By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance’s stock went up 306 percent.
Much of the Chinese government’s lavish spending on cameras and other surveillance gear has taken place under the banner of "Olympic Security." But how much is really needed to secure a sporting event?
The price tag has been put at a staggering $12-billion — to put that in perspective, Salt Lake City, which hosted the Winter Olympics just five months after September 11, spent $315 million to secure the games. Athens spent around $1.5-billion in 2004
[ Snip ... ]
There is a bitter irony here. When Beijing was awarded the games seven years ago, the theory was that international scrutiny would force China’s government to grant more rights and freedom to its people. Instead, the Olympics have opened up a backdoor for the regime to massively upgrade its systems of population control and repression. And remember when Western companies used to claim that by doing business in China, they were actually spreading freedom and democracy? We are now seeing the reverse: investment in surveillance and censorship gear is helping Beijing to actively repress a new generation of activists before it has the chance to network into a mass movement.
The numbers on this trend are frightening. In April 2007, officials from 13 provinces held a meeting to report back on how their new security measures were performing. In the province of Jiangsu, which, according to the South China Morning Post, was using "artificial intelligence to extend and improve the existing monitoring system" the number of protests and riots "dropped by 44 per cent last year." In the province of Zhejiang, where new electronic surveillance systems had been installed, they were down 30 per cent. In Shaanxi, "mass incidents" — code for protests — were down by 27 per cent in a year. Dong Lei, the province’s deputy party chief, gave part of the credit to a huge investment in security cameras across the province. "We aim to achieve all day and all-weather monitoring capability," he told the gathering.
Activists in China now find themselves under intense pressure, unable to function even at the limited levels they were able to a year ago. Internet cafes are filled with surveillance cameras, and surfing is carefully watched. At the offices of a labor rights group in Hong Kong, I met the well-known Chinese dissident Jun Tao. He had just fled the mainland in the face of persistent police harassment. After decades of fighting for democracy and human rights, he said the new surveillance technologies had made it "impossible to continue to function in China."
Just over three years ago I wrote a brief essay seeking, playfully, to build on McLuhan’s famous "The medium is the message", based on the belief that we were in the early stage of entering into a participative environment (and eventually) culture, something beyond the passive introjection of images and ideas television affords.
It needs more work, as by necessity I just kept to the surface. The Web and all the people who use it have been busy filling in the details.
Here’s one more piece of the puzzle, found on Rob Patterson’s blog, in turn obtained from Johnnie Moore. No doubt by now many many others have seen it and posted about it, as well.
Thanks also to Professor Wesch and the students who work with him … they are doing a great job at creating some additional and important meaning.
Dos is exiled from Kazakhstan after setting up his own political party, Atameken, at the end of 2006. He was forced to flee following threats to his life.
Before that happened, however, he acted as an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, and a man of considerable influence within the country.
Dos said that in the autumn of 2005 he had been asked by the Kazakh government, via Kulibayev, to arrange a visit by Cheney. The intention was to improve the country’s international standing.
Dos had spent several days negotiating with Payne. A deal was eventually agreed, he said, and he understood that a payment of $2m was passed, via a Kazakh oil and gas company, to Payne’s firm.
The following May, Cheney made a brief trip to Kazakhstan. His visit was remarked upon in the media at the time, both for the lavish praise which he publicly heaped on Nazarbayev and for the stark contrast between this and a speech he had made just a day earlier at a conference in Lithuania in which he had lambasted Russia for being insufficiently democratic. Now he was lauding Nazarbayev, who has effectively made himself president for life and in whose country it is an offence to criticise him.
“Why did Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system?” said one newspaper following the visit. “Cheney’s flattery of the Kazakh regime was sickening,” said another.
Dos believes some of the money paid to WSP may have found its way to “entities” connected to the Bush administration.
In order to test which channels might be available to foreigners seeking influence within the US, Dos agreed to approach Payne, at The Sunday Times’s request, with a fabricated story about Akayev wanting to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the world. Akayev was not aware of the approach to Payne.
In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”
That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company.
The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.
With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.
ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.
The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.
But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.
Going back almost 5 years now, I co-founded a small Web 2.0 startup called Qumana. Our aim was to make it easier for bloggers to assemble snippets of content and then stitch together and publish blog posts that had a rich mix of text, images and audio, video or slides, for example.
We also offered bloggers the unique capability of inserting advertising into a blog post whenever, wherever and however they wanted … if they wanted to use advertising. But bloggers could use Qumana without using the advertising function.
We ran out of money about 2 and one-half years ago, but left the web site up. People continue to download the tool and use it with satisfaction.
It was also a factor in our decision to put things on hold that Microsoft came out with the blogging tool LiveWriter, an almost direct clone of Qumana. We now sometimes talk of Qumana as LiveWriter for OS X.
There’s still a lot of potential, in my opinion, for such tools to be integrated (with RSS and Twitter, for example) for use in the enterprise setting.
Anyhow, here’s a nod of recognition from a magazine focused on OS X tools.
Via Bertrand Duperrin (whom I enjoyed meeting in Montreal in May .. a very clever and passionate fellow who scours the Web for everything related to Enterprise 2.0).
The network era has been here and has been growing and is here to stay … and there is an opportunity to use technology to help us all, organizations and corporations included, become less technocratic.
I share his belief that large organizations won’t be disappearing any time soon. I also think that many large corporations will be comprised of many small and some large networks, and those networks are made up of people … their brains, their emotions, and their motivations.
It more than time for organizations large and small to recognize that the machine metaphor and assumptions about machine-like structures and dynamics can’t cope effectively with complexity and ongoing change as well as resilient human networks in which understanding and positive motivation reside.
Dare I say that this presentation reminds me of the concept I call “wirearchy” ?
Thanks, Lee, for this clear and compelling presentation. I wish I had been at Reboot this year … aiming to make it to Copenhagen next year.
Perhaps I’ll see you in Montreal at WebCom this fall.
A brief commentary on a recent Forrester survey noting that corporate blogging (to external customers and markets) is often not working out that well.
Personally, I am not that surprised. There is a plethora of writing over the last two years (including some on this blog) suggesting that there’s a lot of adaptation to corporate cultures, management processes and management styles that will be be most useful when moving into a new way of working with information.
This survey does not seem to address social computing inside the firewall. I would be greatly surprised to find a significantly different result, except perhaps where a project or team has indeed migrated to a new way of working.
Using blogs and wikis to good effect in any comprehensive way will, I think, involve a lot of “soft” organizational change.
“The soft stuff is always the hard stuff” … an OD mantra.
A recent Forrester survey of 189 companies found that 38% rated blogging marginal to marketing and 15 % said blogs were irrelevant. My experience is that many who get into blogs have unrealistic expectations, set irrelevant measures and “ROI” goals, and view blogs as a campaign tactic, which they most definitely are not. (Another observation: many quickly run out of things to blog about, often a sign that they’re not passionate or knowledgeable about their field.)
The bigger point is that people today expect a more social, casual style of business communications. In writing style. And in being able to post a comment or talk back.
The value of blogging done right is that it breaks the old corporate speak iceberg. Soon there will no longer be a corporate Web site and separate blogs. Good business Web sites will be blog-like in style and the ability for people to comment.
However, this means that businesses need to be more interesting, provide more valuable content and ideas to people who take the time to go to their site/blogs, have a point of view on trends in their industries, and thoughtfully respond to comments.
It also means that many, many communications and marketing people have to relearn communications skills.
The special plan is available not just to iPhone customers, but any Rogers customer with a 3G next-generation smart phone.
MATT HARTLEY
Bowing to public pressure, Rogers Wireless Inc. has opted to slash its data fees as the launch of the iPhone draws near.
Customers who purchase an iPhone and sign up for a three-year contract any time between July 11 – when the device goes on sale – and the end of August will be eligible for a $30-per-month data plan giving them access to 6-Gigabytes of data. Rogers previously had charged $100 for a 6-GB plan.
Rogers also announced that it would hold special launch day events to welcome the iPhone to Canada on Friday. Six Rogers Plus locations and one Fido store will open at 8 a.m. on Friday with special promotions and free breakfast.
A Rogers spokeswoman said the decision to offer the new plan was based on “customer feedback.”
(I’d call it rapid and loud and constant complaining !)
I think in 2008 computer use and understanding of the internet should be part of the basic skill set we expect from people in positions of prominent public leadership. It’s pretty much impossible to have any kind of understanding of how people in the modern world go about their lives and work without that.
The internet is not a fad or the playground for 17 year olds.
I don’t mean it’s important for someone running for president to spend his/her days on Facebook or becoming immersed in all of the various internet subcultures.
But how can you have any genuine sense of contemporary life unless you at least have some clue?
Two + years on, I am still turning over in my mind this post on process (The End of Process) by Ross Mayfield and the attendant comments.
I have been involved in various aspects of work design in companies for a long time, and one could even say that I am heavily invested in some core beliefs, given that I quit a lucrative and semi-high-profile career fifteen years ago. I believed that information technology would drastically change the nature of work. The company I worked for - a global HR and organizational effectiveness consulting company - wasn’t, in my opinion, ready to acknowledge the extent of the transformation.
I still believe that, and I still believe many, if not most, companies have not really acknowledged the extent of the change that is possible, or that is now coming thick and fast.
This is a statement that, on its face, appears absurd … companies the world over have expended tens, scores, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on large integrated systems that have required the design of long, large and tightly designed work processes … followed by the pouring of *electronic concrete* over these work processes, in the form of the large integrated systems.
I think that processes are good and useful, leading to the standardization of work and the delivery of increased product and service quality in many instances.
I also think that standardization and the fitting of work process to the requirements of integrated information systems have also led to significant rigidities in the face of boisterous, interacting, demanding individual human beings … rendering all too many of us *prisoners* of some companies’ business processes, whether we are workers who struggle with an internal-to-the-company boa constrictor of exceptions and constraints, or customers who are left to fend with a system that won’t let their needs or desires be met in appropriate or sensible ways.
What companies have not done well is acknowledge or understand that the fundamental responsiveness to customer or emplyee feedback comes from what people have always done well … what they, arguably, are designed to do or what is in their nature to do .. which is:
- ask questions, and seek to understand
- suggest alternatives, and watch or listen as they are *tried on for size*
- clarify needs or desires, and find ways to deal with exceptions or delight the customer or colleague with a response that makes sense
- fiddle with things to find out what works best
- invent new ways, come up with good ideas, point out another possibility, etc.
- decide together why and how to do something
In effect, these *social processes* have been suppressed or limited by the structures of most sizeable companies, with the attendant rules underpinning reporting relationships, spans of control, delegations of authority. This is, colloquially, why so many people like to complain about *hierarchy* … there are often better ways available, or conditions which no longer suit the bureaucracy which was yesterday’s process answer to yesterday’s conditions, but they are not permitted to enter into play.
These ruminations bring to mind the approach known as Participative Work Design, known mainly to Organizational Development theorists and consultants:
Participative Design was developed in 1971 by Fred and Merrelyn Emery. They developed the method as a faster and more acceptable alternative to the Socio-Technical Systems (STS) approach, where a multi-functional task force redesigns the organisation, usually taking a whole year to do so. A design created in such a way tends to be flawed, because it is based on an incomplete assessment of reality. Also, workers do not have ownership of the design, and this generates resistance to change. And, perhaps most significantly, the organisation’s underlying power structure remains intact.
Whereas STS is based on what the Emerys call the ‘bureaucratic design principle’, Participative Design reflects the ‘democratic design principle’. This says that (1) those who have to do the work are in the best position to design the way in which it is structured, (2) effectiveness is greatly improved when teams take responsibility for controlling their own work, and (3) the organisation increases its flexibility and responsiveness when people are capable of performing multiple functions and tasks.
The Emerys have also identified six basic conditions that need to be met if people’s work is to be productive and satisfying. There must be:
- Elbow room for decision making - Opportunities for continuous on-the-job learning - Sufficient variety - Mutual support and respect - Meaningfulness - A desirable future, not a dead end
The examples of human interactive behaviour while doing *work* are characteristics of the give-and-take of purposeful interaction. Wikis (such as the solution offered by Ross’ company Socialtext) or purpose-designed blogs (for project management, or brainstorming, or collective competitive intelligence, or for wrestling with difficult problems through dissection, analysis and reconstruction of issues … is a social process.
The lightweight, inexpensive, user-friendly tools are now available to let people interact, with each other and with larger, integrated systems .. to integrate social process into more static and more clearly defined work processes.
The nature of work is changing too much, and the spread of easy-to-use inexpensive social software too rapid and far-reaching (and useful) not to attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of managers, professionals and anyone else interested in the nature of work in a world in which we are surrounded by software and information systems.
It has been said that sociology always trumps technology.
What do you think ? Who else do you know that is contributing to wider and deeper understanding ?
