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

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.

Blogging about Hardship to Ease

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.

• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion
• Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing
• Taking a Step Beyond - Personal efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals

Digging through Web 2.0 for Feelings and Facts and Fraternity

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.

Letting Serendipity Seek You

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.

Related Posts:

• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion
• Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing
• Taking a Step Beyond - Personal efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals

The Importance Getting a Single Message from a Social Media Network

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:

• Designing Your Future and Your Success as a Team Effort
  
• Collaboration As Management Tool= Management as Collaboration Tool
  
• Branding as Commodity Finding Connection Through Leadership
• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion

Collaboration As Management Tool= Management as Collaboration Tool

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

Branding as Commodity Finding Connection Through Leadership

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 .

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

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

Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing

My post on Ten Reasons John Mariotti Won't Use Social Media Sites received a comment from Michael S. Copeland who said...

I agree with John's thoughts somewhat. Yes it's good to do things in your local physical market. However, what if I wanted to get in contact with ALL the left handed trout flyfishing anglers? I would get online on places like Facebook or left handed fishermen dot com and find others. The Social Media Landscape isn't a scary place. It's a world of wonder. It should be explored, and used. As far as marketing, it's great to get to know your customers/users on a more personal level.

Truth is that I do as well, at least that component that Michael focuses on, Yes it's good to do things in your local physical market. A post by another social media maven Brand Autopsy does a good job of making the point. Blogger johnmoore from Brand Autopsy on 6/8/08 wrote about a recent editorial in Ad Age regarding JetBlue's current advertising campaign in which Advertising Age recommends NOT ADVERTISING.

JetBlue is missing the point with its recent ad push. What it needs is to get back to what made it a media and consumer darling: customer service and good internal and external communication."

>"Priority No. 1 should be getting back to a place where consumers want to share good stories.

From John: Let's take this a step further. BEFORE any company spends gobs of money on an advertising campaign, it should first spend money on improving the performance of a product/service and on ratcheting up the customer experience.

The questions being raised lately though go beyond just bottom line and cash flow concerns. The larger question being asked is whether social media is an effective tool for change. The Other Side of the Pillow - Official CoolPeopleCare.org Blog asked Social Networking, or Social Fragmenting? back in February. Sam Davidson brings up a number of issues but I am skipping to the conclusion of his article.

As someone who runs a digital property, I'm constantly looking for what all this means for CoolPeopleCare and our mission to enable people to change the world. Yeah – we've got the Facebook fan page, we've got the MySpace profile, we Twitter and we blog. But why do we do all this, especially when we believe in the power of the offline community so much and that change happens best face to face?

Because we have to be where people are. And people now gather online. Even if the ultimate action we're soliciting is one of offline, real world, or analog behavior, the doorway into people's minds is a digital one.So by all means use social media and use it well – but don't expect it to save the world in an instant. Countless individuals are finding that social networks could lead to social fragmenting. Rebecca's found that social networks don't create new leaders. Even if there is a digital doorway, the pathway to change has to still be traversed with two very real feet.

The Rebecca he is referring to is Rebecca Thorman, who's blog post about how social media doesn't create a new generation of leaders was for Sam a prophetic beacon of how all of this online networking may not be getting us as far along as we'd like.

Rebecca's found that social networks don't create new leaders. Sorry, but I don't find this that insightful. We should know this already. Ecological niches do not create new species, but they do create the environment in which they can arise.

Another source of evidence, I would argue against proof, is Wired Magazine, in which Tim Harford explains why new technological tools, which intend to eliminate the importance of geography when it comes to collaboration, actually do just the opposite.

Business is more innovative, and its processes more complex. That demands tacit knowledge, collaboration, and trust – all things that seem to follow best from person-to-person meetings.

While fully agreeing that we are still most comfortable in establishing a relationship on trust if we can meet people in person, this does not really speak in oppostion to social media. There are a number of psychological and cognitive-neurological reasons for this bias, which have been touched on before and will be again. But, just as E-bay established greater online trust for the web transaction, so will greater degrees of trust occur through Social Media sites (and degrees of wisdom from too much trust).

I have a more basic philosophical beef with Hardford's approach, which is more to do with his often quoted argument that if you (I am paraphrasing here) have a choice whether to study the issues of an election or a new stereo then read up on woofers because your making a difference is so slight in the election. Actually my argument is more with the traditional Homo economicus argument. Not only in that there is a non-rational component to what we do as individuals, but when we interact as a collective or group it changes the paradigms. There is a Malcolm Gladwell-like Tipping Point, where if enough people follow Mr. Hardford's advice the system breaks down.

Yes, this is unlikely to happen, but the same principles that prevent this also serve the integrity of the social media systems. This raises questions on the "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction. Social Media allows Howard Rheingold to speak on Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion and provide an avenue for Kevin Kelly's endeavors - The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us Or At Least Kevin Kelly Is. I am suspicious of using old paradigms to judge new paradigms.

There are a number of other points that Sam makes that should be addressed, but I am going to leave those for another time. I will also admit taking advantage by changing the order of Sam's argument, but one of the best arguments against the hand-wringing regarding social media sites is Sam's own CoolPeopleCare.

So perhaps all of this worrying about technological innovation not taking us as far as we think or as fast as we would like is not all that useful. Maybe it's just a better way to play Scrabble or better yet the Free Rice Game. Not as social, but at least you will be doing some good while improving your vocabulary and you will get better at Scrabble.

I will finish off by fully agreeing that Even if there is a digital doorway, the pathway to change has to still be traversed with two very real feet.

Revisiting Eco20/20 Group At Diigo.com

Back in April I joined one of the diigo groups Eco20/20, an organization that according to the group description, is the leader at providing safe,clean,environmentally friendly alternative-renewable energy information. We must be energy smart and independent. Fossil fuels are finite,expensive and damage the air.

Since then it has tripled the number of friends from 56 to 158 and doubled its membership from 15 to 33. This would seem to demonstrate that having a specific focus of purpose and established credentials to achieve that purpose makes it more likely that others will join you or at least tag along. Membership would suggest greater commitment than friendship, the basis of that commitment being contributions of bookmarks.

Energy Net is by far the greatest contributer to the group with 174, as of this writing, bookmarks provided. A visit to Energy Net's profile page will show a long term commitment to this cause. According the profile of the owner, I'm the archivist for the anti-nuclear movement in California that was organized by the Abalone Alliance and further down this site is organized around educating public about the dangers of nuclear power and alternatives to it. Energy Net has 5,348 bookmarks most dealing with energy and nuclear.

I would seem to be third, at least in terms of shared bookmarks with a paltry 12, but then energy and environmental issues have not been a top focus for me. Truth is that most of my shared bookmarks have dealt with economics, economic sustainability, technology or other issues and happened to involve energy issues. I have also, as of yet, not participated in any forums.

I do, however, have more shared bookmarks and even total bookmarks at the eco20/20 diigo site than eco20/20 itself. Is the site then merely a container created for others to fill in their contributions? Does the diigo site help to feed new people to the ECO20/20 website homepage? It is all for the good, rather the question being raised is on effective communication or conversation with the "crowd". At its highest level, the best term I can come up with would be "collaboration". My past posts on this perspective though have bounced all over the place. Energy Net would seem to be getting the greatest leverage out of their efforts on this subject, at least in relation to the diigo community.

Some of my contributed Group Bookmarks are below. Some perhaps could be debated as to whether or not they were applicable or not.

TED | Talks | Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto (video) --- Add comment
- Tag: development economics environment paradigms poverty social-entrepreneurship sustainability ted video - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:24

- Quotes & Comments -

• Why you should listen to her: Majora Carter is a visionary voice in city planning who views urban renewal through an environmental lens. The South Bronx native draws a direct connection between ecological, economic and social degradation. Hence her motto: - comment by Brian Dowling

European Commission - External Trade - Trade Issues --- Add comment

- Tag: biofuel environment global - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:26

- Quotes & Comments -

• Mandelson writes: "The issue is not biofuels or no biofuels, but the right biofuels. Europe's governments have signed a commitment ensuring that 10% of the petrol in Europe's vehicles in 2020 is made from renewable transport fuels, including biofuels. This will make an important contribution to the EU's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote security of energy supply. But there is an obvious caveat: biofuels must be an environmental policy in pursuit of an environmental outcome - the most sustainable policy is the only right policy".

Food prices | The end of cheap food | Economist.com --- Add comment

- Tag: economics environment - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:25

- Quotes & Comments -

• This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.

Change the Incentive Structure | Cosmic Variance --- Add comment

- Tag: economics environment - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:25

- Quotes & Comments -

• Change the Incentive Structure

  Sean at 11:46 am, December 13th, 2007

  Via Climate 411, through the intermediaries of Matthew Yglesias and Bradford Plumer, here’s a dramatic example of the government driving innovation â€" the number of patents granted for sulfur-dioxide control technologies per year, with major air-quality legislation marked.

Zerofootprint --- Add comment

- Tag: environment - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:24

Powerset Co-Founder to Launch Crowdsourced Green VC Fund --- Add comment

- Tag: crowdsourced economics environment vcfund - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:26

- Quotes & Comments -

• Steve Newcomb, a co-founder of search startup Powerset, is in the early stages of launching a ventur- capital fund that would accept green investments as low as $100, with a maximum investment of $1,000.

  "It would be a breakthrough green venture-capital fund for the people, by the people. As excited as I was about PowerSet, I'm 10 times more excited about this," Newcomb told Wired.com. "Worldwide, there is the potential to raise a multibillion-dollar fund."

Food vs. Fuel --- Add comment

- Tag: economics environment - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:25

- Quotes & Comments -

• Corn is caught in a tug-of-war between ethanol plants and food, one of the first signs of a coming agricultural transformation and a global economic shift. Ever since our ancestors in the Fertile Crescent first figured out how to grow grains, crops have been used mainly to feed people and livestock. But now that's changing in response to the high price of oil, the cost in lives and dollars of ensuring a supply of petroleum imports, and limits on climate-warming emissions of fossil fuels.

The Greener Grass --- Add comment

- Tag: design environment social-engagement - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:25

- Quotes & Comments -

• 

  One of the objectives we should want to achieve when defining and presenting ourselves or our life's endeavors is authenticity. One could take it that design also has authenticity has an objective as well from the writings of Finn McKenty, who blogs at Lightheavyweight. Perhaps, though, it is wrong to think of them as being in separate arenas.

  Finn McKenty extends the concern with authenticity to endeavors of social-engagement. Specifically, the Greener Grass project, which is about connecting people with ideas designed to have a positive impact.

  - comment by Brian Dowling

• About The Greener Grass

  The Greener Grass uses our resources to initiate positive change by opening discourse, connecting people, and becoming a conduit for new thinking and discussion that leads to positive outcomes. Our goal is to build a community by interviewing experts and thought leaders, identifying trends, and creating concepts for products, services, and ideas that bring solutions to life.

Make Green Pay Video, Part 1 - CNBC.com --- Add comment

- Tag: business economics entrepreneurship environment sustainability - Shared By: Brian Dowling 2008-05-21 03:07:25

- Quotes & Comments -

• Make Green Pay Video, Part 1 - comment by Brian Dowling

learning more about diigo

I have spent the last few days, off and on, learning more about the diigo tagging system. I have also been both comparing it and and trying to combine it with the del.icio.us and StumbleUpon tagging systems.

The best thing about diigo, so far, is that you can highlight passages of interest and attach stickynotes for comments directly to articles or websites that have caught your interest. You can also take those comments and send them to your blog as a draft post. The draft post will include an annotated link that will take the reader directly to the particular webpage with sections highlighted and comments attached. Other diigo members can do the same, creating a conversation on the webpage itself. Trouble though is that the annotations don't always seem to show up in the same way, though that may be me or my computer rather than diigo.

Similar to StumbleUpon, there also seems to be a greater opportunity to link up with others than there does with del.icio.us. So far two other (diigoites ?) have asked me to link with them. One is an organization, Eco20/20, a worthwhile organization, which is asking everybody with the right tags to link up. They also asked me to join their group, which I have. Right now it seems that they have more friends (56) then members (15).

Another group that I ran across in my webtrekking through diigo country was edtechtalk an organization with a diigo group. They have 214 members. As their website says, EdTechTalk is a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology. This is another example of a professional organization using diigo for collaboration. What I found interesting was their discussion on whether to use both diigo and del.icio.us or to dump del.icio.us.

As far as which one is better, for inter-active connections among a particular group diigo would seem to be far ahead. I also like their webslide feature, though it seems that I need to re-install it on some of my posts.

For testing which was better in the dissemination of websites, I searched for the word "entropy". I got 133 hits from diigo. It gave me 3 of my sites even though I had not tagged them "entropy". What was particularly interesting was that diigo gave me "linguistics" as a related group with 4 members. StumbleUpon only gives you 10 featured sites but gives you 30 other fellow stumblers who are also interested in "entropy" sites. You can then decide to stumble other sites, which can be cool since I am OK with utilizing random inquisitiveness or being open to serendipity. Mag.nolia gave me about 100. The winner hands down was del.icio.us with 2,680 sites. There are repeats though with all the systems because different people tag sites differently.

So I like diigo's interactivity better than either del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. I will still use del.icio.us because most people who find websites featured on this weblog find them on del.icio.us. Which works out because I can automatically save to diigo, del.icio.us and mag.nolia. I do like the formating and serendipitous approach of StumbleUpon better than diigo or del.icio.us, but that is also ok because I can save from del.icio.us to StumbleUpon using a greasedmonkey script.

My latest experiment using diigo was to use the diigo blog feature about a Penelope Trunk post, highlighting certain sections and publishing it to this blog. The diigo annotated links took me to the posted with my comments highlighted. Finally, I saved this under StumbleUpon using their toolbar.

Now the question is whether it is worth it. It it is not that much more trouble, a few more clicks. Each tagging system has its own strengths. The answer depends upon why you are saving the website in the first place. For a weblog seeking new pathways through learning while endeavoring to share any worthwhile finds, the combination could be the best approach.

Stumbling Through the Crowd On a Path To Wisdom

One topic running, at least in the background, through the recent posts of this weblog has been crowdsourcing. Despite having a working definition for this newly created term, I am still wrestling with fitting it within related web 2.0 jargon. At its most basic it seems to be an individual or entity with an entrepreneurial bent using the labor of unnamed masses transforming services into commodities.

How does this differ though with what was considered under the Challenging The "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction regarding social influence? What factors move the process from crowdsourcing to collaboration or is it to a great degree a matter of perspective? All these perspectives would seem to depend upon one degree or another on some form of the wisdom of the crowds concept, without ever knowing what elements make up the crowd. We become connected without ever knowing who we are connected to, but does being connected to hundreds intimately to accomplish a specific task that is part of a larger goal really make any sense? Maybe if discussing one's favorite pizza, but preparing the financial statements for a business plan?

Some people, as this Wired article demonstrates, can make this aspect of the new economy work for them. Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

One arena of the crowd networking with the crowd is the new StumbleUpon community I recently joined. This StumbleUpon site that I sent to myself includes a companion piece to The Rise of Crowdsourcing article on the 5 rules of crowdsourcing labor. It also goes beyond that utilizing the wisdom of the StumbleUpon crowd to find other sites through related concepts. At least as far as I related them.

StumbleUpon

Discover new web sites

Wired 14.06: 5 Rules of the New Labor Pool

wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/...

reviews crowdsourcing, creativity, management

---

BrianDRPM has sent you a site he found with StumbleUpon

Finding Gigs in the Crowds

BrianDRPM
briandrpm@gmail.com

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Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion

Previously, I quoted Seth Godin as saying.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along.

I agree, but it's actually the concept of passion and people that I agree with, not what is Malcolm's Gladwell's point. I am even more sure that it is not Duncan Watt's point. Also raised a point regarding what had been said about the quality of feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences.

What was missing from these discussions was the concept of collaboration. Both the posting on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and the posting on Unintended Consequences raised by the Freakonomics involved basically unilateral communications or at least the appearance of it.

If there was two-way communication, it was not conscious, purposeful nor intentional. The example of inter-ethnic violence cited by the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, featured in past posts best illustrated the disruptive capacity of this, while the most illustrative example of decentralized crowd wisdom collaboration was undoubtedly Cosmic Variance's starlings used in a previous post to discuss greed and the human condition.

I realize that statistically we can see trends moving in certain directions and ignore the actions of the individual. But I am also reminded of the words of Krishinamurti.