyable and educational about this experience. The journey is far more interesting traveling away from the masses, but there are still many who can share in the travel. At the same time, I still want to find ways of getting the ideas that I learn on those web-journeys to a larger audience.

Kicking Butt: The New To Get Things Going After Building Your Organization

2008-11-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

As a result of seeking paradigm shifts, I am becoming more open to the idea of creating and enhancing change-agent organizations beyond those found in the public sector. There are a variety of challenges though. Jessica Andors, one of the authors o, was part of a MIT panel DUSP 75 years diversifying cities. The article focuses on community development in cities. Paraphrasing what they said, rather than making a product or providing a service it is creating an organization that will build indigenous power and encourage engagement to energize a barren public landscape in our communities.

Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement
diigo tags: community-planning, networking, activism
- Our response to this situation is a “network organizing” strategy that connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life – from the neighborhood group to the City Council – in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. Our approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking to our work has helped us to challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement, and shape a strong demand environment for change.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

It is not enough though just to build the organization regardless of how engaged and empowered everyone feels, it must also have an impact on its environment, political, social and economic to cause change.

Kicking Butt: The New Organizational Model? an article by Kristin Clarke was featured back on 10/30/08 in Acronym. It discussed how social movements start, stall, or succeed and used the success of the September 5, Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C;) telethon as a successful template. Here are the lessons that I took away from her article, it is a re-blogged summary. Acronym is a publication of ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) and the Center for Association Leadership. I am still having trouble with getting my head around who they are, while they seem to be an association of change-agents their scope seems to defy concise definition, still they consistently come up with great ideas.

First, take radical steps to overcome barriers among the interrelated sectors to build an entirely new space in which leading professionals collaborate and take risks. Kristin termed this as, blow up the "let's all get along and just work better together" niceties in favor of "Dream Teams" rallied around a kick-butt attitude of "We're not leaving this war room until we solve this sucker!

Second, create a heavy-hitting leadership team. Heavy-hitting means not only well-known but those who have a long term stake. With the SU2C's leadership team, Kristin points out, "Cancer has touched each of them personally in some manner, making them incredibly determined, knowledgeable, and impatient for progress (hence, the sparks for innovation)."

Third, be smart enough to know that you are not smart enough to solve all of the problems. Partner with others who have been doing it longer and better. SU2C unsurprisingly chose the American Association for Cancer Research

Fourth, leverage social networks in a big way. Hopefully you have considerable social networks or can get them allowing one , bringing in Kristin says, "the kind of major donors that cause envy among us all--AARP, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Alliance for Global Good, and the Milken Family Foundation, for instance—and then convinced an unprecedented number of media partners—from online powerhouses like WebMD, Facebook, and AOL to ye ole traditional Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company—to help jumpstart "a new movement." It didn't hurt that more than 100 celebrities also leapt on board."

I am getting to appreciate her conclusion more now that the Obama campaign has succeeded. Unlike some, I see this as time to realize opportunities.

Maybe a wildly new bring-it-on attitude and fearlessness truly are the secret ingredients.

Belief and Ritual Finding Common Ground Through Difference

2008-11-22T14:10:00.000-08:00

My objective in creating this blog was as a learning tool for myself through finding websites of interest and organizing them for further study to create my own personal paradigm shifts. One of the main sources of interesting material continues to be TED. Recently, I have had a desire to go back to the original motivations for this blog and broaden my explorations again. This is done with the belief that it will help my gaining more understanding of the Millennium Development Goals dealt with in my other blog. Below are a collection of TED talks I found inspiring on a personal level.

Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual
Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada Indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance. Watch this talk >>

Stefan Sagmeister: Things I have learned in my life so far

Rockstar designer Stefan Sagmeister delivers a short, witty talk on life lessons, expressed through surprising modes of design (including ... giant inflatable monkeys?). Watch this talk >>

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Money cannot make us happy, he says -- instead, he looks to people who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

Watch this talk >>

Global Warming means bannas in Iceland is a good thing?

2008-11-22T13:23:00.000-08:00

Achieving a sustainable environment is both a paradigm shift and a Millennium Development Goal. The issues raised here also involve economics and trade. This post deals with the broader basic research from sources complied through diigo.

MIT World » : Global and Regional Climate Change: Underlying Science and Emerging Riddles diigo tags: MIT, environment, greenhouse
- The most recent UN report on climate change predicts that greenhouse gases already in circulation have committed the planet to a warming of 2.5 degrees. “No matter what we do today to reduce emissions, the planet will still heat up,” says Ramanathan. But, through a quirk that Ramanathan has spent 10 years uncovering, the planet actually manifests only ¼ of the warming it should based on these climate models. Air pollution, specifically brown clouds from burning biomass, Ramanathan has learned, act as a global warming mask, reducing sunlight on the ground. “On the one hand, it has protected us, but also prevented us from seeing the full blast of the greenhouse effect,” he says. “One of the dumbest things we can do is to reduce sunlight,” because it reduces ocean evaporation, which cuts down on rainfall, and shifts weather systems everywhere, shrinking harvests and glaciers.
- We are left with “Faustian bargains,” says Ramanathan. If we cut airborne pollutants such as sulfur, the mask will drop, temperatures rise rapidly, and climate tipping elements come into play. Curing one ill causes another.
Europe's Banana Republic
Energy Probe, raises questions regarding food miles. The issue is what is the net benefit of growing bananas in Iceland as opposed to growing them in Chile. Reason Magazine chooses Chile because its climate is naturally suited for doing so, the right choice in many instances but not sure it necessarily is here.
diigo tags: environment, economics, sustainability, energy, green

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Against Intuition - Assumptions that block a path to a better way

2008-11-15T11:12:00.000-08:00

Part of doing a blog based on looking for new paradigms is questioning assumptions of existing pathways as well as looking for new pathways. Chronicle Review recently looked at the assumption of intuition, in the formal, philosophical use of the word. My take on it was from the perspective of how it could relate to economics and creating a paradigm for a better world. This was bookmarked under the diigo group Psychology: the Science of Human Nature.

Quotes: Against Intuition - ChronicleReview.com

Experimental Philosophy seems to have the same acceptance of the main stream discipline as Experimental Economics. Though there is the argument that MRI studies, frequently cited in both, claim more than they can actually deliver. This is related in my mind to an argument of negative and positive rights and responsibilities. If we as a society are more interested in improving the environment than the CEO is in making money then we can't simply leave it to the market to make the choice and hope that they circumstances produce the best outcome case. This does not necessarily mean punitive regulations. There is also a chicken and egg dilemma regarding the philosophical basis of morality and the empirical methodology used by the experimentalist. I do not believe the one cannot fully separate oneself from the moral assumptions of one's culture to attain pure empirical objectivity. It does give a good helping of food for thought. Below are a few relevant quotes from the article.
They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.
Experimental philosophers also draw on work by contemporary psychologists demonstrating just how malleable human cognition is, how easily redirected and reshaped it is by external cues, even as the conscious mind remains blissfully unaware. Opinions on crime and punishment, for instance, can be altered by placing people in a dirty room designed to trigger feelings of disgust: Subjects in such experiments respond more punitively when asked what should be done to certain hypothetical criminals.
Consider this scenario, used in numerous scholarly articles: A corporate chairman is presented by a vice president with a proposal for a new project. The VP explains that the project will increase profits but hurt the environment. The chairman replies, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They do, and predictably the environment is harmed.
Did the CEO intentionally damage the environment? In one of Knobe's most cited studies, some 82 percent of students said yes.
Then take this scenario: Same chairman, same VP, but this time the VP says the program will help the environment. The CEO, again, replies that he doesn't care; his only concern is money. He gives a thumbs-up and, again, as predicted, the environment is helped. This time only 23 percent of students say the CEO intentionally helped the earth, although the scenarios are logically identical. Continue the discussion on diigo »

Activist Bringing About Change Through Disruption (Social and Economic)

2008-10-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

I am posting on this subject here before dealing with it over at my other blog Milestones for a New Millennium. This blog allows me far more philosophical latitude, making it more of a learning tool for me, and I am still exploring these concepts.

The question is whether it is possible to create economically sustainable enterprises that help the billion at the bottom of the economic ladder in a uber-consumer world? It seems obvious that efforts to break into a market will require innovation, but are the cards so stacked that such efforts are hopeless, especially in fields such as Healthcare? After watching this talk by Clayton Christensen, I am going to say no, that a sustainable social-entrepreneurial model is very viable.

MIT World » : The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis
diigo tags: MIT, engineering, systems design, healthcare, management
- Christensen distinguishes between the kind of sustained and incremental technological improvements that help a market leader retain its edge, and “disruptive technology,” where a simple and affordable idea takes root in “an undemanding application at the bottom of the market, then improves from that foothold.” Christensen, looking at lots of industries “found almost invariably that an entrant company came in and killed the leaders” by way of a simplifying technology.

To my mind, this is closely tied with the the concept of creative-destruction. I don't, taking counsel from Robert Solow, see its founding proponent, Joseph Schumpeter as the savior of 21st century economics as some do, and especially not of activists seeking change through social enterprise,.

Which brings us to the "democracy" in Schumpeter's title. He was not a democrat by instinct or by reflection. He had little confidence in the ability of the average citizen to vote intelligently...

At the same time Solow saw that Schumpeter realized that:

Anyone can invent a new product or a new technique of production. The entrepreneur is the one who first sees its economic viability, bucks the odds, fights or worms his way into the market, and eventually wins or loses. Each win means profit for the entrepreneur and his backers, and it also means a jog upward for the whole economy. In the course of this process, which cannot possibly run smoothly, many businesses, individuals, and institutions, themselves founded on earlier successful innovations, will be undermined and swept away. Schumpeter called this birth-and-death process "creative destruction," and realized before anyone else that it was the main source of economic growth.

Creative-destruction is still a useful means, more descriptive than prescriptive, of looking at the world. The disagreement is with what actions we take with that knowledge. What disruptive innovations allow social-entrepreneurs is a means of striving in the world without having to beat the leading-edge of established corporations.

Other posts on creative-destruction
Creative-Destruction, Entrepreneurship And Innovation
The Awards And Risks of Innovation: Embracing Destruction And Creation
Consumerville USA Versus Creatorville USA

We Are All Getting Digital - Old Rocker Shows the Way

2008-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

| New York Times August 10, 2008 An Old Rocker Gets Digital By FRED GOODMAN

Peter Gabriel, the rock musician, has become a powerful player in the emerging online music industry by helping artists find new ways to market their music on the Web.

This has been sitting in my draft bin for about a week. Going digital is not really breaking news, it is an on going transformation. I am pleased that it is an Old Rocker leading the transformation.

This has been an off and on topic for this blog for sometime. What is of interest is the transforming of older paradigms defining mass media industries, such as music, into newer paradigms. The transformation has impact on individual artists and businesses, but it also has broader impact on how we define ourselves in terms of community. It also makes for an interesting model as to how endeavors that are more social in nature can survive in an environment which is more business, the combining of artistic freedom with the creation of an economically sustainable enterprise.

Past posts on this subject
The Power of Many! Music For All?
Troubadour Troubles - Economic, Legal, Moral? You Pick
Confusing Means and Ends and the Pathways Between Them

The Musician As Businessperson The Entrepreneur as Artisan

Challenging the next generation (and this one) to get serious - Tech guru Tim O'Reilly again points the way.

2008-10-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

Tim O'Reilly is one of the main pillars of this blog's beginning. I am, admittedly, still on the periphery of the techno-world. Before starting this blog, the Firefox browser's bookmark button was about as adventurous as I got in the Web 2.0 world. I was also far more aware of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as a former psychology major, than I was of any technological revolutions going on the Internet.

However, when I decided to use the Internet to explore Paradigm Shifts, it was inevitable that Tim O'Reilly's - Open Source Paradigm Shift would be at the top of the pile. O'Reilly's ideas on processes and organizational relationships, though focused on computer technology, still appealed to my organizational psychology perspective. My interest in exploring what Web 2.0 offered in regards to tools for gathering, organizing, communicating and applying knowledge was enhanced. That started a process that led me to create Milestones for a New Millennium.

Now my quest has discovered dozens of different ways to be make positive contributions to the world using the Internet, as well as discovering numerous sources of interesting and educational material. Yet, I am still encouraged when I read today in the Los Angeles Times a story by Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Jessica Guynn that Tech guru Tim O'Reilly challenges next generation to get serious.

SAN FRANCISCO - ; Silicon Valley insiders call it the O'Reilly Radar: Tim O'Reilly's uncanny ability to spot a technology revolution before it happens. But lately the entrepreneur, investor and book publisher has been busier trying to incite the next one.

The entrepreneur, investor and book publisher urges young entrepreneurs and engineers to stop making silly software and start making a real difference in the world.

What I appreciated in the article was Tim O'Reilly's perspective ... that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas."

Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs have cocooned in a "reality bubble," insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping the planet. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters."

Visit latimes.com

Getting Your Say Getting Heard

2008-10-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I admitted that a limited number of readers and visitors were coming to either one of my blogs. I am though quite happy with the quality of visitors. While no longer chasing numbers, I still visit Feedburner and Sitemeter to see who has dropped by. According to Sitemeter, Milestones for a New Millennium was recently visited by the University of Bristol, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, University of Sussex and the United Nations. These were, to be fully truthful, a result of searches, but I still like the idea that something I write could be picked up by a highly regarded institution even for a glance.

Other searches picked up by FeedBurner were, Search for “OBAMA MDGs”, Search for “millennium learning goal” and Search for “2008 millenium development goal obama”

If you blog, you get a chance to have your say, and you have a good chance that somebody is at least going to "hear" you. I don't believe one can expect more.

Getting Ideas Stick To Make Them Grow

2008-10-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

I consider the "economics" of my blogging on the Millennium Development Goals sound. Economics is in quotes because I am not talking about making money. Using the Lionel Robbins quote from the the Wikipedia article on "Economics" "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.", it is based on putting in minimal investment, relatively speaking in influencing somebody else's behavior, for a maximum return, making the world a better place. Even if I only effect one or two people, there is the potential that with an aggregate number of people like me that at some point in time it could reach a tipping point.

Truth is that I am only going to reach a limited number of people. It is also true that I don't understand what makes the World Wide Web tick. I may know a few tricks of the trade, but why at one point people are clicking, then they are not and then they are again is beyond my understanding.

Still some insight might come from comparing this blog, ...New Paradigms, and my other blog Milestones For A New Millennium. This blog has been in existence for almost a year, ...New Millennium has been in existence since August 23rd of this year. Right now this blog has more subscribers than New Millennium, 10 compared to 8. Over the last month New Paradigms had 8 subscribers while New Millennium had 7 subscribers, so that fluctuates. For the life of the blog, New Paradigms had an average of 9 reaching a high of around 20. New Millennium has too short a life to worry about. So far New Paradigms is arguably has good of a blog as New Millennium.

It is harder to measure click rate since both blogs are on Blogger, and New Paradigms gets credited with most of the click on items counted by Feedburner. New Paradigms got 547 clicks in a month on 54 items with 0 views. New Millennium only got 6 clicks on 2 items with 64 views on 42 items in the same time period. The "business" of delivering global health services was the last New Millennium post to be click (4 times). The best for New Paradigms is still “WHO | What are the key health dangers for children at 129 times.

In regards to site visitors, New Paradigms has had 7 on average in the last month from all over the world Most stayed for a very short time, not really sure how that works. New Millennium only had 3 visitors on average.

According to Lijit, New Pathways had 385 pages views within a month, many coming from Indio, CA. 118 of those views were a result of re-searches with the most common term being "Creative-Destrucion". The average number of page views per day 12.85. New Millennium had 412 page views within a month with only 12 being for researches, a good number of them coming again from Indio, Ca. The average number of page views per day 13.3. I thought that maybe Lijit was located in Indio, but it's in Boulder, Colorado.

Be The Best For Your Self

2008-10-03T07:16:00.000-07:00

Skellie at skelliewag.org recently wrote about how to Be the Best, Be Discovered.

The significance of this experience for me–and hopefully it seems significant to you as well–is that my motivation for working on the site was completely internal.

My goal was only to please myself by creating the best site I could and my rewards came in being proud of what I’d done. Visitor feedback was nice, but it only served to tell me that ’some’ people were enjoying the site. I didn’t really care so much about the volume, only that at least a few other people thought the site was as cool as I did. But if I had only ever received a handful of emails each week to say I was doing a good job, I probably would have been happy, and I probably would have maintained the site for a long time.

But I didn’t. Once stats came into the picture, my motivation was externalized. I wanted more visitors, and I started to only enjoy adding to the site when I felt it would see my stat counter climb. Whenever my visitor count dropped I felt deflated.

I did not start off on this venture with the intention of creating a blog to speak to the world. It was created as a means of discovering and organizing new sources of knowledge and experimenting with some of the tools of Web 2.0, all of which were new a year ago. The blog itself became the focus of the experiments and I discovered that somebody was reading what I wrote or saved. The surprising thing for me was that it doesn't really matter whether its 10 or 10,000, it still has an impact. I also tried chasing statistics, though I was only trying to get to double digits. Then everything deflated for a while.

So I decided to stop worrying about it and focus on what I liked best about doing this. I like having people click on items that I placed at del.icio.us and other places. It makes me believe that they possibly found something useful. While I do not have a large number of contacts, the contacts I do have are more like collaborators working for common . I appreciate the quality more than I yearn for the quantity. I am more impressed with the fact that somebody in Africa might read one of my posts than I am getting a thousand posts in Akron, Ohio (OK, I am lying, I would love to get a 1,000 posts in Akron, but if I don't still OK).

Now I have two active blogs and for whatever reason, because it still seems like tea leaves to me, this blog is doing better. Not next Facebook better, but better enough to make it enjoyable again. I enjoy doing this. Now, with this blog, I am no longer worrying as much about where I stand in blogosphere, but simply participating in World Wide discussions. I am still watching the stats at my other blog, but since it reflects my own views and opinions there won't be any chasing numbers there either.

Learning To Be A Good Netizen - Not A Well known One Perhaps, But A Good One

2008-09-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

My new blog Milestones For A New Millennium is turning me into a netizen.

The word netizen seems to have two similar meanings. A citizen who uses the Internet as a way of participating in political society (for example, exchanging views, providing information, and voting). An Internet user who is trying to contribute to the Internets use and growth....

Source: www.synergy-uk.com/glossary.php

A Netizen (a portmanteau of Internet and citizen) or cybercitizen is a person actively involved in online communities. ...

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netizen

Starting this weblog gave me an online personality, now I am becoming engaged in World Wide Web citizenship. The new blog engages both the World Wide portion of that concept in the work with the Millennium Development Goals and the Web portion because I am making a concerted effort to get the word out to a greater degree than with this blog.

I am trying a number of new things, more on that later. I am also attempting to avoid some of the faux pas of the Internet. The first was deleting two posts that I have on Newsvine that linked back to my posts. That turns out to be frowned upon, and I want to establish some trust with this endeavor. I honestly thought that since my post had additional links to other information that it was the best which to link plus it was easier since the Newsvine button is below every post. I am going to leave that to others since reputation is more important than forcing numbers.

I still have limited impact as a netizen with my online persona. In some ways though, I have greater impact on the World Wide Web Stage as a netizen than as a voter in the "real" world. In the real world, my particulars can be fairly well known, fairly easily. It is my vote that is secret and only combines with others in aggregate. On the World Wide Web, my particulars are for the most part of no consequence and it is my publicly accessible vote through my blog posts that define me. My vote may not at this time reach more than 10 people, but it has a chance to cascade and there are millions of others making the same cascading votes on these issues (I get to do it on my own blog). This means that there is a force beyond the aggregate of people passively voting for whatever program is put in front of them to a level of actively engaging in the issues on an ever expanding platform.

Going Beyond Nature

2008-09-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of posts this blog raised the question on the role of architecture in overcoming the challenges facing the world, over-consumption by the developed world, need for development in the developing world, sustainability for both. On one end of the spectrum was the work of the Open Architecture Network and on the other discussions of Frank Gehry's work on the MIT Stata building. Not as a criticism of Gehry's work, but the issues such work brings up and the debate regarding those issues.

The following is also from MIT and features Werner Sobek discussing architecture which is 100% recyclable and capable of incredible designs. It addresses the question of what can be done, not necessarily what should be done, but its interdisciplinary approach provides a good model for overcoming global challenges and it demonstrates the potential of what is possible.


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view latest additions		volume 7 \| number 57 \| August 18, 2008

Video date:
April 24, 2008
6:30 PM

"Complete know how in disciplines is one thing, but to work in terra incognita, this is something we more or less have devoted our lives to..."

—Werner Sobek

High-Eco-Tech:
Building Avant la Garde

There's more than a little magic in Werner Sobek's constructions, which balance aesthetics, architectural constraints and pathbreaking science to, in his words, "go beyond" nature's own limits.

SPEAKER:
Werner Sobek
Engineer and Architect, Werner Sobek Ingenieure

Event Host:

Department of Architecture

Role of Architecture In Defining Ourselves

2008-09-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

One of those subjects that doesn't seem to fit the focus of Milestones For A New Millennium is the role of architecture in creating communities. With so many problems facing the world and efforts to house millions in need of shelter does architecture make any sense any more? Should architecture simply be a matter of pragmatic technology or is there still a place for the art of architecture? Can architecture as art be made sustainable?

Frank Gehry asks the question in this TED talk, Nice building. Then what? Ironically, he mentions, mostly in passing, the MIT Stata building as a future example of ideal architecture. He uses the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as the testing ground to ensure that the Stata doesn't leak.

Of course, it did leak and MIT sued. Seems Gehry is allegedly famous/infamous for leaky buildings. The TED video has a view good lines by Frank Loyd Wright on leaks. John Maeda also references the quote in his defense of form being more important than function or at least being more forgivable. Others were less willing to take the more idealistic perspective.

These ideas are further touched upon in this two part look at Frank Gehry's Stata building at MIT by MIT World » : The University as Patron of Cutting Edge Architecture.

Part 1 of a 2 part series that discusses Frank Gerhy's Stata building at MIT.

Part 2 of a 2 part series that discusses Frank Gerhy's Stata building at MIT

These two videos occur after the TED talk but before the lawsuit. There is much more available on the web. This is just a current example of artistic vision wrestling with pragmatic necessity. Clicking on the various labels provided below will take you to other perspectives on architecture, cities and community-planning put forth by this blog.

Change in Pathways But Not A Change in the Path

2008-09-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

The site is going back to its original intention of being a learning portal. The efforts toward blogging will be focused on the new blog Milestones For A New Millennium. I will still be making posts here but with less regularity. The difference being that this policy will now be followed on purpose rather than by happenstance as has been occurring.

This site can provide two important avenues. It can be used to explore issues which relate to but don't deal directly with the subject matter of Milestones For A New Millennium and it can be used to work through some of the subjects prior to posting on Milestones For A New Millennium.

The Role Of Architecture In The Life Of Cities

2008-08-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

The role of architecture involves the creation of cities as much as the individual buildings that make up those cities. Below are two ostensibly different perspectives on the world's cities that demonstrate the challenges facing efforts to house and feed 6 billion people. The first, from TED involves the creation of mega-communities growing seemingly beyond their capacity to be viable.

Robert Neuwirth on our "shadow cities" Video on TED.com

Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities, finds the world’s squatter sites -- where a billion people now make their homes -- to be thriving centers of ingenuity and innovation. He takes us on a tour.

diigo tags: TED, architecture, cities, community-planning

The second involves Shrinkingcities

which involves established urban cities disappearing.
Whether in the USA, Britain, or Belgium, Finland, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, or China: everywhere, cities are shrinking. The dramatic development in eastern Germany since 1989, which has led to more than a million empty apartments and to the abandoning of countless industrial parks and social and cultural facilities, has proven to be no exception, but a general pattern of our civilization.

diigo tags: shrinkingcities, community-planning, architecture, development

Helping Myanmar (Burma) rebuild, Using Architecture to Rebuild Humanity

2008-08-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

A number of the stories that have been held in the draft bin deal with architecture. The concept of architecture, however, applies to more than the design of individual buildings. It also applies to other things such as the web and to entire cities.

Does architecture give us a model as to how we can we use the Web to drive social change? The TED prize is one avenue created to bring about social change. Architecture for Humanity leveraged a 2006 TED Prize to build the Open Architecture Network, linking communities around the globe with architects and designers who can help them solve problems.

In 2006, Cameron Sinclair asked TED to help him build an open-source platform to help architects connect with communities in need of designs. The result was the Open Architecture Network -- a successful website that acts as both a clearinghouse for building plans and a vibrant social network, allows its users to sample, remix and customize design work for their needs. To help Sinclair's wish come true, join the community at the Open Architecture Network's website.

One of the latest examples of their work is their attempt to help Myanmar (Burma) rebuild, with Architecture for Humanity as told by the TED TEDBlog by on 5/6/08.

Following the devastating Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma), Architecture for Humanity asked for help in rebuilding the country over the long term. They wrote:

While the media will focus its attention on the loss of life, there will be millions displaced in the coming weeks -- and like most natural disasters, there's no plan for long-term sustainable reconstruction. Large aid agencies like Oxfam and Care will be knee-deep in immediate delivery of aid. How will the country respond to the long-term strategic need to rebuild the country?

In the first 6 hours of this drive, AfH raised $4,000 from over 120 donors. Learn more about this appeal >>

Lessons Learned Lessons Applied

2008-08-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

The new blog is still undergoing construction. Actually construction is not right because it is still in the design phase and undergoing is not right because I haven't done anything with it for last few weeks. This post is partially to get back on track.

While this current weblog has provided a number of lessons that can be applied to the new one, there is still the matter of deciding what the new weblog is supposed to accomplish and how to achieve that. One primary lesson being applied is that Milestones for the New Millennium is far more focused than this endeavor which tends to follow its own path of exploration.

The new blog is focused on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the efforts of others to see those goals accomplished. The eight goals though still provide a wide range of topics to write about. Within each of those goals, is it to 1. End Hunger 2. provide Universal Education 3. ensure Gender Equity 4. ensure Child Health 5. ensure Maternal Health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases 7. ensure Environmental Sustainability or 8. create Global Partnerships; there are both milestones to celebrate and millstones to rail against. The efforts of those supporting End Poverty 2015 will be prominently featured.

The concept, though, of overcoming all the world's problems for the thousand years before us is daunting. The notion that we will be successful in pushing the world's governments into meeting their promises by having people stand up is almost naive. It is still, nonetheless, worth supporting.

The Millennium Milestones blog is based on the premise that there has to be other avenues connecting the global perspective of the Millennium Development Goals with the individual activities of organizations and people working at the local level. There is also the "how" as well as the "what". This blog has explored social-entrepreneurship and the efforts of those trying to make the world a better place. There is the expectation that increased awareness will not command compliance from world governments but that their lack of commitment will inspire others to take matters in their own hands. It will be the day-to-day efforts of hundreds working through organizations utilizing new technologies that will lead us to fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals.

Getting Back To The Writing Desk

2008-08-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

I stopped writing which is bad. It is not bad because the world has been denied my writing, but my not writing, my not partaking in the activity of writing is bad. It is bad because when I am not writing I am not doing anything else of particular value to anyone including myself. I also stopped learning when I stopped writing.

It is not that I don't have anything to write about. There are a number of drafts waiting to be developed and finalized. There is also the creation of a new blog. It is getting over that initial writer's blockage that seems to have built up since returning from China. Writer's blockage seems to be a more precise term than writer's block because it isn't a matter of a blank wall but overcoming those factors that weigh one down at the end of the day and making the time for writing.

The plans that I have made for my new blog require that I overcome my recent stupor. This post is the first step.

Back Home From China To New Adventures

2008-08-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

I am back home from China, after a month stay. The trip resulted in a couple of realizations.

First realization is how much this weblog depends upon the Web 2.0 bells and whistles. In China, for whatever reason, I could not get to a good number of sites and did not have available my handy tool bars for del.icio.us, diigo, or Stumbleupon.

Second realization, this blog, using the term loosely, is designed more for open exploration. One recurring topic has been the intention of creating a more focused blog on a particular subject. While in China, I annouced that I was creating a new blog. The new blog is another Web 2.0 experiment, but the subject is something that I have at least minimal knowledge about, am supportive of, and which I have blogged on before.

The chosen subject is the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. This subject allows me to blog on social-entrepreneurship, global health, sustainability, the use of the web as a tool for development, and other topics. The connections made over the course of putting this blog together provide a great deal of useful information on the topics covered by the subject of the millennium goals. Currently I am experimenting with links to see if they work with what I am trying to achieve, also fine tuning what it is that I am trying to achieve. There are a number of excellent sites newly discovered through the creation of the new blog.

The new blog is named Milestones and Millstones to A New Millennium. It is still under construction and testing, so I am not creating a permanent link in the left hand column yet. Most of the initial construction was during my stay in China. Why I decided to do it when my web resources were minimal is for future introspection. The inspiration came from a number of sources, those being some of the connections or comments received by the weblog over its existence.

Using Business Wisdom For Social Compassion

2008-07-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

This weblog has written posts on change-agent organizations or non-profits using fundamental business practices to increase their economic viability. When it does, it very often gets its ideas from The Entrepreneurial Mind, which wrote another article in this vein on 6/4/08, Business Turns Profits into Charity.

MyBusiness magazine (from NFIB) has a feature written by Emily McMackin on a for profit social venture called Giving Tree ....
... which sells the GiveCard---a prepaid Visa or MasterCard that allows recipients to donate 10 percent of their gift to the charity of their choice---Nicholas and cofounder Jeff Jacobs discovered that consumers were eager to give back.
McMackin interview me (Jeff Cornwall) for the story and was curious about the growing trend of more for profit social ventures.

Young entrepreneurs today are taking this tradition a step further by forming businesses to tackle specific problems in society, says Jeff Cornwall, director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship in Nashville, Tenn.
Without the IRS constraints that nonprofits have or the need to beg donors for money, these social entrepreneurs are finding more freedom to bring about change. Rather than trusting in these large institutions they don't think are effective, they're going out and solving problems at a grassroots level, Cornwall says. Given the interest we are seeing in students wanting to learn about social entrepreneurship, this is a trend that is likely to continue.

The New York Times ran a story on the same subject, social-entrepreneurship. This time though the focus was on Internet technology. When Tech Innovation Has a Social Mission - New York Times April 13, 2008.

diigo tags: innovation, web2.0, technology

Now a new style of “hybrid” technology organization is emerging that is trying to define a path between the nonprofit world and traditional for-profit ventures.They're often referred to as “social enterprises” because they pursue social missions instead of profits. But unlike most nonprofit groups, these organizations generate a sustainable source of revenue and do not rely on philanthropy.

Revenue is life blood for an economically viable entity, whether it is a corporate business, a entrepreneurial artisan or a social-entrepreneur. Revenue usually derives from some form of value added or productivity enhancement, though who provides the revenue and who benefits from the value-added may not always be the same.

Brewster Kahle, who has founded a number of successful Internet companies, as well as the nonprofit Internet Archive, said: “If we do this right, I think there is momentum here. The next major operating systems company might be a nonprofit.”

Mr. Kahle says he is developing a set of principles that he hopes will help formalize his idea that there is a middle ground between the technologists and the capitalists. He ticks off operating guidelines like transparency, staying out of debt, giving away information and refusing to hoard.

TechSoup distributes products from 32 commercial companies, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Symantec, to roughly 50,000 organizations annually, for a small administrative fee.

“We were just trying to meet the needs of nonprofits,” said Rebecca Masisak, co-chief executive of TechSoup.

“Computer technology and the Internet are lowering the cost of doing business,” said John Lilly, the chief executive of Mozilla, the Web browser developer that is being subsidized by advertising revenue from the search engine business.

Overcoming Copyright Concerns aka Making Sure You Get A Paycheck

2008-07-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

David Pogue of the New York Times has been mentioned in this weblog before under a similar subject, the The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality. Here Mr. Pogue asks Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns? - New York Times on May 22, 2008. This time he seems to have been attempting to offer some business advice to artistic entrepreneurs. The question of copyrights has been linked with the question of fair use in a number of posts. It is a double-edged question. One wants to protect the concept of fair use, but the individual artist finds himself at risk. Mr. Pogue asks the unresolved question.

"What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can't earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you're one of those musicians who plays live), or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of 'value-added' service. Many such arguments seem to me to be simple greed disguised in high-falutin' idealism about how 'information wants to be free.'

This weblog has passed on advice from both the artistic perspective and the business perspective. A week after his article (May 29, 2008) Mr. Pogue received advice from his readers, though he was reluctant to take it. From the Desk of David Pogue - Readers Have Their Say in the E-Publishing Debate - NYTimes.com

Last week in this space, I agonized over the issue of releasing the books in my Missing Manual series in electronic form.

A number of passionate writers were confident that releasing free copies of my books would lead to more sales of the printed ones, not less. These people could not understand why I don't see that:

Mr. Pogue has every right to provide his product or services to the public as he sees fit and if he doesn't want to make them available free online, so be it. Not everybody is comfortable with all aspects of e-commerce. How useful his advice is though to struggling artists in another question. I am not certain that he even addresses the question. I am summarizing the question here, partially because of copyright concerns. The questioner is not asking Mr. Pogue to provide the materials for free. He is asking him to consider alternative avenues of sales/revenue and challenges him to do a test.

"All you have proven is that there is pent-up demand for an electronic version of your book. Your conclusion is only valid IF you had a legitimate electronic version to sell, and people chose to get the free one instead of the paid one.

Even if your book was on a pirated site, people (like me) would buy a legitimate non-DRM'd electronic version if you sold it. Until you do, you cannot make any claims about digital piracy from personal experience, because you haven't done a valid test."

Mr. Pogue's response: This is the crux of the matter, really: *nobody* can do a valid test. Some authors (like Cory Doctorow) point to anecdotal evidence that free e-versions boost the sales of printed books; other authors (like Stephen King and Steven Poole, whose blog I quoted last week) declared their e-book experiments failures. But a truly valid test will never be conducted because it would require parallel universes:

Mr. Pogue's response would be valid entrepreneurial advice if the questioner was applying for a job at CERN, but artisans in a new economy won't be able to wait for such a perfect universe(s?). I suspect that Mr. Pogue's position is based more on his view of the "morality" of the issue. Morality is in quotes not to question Mr. Pogue's ethics, but in recognition that it is not as straight forward an issue as some may claim. Does the artist need to give away his creativity because Slashdot thinks 'information wants to be free'? - No, but if the artist finds that selling t-shirts and using the music for marketing is a better business model than selling music and using the t-shirts for marketing, they better give it some thought. The old paradigms are gone.

diigo tags: web2.0, entrepreneurship copyright epublishing, pogue,

Getting Started With Let It Begin With Me

2008-07-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes when I meditate, I don't use any particular method. I just allow my mind to rest, and find, especially when I am inspired, that I can bring my mind home and relax very quickly. I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don't question or doubt whether I am in the ‘correct’ state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakeable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am. A fundamental trust is present. There is nothing in particular to do.” Sogyal Rinpoche

From Let it begin with me - mind training and meditation briefings A rough guide to mind training and meditation

diigo tags: buddhism, meditation, mind, philosophy

Creating and Re-creating A Blog Creating and Re-creating Yourself.

2008-07-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

One of the resources that this weblog uses is Daily Writing Tips, which is listed in the left hand column under Blogging Roads Less Traveled. An important question raised by Daily Writing Tips is, "why blog"? They assert that having a blog can help your writing.

Do you have your own blog? If so, do you sometimes feel guilty about spending time writing for your blog rather than working on something which you consider more “worthwhile”? If you don't have a blog, have you ever thought of starting one? Perhaps you're not sure whether it would be worth the investment of your time and energy.

Here are Daily Writing Tips 5 reasons why blogging improves your writing.

There are five great ways that starting your own blog, or continuing writing the one you already have, can improve your writing.

1. You’ll get into the habit of writing regularly. Blog posts tend to be short and can be online as soon as you've written them: Very true, though my posts can get longer if I am dealing with an involved subject. The instant publishing can be problem because it is too easy, but I give myself the option to re-write what I have posted if I find mistakes afterwards or think of a better way to say something. Overtime, my need to re-write has been becoming less, relatively speaking. There are some posts at which I will keep plugging away before publishing them to read up on additional sources of information or because it just isn't sounding quite right.

2. Instant feedback lets you know how you're doing: As this is my personal learning web portal, feedback is not essential, but I have received some positive comments or obtained other forms of acknowledgement. Nobody has, however, given me either positive or negative feedback on my writing itself, which I would not expect for a blog as it is a different type of creature. Most times posts are judged on content and there have been posts claiming that blogs can ignore some of the writing rules.

As far as none at all feedback, that would be vast majority of this effort. So there is still the potential for this work to be boring, trite or over-done.

3. Having readers for your work is a big motivation: Even making a tiny ripple within the Internet was motivating and to some extent addicting. Having the opportunity to participate in the creation of a wave of change is also enticing. It also makes a difference who is reading this blog. In the early stages of this weblog I linked to anything having to do with paradigms that seemed to fit. One link was to the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant under PoetryExpress again under the left hand column. What was surprising was the number of visits from that site to this one. That was a big motivator in making the posts at least adequate in terms of writing.

FeedBurner also tallys how many times a webpost you have created or a weblink you have saved on del.icio.us or elsewhere is clicked. Overall, this weblog has resulted in 6,467 clicks back to the original site on 301 items. That means that on average 21 people found something useful in what I did at least enough to click the item. While that won't let me quit my day job it is still gratifying. The highest was 128 clicks for WHO, What are the key health dangers for children? I found the idea of being able to provide a helpful link to others appealing, in some ways more appealing than having somebody read something that I wrote. The trouble is that has now dropped radically. The average number of clicks for the last month as dropped to 19 clicks back to the originating site on 11 items. Why the sudden upswing and then sudden downswing is not something for which I have found an explanation.

This weblog according to Technorati's Dave Sifry has low authority, which is currently at 6, but it has some authority, which is more than I was originally expecting. The Low Authority Group is defined as 3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months. Though admittedly some of the links are self-promotional for the blogs doing the linking. Again, my impact on FeedBurner has fluctuated. I began with zero, so anything would have been an improvement. My average number of subscribers has been 9, since I started this experiment in late 2007.

4. Your writing will improve. The best way to get better at anything is to practice. Writing frequently for your blog means your writing will improve: I do believe that this is true. The posts are becoming better than earlier posts. Do they make you cringe, when compared to your writing now? Enough that, every now and then, I will still go back to make corrections or do re-writes.

5. Blogs are an ideal medium for experimentation: Definitely agree with this one. It is part of the reason that this weblog has evolved into something more than was originally envisioned.

One form of experimentation suggested is using Bullet pointed lists. Creating a blog, especially this blog, involves both combining and expanding concepts and then distilling and summarizing them into a more concise format. Most blogs, in my view, depend to a very large extent upon the work of others or stories within the news. This weblog is no exception. There needs to be enough of a change though to make the post truly yours rather than just a rehash of somebody else's work.

What I found as fascinating as the fact that somebody was reading or clicking my stuff was where they were coming from - around the globe. According to Lijit, this weblog has had 227 page views in the last month, actually 393 minus the 166 orginating from Nanjing, China where I am staying. Most of these were within the United States but others have originated from South America, Europe and Asia. Feedburner indicated the same thing. The other aspect of this blog that has helped with international connections is learning different tagging and social bookmarking systems. Again, this weblog connects with others in South American, Africa, Europe and Asia.

Daily Writing Tips helps me to understand that there is a difference between blogging and writing. Yes, they are very much interrelated, but they are still also have independent aspects. One can write without ever touching a computer and there are technical issues related specially to blogging. While there are those who argue that they are even more distinct, the skills of writing can only make blogging better to my mind. This question has been asked before, but it's good to be reminded and look at the issue from a different facet. Whether you think it is worth the investment depends upon what you want to get out of it. It also depends on what you define as being a blog.

The Internet and Web 2.0 (presuming we see these as two different things) seems to keep re-inventing themselves, which often means re-inventing the terms to describe them. Web 2.0 seems to be in the midst of being re-invented as social media. Weblogs are now everything from personal journals to alternative news sources. At one time though, according to Jon Barger, who originated the term: "1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

This weblog did not start off with the intention of becoming a blog in the current sense of the term. I also wanted it to be more than just an inert collection of weblinks. It was an experiment in collecting data and information from various sources within the Internet and organizing them for easy retrieval in such a manner that new connections could be made and a better understanding of various subjects could be obtained. The essential point was being able to generate new connections for deeper understanding. Its original intention was to be a learning tool.

This endeavor was started with the understanding that I was a novice. The old adage was to write what you know about. This weblog at least starts with what I do not know about and though there is much I have discovered, I continue to learn more with the focus being on new learning. Even within those areas of professional experience the decision was made to start with an empty cup and begin with a beginners mind. Then I found out that somebody was reading what I wrote and that started changing things.

So I definitely believe that this weblog has created some value for me, even if it might not be judged successful as a blog in the common use of the term.

Wisdom Of Strength And Weakness

2008-07-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom.
It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Mahatma Gandhi, 10/02/1869 - 01/30/1948
Indian ascetic & nationalist leader

Securitization Doesn't Seem That Secure For The Rest Of Us

2008-07-17T02:19:00.000-07:00

In my post on rising prices and trying to pin the blame on somebody, the evidence against speculators creating the bubble seemed weak. On one side was Chief Investment Strategist for Charles Schwab Liz Ann Sonders , who in the interview with the Wall Street Journal seemed to bring the issue up and take it away in the same breath.

There's also a lot of speculation in commodities, and that type of money can turn very, very quickly on a dime. And I think we may be unwinding some of those speculative trades that had been sort of chasing economies on the upside on dollar on the downside. So I do think there is some relief.

Then there was the New York Times article on energy analyst Mr. Daniel Yergin's testimony before Congress.

“There is a shortage psychology in the financial markets and that is reflected in the price of oil,” Mr. Yergin said in the interview. “You are seeing a lot of people who have never invested in commodities who are now piling into the market. But calling it speculation is way too simplistic.”

What role financial institutions — pension funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds, among others — are playing in driving up the price of oil to nearly $140 a barrel remains a key question. Regulators in Washington have acknowledged that they do not have enough information on speculative trading in commodity markets. Even though the evidence is incomplete, speculators have nonetheless become prime targets for legislative action.

A bit more web-mining showed me, however, that my was complacency regarding the commodities market unfounded. Speculation in the commodities market is a serious issue but not so much because of the speculators.

Mack Frankfurter wrote a 3 part article on The Commodity Conundrum: Securitization and Systemic Concerns I, II, III. Longer, I know than the usual web-scan, but worth the trouble if you want to get an understanding of the issues.

First, let's address the oil bubble speculation. Not everybody it seems agrees with Mr. Yergin.

Oil executives told Congress that speculation might be responsible for half the current cost of oil. Leaders from five top companies agreed that current supply and demand levels should place the price near $55 a barrel, instead of the roughly $100 a barrel in recent days.” As reported by Lisa Desjardins, CNN Radio, April 3, 2008.

Mr. Frankfurter has a number of other well documented examples as to why the changes occuring now are a new paradigm. What was more interesting was Mr. Frankfurter's reasons why behind the changes, because in explaining his theory he also did a good job of explaining the basics.

Back to Futures Basics
Futures and forward contracts are intrinsically different instruments than securities which are derived from the capital markets (e.g., fixed income or equities). This is underappreciated.

Derivatives are risk management tools, a “zero-sum game,” fundamentally different from the “rising tide raises all ships” concept of the capital formation markets. While, there is an established theoretical basis and considerable empirical evidence that link investment in capital market assets to positive expected returns over time, notwithstanding the recent surge in commodity prices, a legacy of academic disagreement supports the claim that, on an inflation-adjusted basis, the same cannot be said about commodities.

So, it is not that we have more speculators, whether rational and less so, in the market but that the fundamental assumptions underlying the market process have changed. Its not the number of players at the poker game or how they play their own cards, its how the stakes of the game has changed. There is no way I am going to summarize Mr. Frankfurter's work better than this, so if you want details read the report, the entire report.

Mr. Frankfurter's solution to all of this:

It is time to rein in excessive market speculation which is occurring on the “dark exchanges’ and support the transition of unregulated commodity speculation back into the domain of the regulated futures industry.

The Center for American Progress also has a piece on this subject Speculators “R” Us: Commodities Markets Need Institutional Investors Like Us, which seems to fall in line.

However, from the ascendancy of my amateur armchair, I would still not focus on the speculation bubble as the most important economic factor currently effecting businesses.

My choice would have been the weak dollar, which has I realize now has good aspects and bad aspects depending upon where you are in the economy. Those good aspects could disappear quickly. The Center for American Progress also has a story on the weak dollar or as they put it Bush's Weak Dollar .

The real villian though would be the Current Account Deficit. The Center for Amercian Progress can arguably be accused of having a slanted perspective, the National Bureau of Economic Research far less so. Here is their telling article:

America's Unsustainable Current Account Deficit

The amount of foreign capital inflows required to sustain an American economy in which both the government and individuals eschew savings and spend beyond their means -- and imports far exceed exports --has soared to record highs. But even if the foreign appetite for U.S. Treasury securities and other U.S. assets continues to grow, a day of reckoning for what economists call our "current account deficit" is likely to arrive soon. And the price will be paid in a currency drop that will significantly reduce domestic economic growth.

That's the conclusion of a study by NBER Research Associate Sebastian Edwards. In Is the U.S. Current Account Deficit Sustainable? And If So How Costly Is Adjustment Likely to Be? (NBER Working Paper No. 11541), Edwards provides a detailed analysis that culminates in blunt answers to these questions: No, it is not sustainable and the adjustment, if history is any guide, is likely to be "painful and costly," causing U.S. economic output, measured as gross domestic product or GDP, to plummet. "

My rationale for looking at this is that whatever pathway we take, whether we truly think that free trade is the greater good for the greatest number of people or fair trade is the only way to insure economic justice, those efforts have to take place in an arena defined by these parameters. It is my personal belief that it is important for change-agents and social-entrepreneurs to understand them.

Leading Global Growth And Protecting What Matters Most - Irreconcilable Goals?

2008-07-16T00:37:00.000-07:00

Now I have my own biases, which hopefully I can examine more thoroughly through this weblog. One of which is positively slanted toward technology and MIT. What I admire is that MIT combines the technological insights and scientific discoveries of their labs with the management and leadership of the Sloan School of Management. What is more is that they don't stay sequestered in an academic environment but venture out to help better the world and invite in those who have walked the walk. The question though is what walk exactly?

Recently MIT World had Ellen Kullman speaking on: Leading Global Growth by Protecting What Really Matters Most. The question I am asking myself is whether the same corporate entity can do both?

- Annotated diigo tags: MIT, business, sustainability, economics, management

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
After 205 years, DuPont has transformed itself substantially while remaining true to its character, suggests Ellen Kullman. “We're a company with a passion for science,” says Kullman. DuPont, which got its start making black powder for explosives, pursued chemicals for its first 100 years, but is now taking its science into energy, biotechnology and nanotechnology, with products and services in agriculture, nutrition, coating and color technologies, performance materials and safety and protection.

It was Ms. Kullman's assertion that Dupont's core values were:

Safety
Ethics
Environment
Respect for people and environment

Ms Kullman came up with examples of Dupont's commitment to corporate responsibility. It is a concept, however, that can be attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. One such example was its membership in the World_Business_Council_for_Sustainable_Development . This is also subject to debate. Dupont's commitment to the environment can be questioned.

Yet, despite such concerns, there is still a great deal to be learned from Ms. Kullman's talk. Ms Kullman focused on 7 principles that can be as readily adopted by change-agents and social-entrepreneurs as they are by corporate businesses.

7 principles

1. focus on opportunity not current capability
2. thrive on fast cycle time and feedback
3. communicate, communicate, communicate
4. go beyond assets tremendous opportunity beyond assets
5. open up business models
6. embrace future
7. think big think different

Ms Kullman emphasized Surrounding yourself with the right people with the right skills.

From the Leading Global Growth side of the question global exposure means global impact. To sustain the lead for growth meant looking to:

Who is the customer. Listening and respect
Interdependent innovation
Collaboration without borders requires reciprocal relationships
Recognizing that while technology and innovation are global humans needs are local
That science and technology are not enough, you also need commitment.
Finally, it requires optimism

Ms Kullman has the same bias that I do, that most problems are solvable and that science will help. Organizations seeking to bring about change need to address short term pressures in addressing long term needs. We must realize that people must see innovation to appreciate it.

She left the audience with some optimistic inspiration.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. - antoine de saint-exupery

Congress And Everybody Else Looking For A Culprit For Rising Prices

2008-07-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

My web-trekking explorations are back on economics. The self-educational pursuit has to stop during my time in Nanjing, China because for various reasons I can't get to the Berkeley macro-economics videos that I had been following. There are though a number of posts from other sites that provide me food for thought.

It may seem obvious that there is a difference between economics and business, though coming up with a quick answer may not be that easy. Perhaps it's the difference between recession and depression, it depends on whether it's happening to you or other people.

Is it Inflation or a Bubble? is an economic question asked by the Small Business Trends expert Anita Campell.

Rising prices hurt us because we are people … consumers … above all else.

But as businesspeople, the situation can be even worse if you happen to be in one of those businesses that use the commodities and materials experiencing record-high prices right now.

This is a direct business concern, creating what could turn into a vicious cycle as those higher prices are passed on to the end-use consumers with little supposed benefit to the business producers.

Think of food (restaurants); gasoline (businesses with fleets and delivery vehicles); and high heating costs (landlords and real-estate related businesses).

She asks the larger economic question whether inflation was the real worry, rather than recession. But after digging into the question a little further, it appears that the question of high prices is more complex than simply inflation.

Charles Schwab Town Hall meeting, Chief Investment Strategist Liz Ann Sonders suggesting that there is a bubble taking place in commodities, spurred partly by speculators. That seems to be contributing to the rising prices of certain categories such as food and gasoline. (She mentions commodities speculation in this Wall Street Journal interview, too.)

Ms Campbell goes on to address another economic question. Consider this: while the prices of food and fuel have skyrocketed, the prices of some things keep coming down. It's not a question of inflation across the board. It's really a matter of some things being at record highs, and others being at record lows.

What do you think is happening? Weigh in with your opinion about: Technology Prices Defy Inflation (So Far)

The area she focuses on for this crowd-sourced analysis is technology. My hypothesis is that its the ability of technology to increase productivity following Moore and other so-called laws. As long as this happens there will be lower costs, though how long this will happen is another technical question. It is also how business people from entrepreneurs to secretaries in corporate offices use this technology. That according to the Berkeley macro-economic class is where the majority of the productivity boost comes from.

But what happens to tech productivity if you can't feed those enginners beer and pizza.

Back to the direct business concerns.

Consequently, some small businesses are being hurt more than others in the current environment. If your business happens to depend heavily on commodities — say you run a pizza shop and depend on flour and cheese — you are being hit hard. But if you are in a business that relies primarily on technology, then your costs of doing business may be low.

Ms. Campbell is not alone is looking for culprits for rising prices, according to this New York Times article BUSINESS June 25, 2008 By JAD MOUAWADs, Congress Looks for a Culprit for Rising Oil Prices. This expert doesn't follow the same line of thinking as Strategist Liz Ann Sonders when it comes to oil prices.

A pre-eminent energy expert is to testify on Wednesday before lawmakers that the suspicion that investors are a large cause for skyrocketing oil prices is misguided.

"Everyone would like to believe that there is a silver bullet — like a bubble or speculation — that can solve our oil problem," he said. Instead, he said, it would be better for the nation to focus on conserving energy and reducing its oil consumption.

My last post looked at the effect of the commodities upheaval on the poor. The Financial Times article Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture, cited in the post, provided additional insights from a number of economists including Paul Collier and Bart van Ark who wrote in response to the article.

We need to examine the two phenomena – increased shortages due to a decline in the growth of supply, and price increases related to speculation and securitization of several commodities – in conjunction to fully understand what has happened and what is likely to happen next. There is no question that the securitization of various food commodity markets in early 2007 has played an important role in this crisis, especially over recent months. The mean of the price increases of securitized agricultural commodities (including coffee, cotton, soybean oil, soybeans, sugar, wheat, and corn) was 49 percent in the 15 months from January 2007 to April 2008, compared to 20 percent in the preceding 12 months. In comparison, prices of non-securitized agricultural commodities (including, rice, tea, cocoa and rubber) increased by only 14 percent in the last 15 months, compared to 11 percent in the 12 months before.

Despite the slower average price increase, the effects of speculation do appear to have spilled over into some of these non-securitized commodities, for example, to rice (69 percent since January 2007) and palm oil (88%). One should also ask, as Martin Wolf does: If this is truly a speculative bubble, where are the stocks of these goods? The answer is in part: still out in the fields, as future contracts deal with future harvests. In all likelihood, some of the recent price jumps stems from the perception among hedgers and investors that the harvests will disappoint.

The author of the FT article Martin Wolf, FT associate editor and chief economics commentator, argues that while:

I am grateful to Bart for his comments on securitisation and prices. I should note, however, that if futures prices are jumping because of the perception that harvests will disappoint, this is stabilising speculation. It acts to lower consumption now, thus preserving stocks.

I am unclear on how this happens unless the end user has transparent information that this is going to happen. So far, I don't see that being the case. Another philosophical and ethical question it raises for me is if the so-called speculator realizes through more insightful analysis and precise information the actual market value of the product is he gambling? Yes, there is risk, but there is a difference between statistical knowledge to understand and using tea leaves to assess the unknown. No doubt though that once somebody does benefit from a deeper understanding of the market, they are followed by those who jump on the bandwagon long after the music has stopped playing.

To finish off, I am throwing in the comments from Paul Otellini from this interveiw in the New York Times TECHNOLOGY section on June 1, 2008. You have the business, the technology and the price of oil all combined together.

Bits: Intel's Chief on Strategy, Globalization and the Price of Oil Steve Lohr
In a wide-ranging interview, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini talks about Intel's move into processors for smaller machines, the company's new chip plant in China, the challenges of programming many-core processors and the economic impact of the rising price of oil.