April 2008

"Power To The People" or "Power To The Handful of Telcos" ?

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Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

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Either way, I think the future holds for us an "archy" with respect to being "wired".

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So over the years it’s become increasingly clear to me that organizations do not have innovation DNA. They don’t have adaptability DNA. This realization inevitably led me back to a fundamental question: what problem was management invented to solve, anyway ?

When you read the history of management and of early pioneers like Frederick taylor, you realize that management was designed to solve a very specific problem - how to do things with perfect replicability, at ever-increasing scale and steadily increasing efficiency.

Now there’s a new set of challenges on the horizon.

- Gary Hamel, the Future of Management

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… of my time has been spent mainly on the project described below.

Best Practices research, governance, space and operational planning and playing an advisor role.

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The W2 Community Media Arts Centre represents the cutting edge in bringing together hybrid art forms, community arts practices, and community cultural development in a single environment, and will host a diverse grouping of Vancouver arts and community service organizations. In particular, the public gallery, production, and performance venues will provide for the development and presentation of digital media, movement, and inter-arts productions by local and international artists.

The Centre will become an outstanding cultural hub for the DTES, and provide a framework for artists, residents and community groups to work together, while exploring new cross-cultural and hybrid art forms. Respecting the community’s diverse existing populations as well as new residents, the programming partners will develop strategies to engage participants as producers rather than consumers of new technology and the arts; creating new forms of collective learning and expression, resources and platforms for self-representation.

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I wish it were easier to sort out who knows what and which information is most correct , but it certainly seems that there is a preponderance of evidence to suggest that this statement by Supreme Ayatollah Khomeini is correct.

We in the western world have so much propaganda and demonization pumped into our cerebellums that we literally seem at times to have stopped thinking, functioning mostly on emotion (notably apprehension and fear of demons).

Here’s an excerpt, via Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, about Senator’s Clinton’s recent statements about the distant, though forewarned, possibility of the USA "obliterating" Iran.

Via Karl Denninger’s Market Ticker blog

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Step back for a second and remove the name "America" from where this is happening.

Walk up to a random person and describe all of the above (summarized directly below), leaving the name off.

Massive liquidity injections made to cover up the intentional lying of financial institutions, refusal to declare a loss when its a loss, a property bubble (intentionally blown by that nation’s central bank through willful blindness to what amounts to a gigantic ponzi scheme in the credit markets) that has popped and is dragging down values by more than 20% in a single year’s time (with no bottom in sight), 97% of the auctioned properties going back to lenders because they rigged the bidding and refused to accept the offered amount, and a government where literally millions of dollars in bribes, er, "campaign contributions" are made by PACs set up by the very companies that are doing the lying - and a government that not only allows this to go on but gives some parts of this den of thieves preferential tax status.

Then add in that virtually every large financial institution in the nation has intentionally moved billions of dollars of "assets" into a bucket called "Level 3" not because they can’t get a price but because they didn’t like the price they were quoted. So instead of recognizing the value (or lack thereof) that the market says these assets have (and which, by the way, is right in line with what has happened to them in previous recessions) they instead simply stuff them in the closet and stick a wholly-made-up price tag on them, calling that their "value". Oh, and then these same firms pay their executives bonuses based on these claimed "values"!

Finally, in the financial sphere, some of these firms allegedly "sell" off tens of billions of loans for 90 cents on the dollar, but they finance the purchase, yet account for it as a "true sale", and oh by the way, those loans were originally made to the same people who bought them back. The accountants wink, nod, and call this an "arms length" business transaction.

Due to all of this intentional fraud and deceit that nation’s currency has declined in value by 40% in the last three years and is still falling, with some market analysts predicting a further 30% decline in the next year or two, and a full 10% of that currency decline has occurred in the last three months.

The nation’s people have figured it out, driving consumer confidence to generational lows. They are being laid off at the rate of tens of thousands a month, yet the government claims that unemployment is modest and the nation’s economy is "fundamentally strong."

Finally, tell them that this nation claims inflation is running "3%" (and adds that to their senior citizens entitlement checks) when over the last year meat has gone up in price by 30%, milk 35%, eggs have doubled, gasoline and diesel have doubled, and some basic crude goods have gone up in price four times over (e.g. flour) Add to this that this same government has mandated that 30% or more of the corn being grown be turned into fuel and put into the fuel tank of that nation’s cars, driving these price increases in foodstuffs even harder.

To a man these people would call that nation crooked, corrupt, a "banana republic."

They would call their stock market "rigged" and "impossible to invest in with any sort of rational basis."

They would call their politicians and businesspeople "crooks", "thieves", "liars" and worse.

They would lament that the population was being fleeced, ripped off, swindled and screwed.

They would compare that nation to Germany prior to the rise of Adolph Hitler, Argentina and Venezuela.

Welcome to America 2008 folks.

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Cross-posted to the FASTForward blog.

Much of what follows may not be new for anyone who may read this blog.  Nevertheless, I think it’s always useful to look back every once in a while, if only to see how far and fast (or not) we’ve come since this Web thing started to penetrate more deeply and spread more widely into the workplace. 

The changes to what we call knowledge work are now coming thick and fast.

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Knowledge management (KM) sometimes seems like the business buzzword that won’t go away. But that may be changing.  As Web 2.0 penetrates and spreads through workplaces, will it render KM as it was once known obsolete … or not ?

We have all been wrestling with the massive changes brought onto the scene by Web 2.0 technology and capabilities … changes that portend transforming the relationship between information technology, the nature of knowledge work, how organizations are structured and how humans operate when surrounded and penetrated by ongoing flows of information.  It’s doubly important to note and understand that we are in reality still only in the early days of these fundamental changes to both the processes of work and the capabilities of the electronic infrastructure of hardware and software, aluminum, silicon and logic that supports these transformations in behaviour in the digital workplace.

A first wave of what we currently call knowledge management (KM) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990’s as organizations began coming to grips with the potent combined forces of information technology and its twin sister, information-based knowledge work.  Much of the attention and effort centred on integrated information systems and specialized information technology that combined enabled the categorization, archiving and easy access to documents and other codified knowledge.  Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.  

Much water has passed under many bridges over the past five years or so.  Blogs and wikis began to appear on the scene in 2001 and 2002 and some speculated then that these tools - or more accurately their derivatives - would create a major impact on the knowledge workplace.  They were followed by the evolution and expansion of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 … features, functions and web services enabled by plug-ins, widgets and other easy-to-use digital mechanisms.  It was not until the middle of 2006 that IT executives and managers began to realize that lightweight, easy-to-use-and-integrate capabilities for finding information, pulling it apart and putting it together again in different ways, and exchanging that information to build useful knowledge would probably transform key areas of knowledge work and its attendant dynamics. 

Today there is rapidly growing awareness that the Web will play a major, if not dominant, role in the use of information technology by organizations small and large, whether through upgrading to the latest versions of major ERP systems that incorporate social software and collaboration capabilities and a range of useful widgets and plug-ins, or through wider adoption of SaaS or a make-over of an enterprise’s work systems to incorporate collaborative platforms and capabilities. Increasingly, changes to functionality, systems integration and IT architecture will need to be built around both individual and group cognitive and interactive styles and needs as well as the enterprise’s business process requirements

Many interviews with some of the acknowledged experts in the domain of knowledge management and in technology companies have led to forecasts of some version of the points outlined below (and of course many variations on the theme that each point suggests):

1.   KM assumed that knowledge work in information-based organizations basically remains more or less the same … more static or stable as opposed to dynamic (and always under construction) with ongoing reference to core dependencies on knowledge objects.  In other words traditional KM was over-reliant on structure where structure when working with flows of information is difficult to impose and fix into place

2.    “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question.  It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used.  This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work

3.     Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing.  It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction

4.  By and large, incentives should not be used to stimulate information contributions.  Generally, this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating

5.    Had today’s Web 2.0 tools and capabilities had been available a decade ago, what we have called knowledge management would have been embraced and used more successfully

6.    Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets. The knowledge accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of business / organizational processes on knowledge objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge from ongoing flows of dynamic information.

7.    We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects.  The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).

8.     An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.

9.     Computers alone cannot competently tag content. Authors must tag the content they create and / or use. Putting names and labels to content is essential and often may be words that do not appear in the content (this is the essence of metadata).

10.  Centralized IT control is on its way out.  Much more of the decision-making about what platforms / applications / software to be used will be made in by line management or by project teams.  Security concerns are real due to Web 2.0 but not apocalyptic and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.

11.  Human Resources (HR) will in all likelihood need to undergo a massive transformation.  The nature and design of knowledge work keeps changing and as that change accelerates, it’s likely that companies will need to move towards the self-organizing of work … including people, tools and methods.

Exploration of the issues in the field of Enterprise 2.0 has also more recently led to the understanding that social computing depends to some degree on the architecture, engineering and specialized knowledge handling technology that has come before.  Numerous vendors with KM-labelled products (mostly leveraging intranets) appeared in the market in the late 1990s and early 2000’s.  During that same period, hundreds of major enterprises developed and implemented KM programmes and / or functionality, to some degree or other.

Social computing in the enterprise  is intended to improve the collaboration, use of information and knowledge and the decision-making effectiveness of individuals, teams or the whole enterprise.  Today, more and more of the established KM-oriented products have added social-computing functionality.  Existing capabilities and implementations are being adapted, re-designed and/or added to by Web 2.0 applications, platforms and capabilities that make it easier and faster for knowledge workers to exchange information, collaborate and build and use. 

While through the spread of social computing KM may be coming out of an initial identity crisis, the advent and rapid spread of what is termed Enterprise 2.0 has helped create for KM a new Identity Crisis 2.0.   Today it seems clear that the new crop of collaboration tools, platforms and methods for enhanced collaboration are rapidly synthesizing and integrating fragmented or separate components of what was understood to be a KM-oriented system a few short years ago.

And whatever the current guise (which is likely to be different in virtually every organization)  increasingly practicality and ease-of-use will rule the day.

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An orchestra conductor on how the mode of totalitarian, authoritarian leadership (exemplified by orchestra conductors) is changing, necessarily so.

Lovely quote:

I’ve been watching an interesting documentary this evening on CBC titled Radiant City, which examines daily family and social life in the North American suburb …. life from the perspective of sustainability in an era of peak oil, social alienation and social conformity.

It struck me halfway through the documentary that the host / narrator is James Howard Kunstler, author of the book The Long Emergency and the blog Clusterfuck Nation (I recognized him in the documentary from the picture on his blog

The documentary also features commentary by Joseph Heath, one of the co-authors of the book Rebel Sell - why the culture can’t be jammed.

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RADIANT CITY
Sunday April 6 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld

Genie Award-winning Radiant City offers an entertaining look at life in suburbia.

While Evan Moss zones out in commuter traffic, Ann toils away in her dream kitchen and the kids play sinister games amidst the fresh foundations of monster houses. Developers call it big business, but the Moss family call it home.

Welcome to the neighbourhood and welcome to Radiant City - an entertaining and startling look at 21st century suburbanites and suburban sprawl.

Venturing into territory both familiar and foreign, Radiant City is a vivid account of life in The Late Suburban Age, where urban sprawl is eating up the planet. Across the continent the landscape is being levelled and blasted clean of distinctive features.

An array of cultural prophets provide insight on the spectacle that is suburbia: author James Howard Kunstler speaks out against the brutalizing aesthetic of strip malls, philosopher Joseph Heath fears the soul-eating "burbs", although admits they offer good value for money, and urban planner Beverly Sandalack dares to ask, "why can’t we walk anywhere anymore?"

Through a variety of cultural references, from Jane Jacobs to The Sopranos, Radiant City creates a provocative reflection on why we live the way we do. The theatrical version of the film recently won a Genie for Best Canadian Documentary.

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I’ve been out of the pool for the last week, head down in a project, but found the time to get back in the pool for a medium-length swim today.

I can now feel that I have not been swimming quite as regularly as I was a month ago, as the last 300 metres were a bit of a grind … but it’s nice to know that with another three or four sessions I should be closing in on the fitness and endurance level I was at a month ago.

Splash, splash, splash .. that’s what it takes.

… blog.

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I. Wallerstein speaks of the next 25 to 50 years as a critical juncture in the history of human society. That we are at the end of a world historical system that began 500 years ago. That capitalism is in terminal crisis because it can no longer externalize the true costs of its operations.

Everywhere, both people and the environment are rejecting the program.

Peak oil, ecological devastation, population pressures, social and psychological exhaustion / repulsion are all converging on the system concurrently and as there is no square inch left on earth that has not been mapped, charted cataloged, inventoried and analyzed, there is simply no place left to go.