Featured - Written Monday, October 18, 2010 by Don Tapscott - 0 Comments

Wikinomics.com is now Macrowikinomics.com!

Dear Wikinomics community member,

I want to thank you for your support and interest for Wikinomics.com. We created this site more than four years ago as a follow-on forum for the ideas Anthony D. Williams and I presented in our 2007 bestseller, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The book revealed how mass collaboration was reinventing the way businesses communicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace. Since its inception, Wikinomics.com has hosted many good discussions with insights from posters and readers alike.

Now we want to continue and expand the same great discussions on a new site, Macrowikinomics.com, which derives its name from my most recent collaboration with Anthony, Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet.

The book’s thesis is that we are mired in more than just a recession. We’re seeing the precipitous decline of the industrial economy as a whole. Many of the institutions that have served us well for decades—even centuries—seem frozen and unable to move forward. Yes, the industrial economy brought us unprecedented productivity, knowledge accumulation and innovation that resulted in undreamt-of-wealth and prosperity. But that prosperity has come at a cost to society and the planet.

It is clear that the wealth and security enjoyed in advanced economies may not be sustainable as billions of citizens in emerging markets aspire to join the global middle class. If we continue on a business-as-usual path, today’s global instability will surely increase. Indeed, we believe the world has reached a critical turning point: reboot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or even collapse. We look at more than a dozen fields—from finance to health care, science to education, the media to the environment—that are ripe for reinvention by mass collaboration.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google says that “Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ insights about the power of collaborative innovation and open systems, and their call to ‘reboot’ our institutions—business, education, media, government—haven’t come a minute too soon. Macrowikinomics inspires by chronicling these path breaking developments and pointing the way forward for all of us.”

Please join all of us at Wikinomics.com as we make the move to Macrowikinomics.com. This site will continue to be available as an archive of all of the discussions that have gone on to date. New posts and comments will not be possible. Recent posts on this site have already been copied over to Macrowikinomics.com, and you can continue any discussions there.

If you haven’t read Macrowikinomics yet, I encourage you to do so. Visit Macrowikinomics.com to get your copy.

Best,
Don Tapscott

Business - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 by Tim Bevins - 0 Comments

DRM and us

Cory Doctorow says he does not tell artists to give their work away for free, as some people incorrectly claim, and anyone who thinks he does is wrong. He just believes that preventing copying is impossible, and that copying is only going to get easier, so adapting to this reality just makes sense for “copyright giants.” The topic dear to his heart is what he describes very clearly in “The real cost of free”: “the risks to freedom arising from the failure of copyright giants to adapt to a world where it’s impossible to prevent copying.”

His personal answer to copyright is to give away his “ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing.” He then attracts readers who buy hard copies. Having two books on The New York Times bestseller lists in the last two years, he says, validates his particular approach.

But his piece online at The Guardian, published today, takes on a much broader issue than how he’s perceived by others or even the idea that copy-prevention is futile. “… here’s what I do care about. I care if your plan [to stop people from copying your work over the internet or to build a business around this idea] involves using ‘digital rights management’ technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won’t be able to catch infringers if you can’t spy on every video.”

[Breathe here.]

Continue…

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Government - Monday, September 13, 2010 by Thomas Gegenhuber - 2 Comments

Repair the world

The ARS Electronica Festival in Linz is a conference that supports cutting-edge experiments in digital culture. The motto of this year’s festival was “REPAIR – ready to pull the lifeline,” and the highlight was the “Open Source Life” symposium. The bottom line of “Open Source Life” is how to transfer the ideas of open source to other layers of society.
Although I saw a lot of good ideas, here are some of my favorites: Continue…

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Society - Friday, August 6, 2010 by Thomas Gegenhuber - 4 Comments

The Empire strikes a light

In my first blog post, I wrote about different examples of Government 2.0. I also mentioned Manorlabs, the City of Manor’s idea generation and innovation platform. Manorlabs uses game mechanics to keep the people engaged. The CIO of the City of Manor, Dustin Haisler, told me in an interview: “Innovation can actually be fun and citizens can actually have fun helping the government do progressive things.” This statement brings to light two key questions that every community must address: Continue…

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