Now, a new crop goes beyond these to analyze what went wrong, what were the underlying causes of the crisis and what should be done. The common conclusion is that the worst of the financial crisis may be over, but for business and government leaders the toughest days lie ahead. To save capitalism, we need to make some fundamental changes.

Who would have imagined three years ago that, in 2010, the central discussion among business and government leaders would be how to save capitalism?

Two books offer surprising and radical perspectives

The first is The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy, by Richard A. Posner, the prolific author and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge.  (Harvard University Press, 402 pages, $29.95)

Until recently, Posner was one of the free market’s most articulate proponents. He contributed greatly to the anti-regulation perspective that shaped public policy for the past three decades.

Posner now confesses that he and the so-called Chicago School believed erroneously that “markets were perfect, which is to say self-regulating, and government regulation in them almost always made things worse.” But the crisis shows that pure market competition can cause people to take reckless and irrational risks, with short-term profit-maximizing behaviour jeopardizing society’s long-term interests.

I suppose it’s a step forward to acknowledge that markets, left to their own devices, will result in disaster. But it’s hardly a revelation.

Posner foreshadowed his change of thinking in the Sept. 23, 2009, issue of the New Republic, with How I Became a Keynesian. In the book, he expands his argument and makes a compelling case that liberal icon John Maynard Keynes was right when he argued that governments need to play a strong role in the economy, particularly in stimulating demand during recessionary times.

In this dense tome, Posner presents well-argued suggestions for change and offers fresh thinking about the business cycle, building on Keynes’s theories. Like many critics, including former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, he would reinstitute the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed in 1999. It separated risky investment banking from commercial banking. He also savages the three bank-funded bond agencies that rated worthless financial instruments as AAA, arguing they should lose their semi-official status.

He serves up the dismal science of economics on a skewer, a popular pastime these days. Some economists defend themselves by saying their job is not to predict the future. Posner rebuts that economists didn’t do bad forecasting; they were “oblivious to danger.”

But, in the end, he offers little confidence that this crisis is over, let alone that its causes are fixable. He believes that polarized U.S. democratic institutions cannot rise to the challenge, lobbyists have near-complete control of government, and the prevailing belief that low taxes and appropriate public spending are both possible is foolhardy. We should expect waves of aftershocks resulting from rising public debt, including currency deflation, severe inflation and continued turmoil or worse.

The second book is The Road from Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Crown, 373 pages, $32). For Bishop and Green, capitalism as we knew it ended on Sept. 15, 2008, the day Paulson made the grave error of letting investment bank Lehman Brothers fail.

Like Posner, they propose sweeping changes to the capitalist system, which is a bit surprising coming from editors of the centre-right, pro-business Economist magazine: “If the biggest mistake we could make after the crisis would be to abandon capitalism, the second-biggest mistake would be to assume that capitalism does not need to change.”

The book is a delightful and stimulating read by two of today’s best business writers. Throughout, they take insightful deep dives into the history of capitalism, from the 1720 credit crunch in England to today, showing how the system has been built on constant crises. With a fresh view that is hard to categorize, they dismiss free-market fundamentalists such as Ayn Rand or Arthur Laffer, along with left-wing advocates who argue that markets can do no good.

They conclude there are five mistakes we must avoid making: Believing that bubbles are wholly negative; that governments should avoid bailing out the financial sector; that crises can be solved without addressing underlying economic causes; that an economy will always naturally recover on its own after a crisis; and that the solution is simply a rush to more regulation of financial markets.

Where Posner decries the reckless innovation in financial instruments that caused the crisis, Bishop and Green applaud the spirit of creativity. The predictable bubbles and crashes that result are part of a learning process, and we shouldn’t, warn the authors, throw out the innovation baby with the recklessness bathwater.

In addition to the wonderful review of economic history, the book is strongest when it presents four big ideas to shape this new and improved capitalism: Rethink economics; redesign global governance; put values back into business; and promote financial literacy. They advocate replacing the dollar with a new world currency, and for a new set of business values, blaming the crisis on “toxic ideas” rather than “toxic assets.”

Dissenting from Posner, they say that reinstating a new Glass-Steagall act would undermine U.S. banks’ international competitiveness. The authors might gain evidence for this view from the Canadian experience. Our banks avoided the risky and unethical behaviour of their U.S. counterparts, even though there is no Glass-Steagall-style imposed separation.

Bishop and Green, like Posner, stop short of laying out a comprehensive blueprint for change. However, clearly we’re in early days of this debate and enormous change lies ahead. By painting a rich historical tapestry and providing startling insights into how economics needs to recognize the complexity of human behaviour, they have made a powerful contribution to get us off a road that is indeed surely ruinous.

6. The world needs better governments.

Some governments in Central America and Africa are just holding on and many are dysfunctional.  But governability is becoming an issue for G20 countries as well.  One leader said the US is on the brink of being “ungovernable.”  One Chinese executive responded thusly when asked to defend his country’s lack of democracy:  “So we should adopt the American system where lobbyists run everything and nothing happens?”

Democracy was still seen as an unstoppable force but in many regions of the world it is becoming stalled, and in some cases losing ground.  Basic democratic institutions are at risk and in danger of failing part due to the economic crisis in poor countries.  The best predictor of democratic survival is per capita income.  In some countries portions of the government have been captured by interest groups. Other non-democratic countries are proving competitively stable and economically healthy.  And the current economic crisis shows that national governments and domestic regulation are inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global economy.   There is also danger of protectionism and isolationism.

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

The much-discredited phrase from the dotcom period is not just geek speak.  The Internet and Social Networks were central to many of the discussions here.  The digital age seems to be coming of age.  I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. It got a lot of buzz at Davos.  A few minutes into it the session we solicited questions from Facebook.  6,000 questions appeared in first 2 minutes.

The growing consensus is that new business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society.  I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging – changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles.

Most leaders love that a web company – Google –  is taking on China. The circumstantial evidence that the China-based hacking of Google was conducted by authorities looking for information about activists was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Talking to Google execs I’m convinced they not going to back down.

8. Girls, women and gender. A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women’s emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse.  The expected worldwide increase of women’s income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China’s expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest in the so-called Girl Effect, i.e., investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world.  In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men.  But every year of schooling increases a girl’s future earnings by 20 percent.  And by earning more and influencing how dollars are spent, women would acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically.  Countries should be more aggressive in finding female candidates for public office, and look outside the regular channels. But increased financial and political power brings responsibility. Woman could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9.  We need new measures of progress

There is growing agreement that GDPs and GNPs are flawed tools for measuring the health of country, and we should instead emphasize the idea of Gross National Well-Being or something similar.  Just as some companies have moved to “triple-bottom line” reporting for their impact on society, many economists argue that GDPs and GNPs measure activities that are detrimental to society and ignore activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic will increase drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP.  Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP.

There is no lack of research and creativity on this issue, as some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthily a country is growing.  The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and encourage their widespread adoption.

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

Like a park in a village we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations – especially intellectual property – through patents, copyright and trademarks. If someone infringes your IP, summon the lawyers out to do battle.  That’s often the wrong approach.  Contributing to “the commons” is not altruism; it’s the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example is when more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling.  Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology – breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders. Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people have such great potential. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us if we don’t want to pass on a deeply damaged planet to our children.  At the final session at Davos, we heard from six inspiring young people on stage on their hopes and ambitions.  There were more than a few tears in the audience.

1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able. Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle. In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed. The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy. The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom. Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change. We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways. They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well: “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better. US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos. Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock. This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4. Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected. The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis. Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs. To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin. But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance. Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use. CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

With the conspicuous exception of global warming, Harper acknowledged that many challenges face the world, but told delegates that the two most appropriate arenas for discussion and decision making are the G8 and the G20.  He described the latter as “the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation.” And each country should be guided by “enlightened self-interest” and a better “attitude.”

But the mood in Davos is that the planet is facing urgent, complicated, 21^st century problems, and we need to craft 21^st century systems to develop the answers. We should involve all of our planet’s best talent in the solution-seeking process, including the private sector, civil society and individual citizens.

Doubtless Harper placed emphasis on the G8 and G20 because this year’s meetings will occur in Canada and he is the Chair. But that doesn’t mean he should be indifferent to the enormous contributions that could be made by others, or closed to the exciting new approaches to solving global problems.

Following last year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, many delegates went on to participate in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative in meetings around the world. The Initiative brought together diverse stakeholders to develop fresh solutions to the many challenges facing our small and fragile planet.  Much of this year’s Forum was devoted to discussing the proposals developed by the Initiative.

The Initiative itself was driven by the belief of Forum members that our international collaborative processes are tired and too constrained to meet current needs.  In Davos, the failed Copenhagen global-warming conference was frequently cited by delegates as a metaphor for the inadequacy of existing processes. To be sure, no one is suggesting that nation states do not need to sit down and hammer out accords. But many Davos delegates believe that such meetings, while necessary, are by themselves insufficient to grapple with the thorny issues confronting us.

Davos delegates feel all issues on the global agenda should be addressed in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and are frustrated many government leaders aren’t embracing this view.

Had Harper come a day earlier, he would have heard French President Nicolas Sarkozy deliver a withering critique of how the planet’s issues are managed today. “From the moment we accepted the idea that the market was always right and that no other opposing factors need be taken into account, globalization skidded out of control,” Sarkozy said. Many systems in the world, including capitalism, were in serious need of reform.  “Each of us must hold the conviction that the world of tomorrow cannot be the same as the world of yesterday.”  A text of Sarkozy’s remarks can be seen here.

While Harper promotes the notion of enlightened self-interest, that got us nowhere in Copenhagen.  . And the irony of Harper’s remarks is that many here think one country with needing a better “attitude” on climate change is Canada. And it is an uphill battle for Canada to turn around its reputation as “the dirty old man of the climate world.”

In fact Harper further damaged Canada’s reputation on this issue, and undermined his approach to global cooperation in a panel discussion after his speech. When questioned about Canada’s position he said that countries needed to take into account the economic costs of being green.  To be sure Canada, as an energy producer has more complex issues than European countries. But some in the audience were disturbed by the remark.

Liberal MP Scott Brison said to me that Prime Minister Harper was “the only leader at Davos who didn’t understand the opportunities for economic growth and jobs in becoming a green nation. Environmental laggards will become economic laggards in the emerging global carbon-constrained green economy.”

Yes the G8 and G20 meetings will be important and they may even make some progress on climate change.  But today there are collaborations involving millions of people, along with governments, private companies and civil society organizations that are actually doing something about climate change. Government leaders need to listen to fresh thinking about how to harness this power, rather than relying on old approaches that have the world stalled.

The venue was a conscripted hairdressing salon that was pressed into service by the Forum as a meeting space.  We were like sardines. But the energy in the tiny room was high.

To recap: The Xchange is a Web-based marketplace where companies can collaborate and share intellectual property which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Ten organizations have already signed on. The Xchange is the first step in a journey towards more sustainable innovation, and the more companies that get on board, the faster we’ll all make progress.  More info can be found here. http://greenxchange.force.com/

In Wikinomics my co-author Anthony Williams and I argued that we’re living in a world where new approaches to collaboration enable new business models that enable companies to create better value for consumers.  We said companies need a portfolio of intellectual property – some that they own and protect, some that they licence and some that they share.  The Green Exchange is all about achieving that.

Nike began the announcement with a cool video that made it clear that sustainability is not an obligation, it’s an opportunity.  Companies can choose to be ahead of the curve or behind the times.  The goal is to create an innovation community.  No one is “giving away” their intellectual property; the exchange includes a licensing protocol.

“Nike is today committing to placing more than 400 of our patents on GX for research, demonstrating our belief that the best way to stimulate sustainable innovation is through open innovation,” said Mark Parker, Nike president and CEO. “Our hope is this will unleash new innovation to help solve current obstacles to sustainability issues.”

Example: Possible cross-industry benefits of making available Nike’s Environmentally Preferred Rubber. Used in Nike footwear the rubber contains 96 percent fewer toxins than the original formulation. By licensing the technology on GX it could be used in other company’s footwear, or it could hypothetically be used by Mountain Equipment Co-op for bicycle inner tubes. In this way Mountain Equipment Co-op could bring a greener product to market more quickly and cheaply than it could on its own.

Parker explained that initially the company’s lawyers opposed the Xchange.  They felt intellectual property was always meant to be kept under wraps and guarded.  But they’ve all come around to see the value of the Xchange, not only to the environment, but also bring competitive advantage to the company.  When Nike’s patents are put into the commons, any improvements made to the patents will be available to Nike.

Parker said universities are a great source of intellectual property. What is needed – and what the Xchange provides – is a standard protocol whereby IP can bust out from the university and be helpful more broadly to business and society.

John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, said “There is so much duplication of effort and wasted resources when it comes to sustainability. We need to make it easier for individuals, companies, academia, and researchers to collaborate and share best practices.”

This idea of a patent commons came up at another session.  Currently the planet has many commons like the ocean, air and space.  Much of the Web is in the commons. It’s time we added an additional area:  know-how related to sustainability.

A couple of years ago the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, launched, to say the least, a rather bold undertaking to use the Internet to turn Davos into a 365-day experience.  Not unthinkable I say.  After all hundreds of millions of people collaborate on social networks, wikis, blogs and brainstorms to do everything from making friends to creating encyclopedias, writing disruptive software projects and helping a devastated Caribbean island recover from a horrific earthquake.  So why couldn’t such tools be used to fix what’s wrong with the world on a year round basis?

Call it a Digital Davos.

But WELCOM (stands for World Electronic Community) got off to a slow start.

There were numerous technical challenges in getting the right companies assembled to  do the work: there was no integration between WELCOM and the system of information kiosks at that Davos attendees use to sign up for sessions and communicate with each other;  the project was viewed by some as elitist – restricted to the few thousand world leaders that might attend Davos; and there were enormous challenges getting CEOs, politicians and leaders of the civil society to actually use the platform and change their behavior to solve problems on networks.

But it looks like this year these issues have been addressed and WELCOM might actually be ready for prime time.

To begin, the technology is now first rate.  After a false start, WELCOM now has a group of partners, companies like Accenture (ACN), Adobe Systems (ADBE), BT Group (BT) and TIBCO that are putting some real muscle into the work, primarily on a pro bono basis.  The platform has good basic functionality and The Forum has a good team figuring out how the system should evolve and improve.  It’s not just another Facebook. Users can videoconference, exchange documents and video and audio files, store material online, co-edit documents, brainstorm and more.

Second, Accenture has fully integrated WELCOM and the onsite Kiosks, so you can sign up for sessions from laptop or Blackberry, reducing the Kiosk lineups.  There is a wealth of material online about the topic being discussed and the delegates in attendance.

Third, one charge frequently made against the Forum is that it is elitist, but the Forum has made great strides in making its work and proceeding open to the public. Linked to WELCOM is a Social Media Outreach designed to engage the broader world.  For example, one of the sessions I’m helping to lead deals with social networks.

But check out the description and the twist:

The World Economic Forum will explore the growing influence of social networks in a workshop at the start of the Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos. The discussion is moderated by Loïc Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic and will include, among others Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning, George Colony, CEO, Forrester Research, Don Tapscott, NGenera, Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn, Owen Van Natta CEO, MySpace.com and Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter.

Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. We want to hear from you:

1.   “How are social networks changing society?” 2.   “What are the most important implications and risks for society?” 3.   “What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?”

 You can join the discussion on a number of social networks and platforms.

1) Leave a comment on the Forum blog

2) Become a Fan of the Forum on Facebook

3) Join the Forum group on LinkedIn

4) Befriend the Forum on MySpace

5) Join the Forum network on Ning

6) Reply to @Davos on Twitter

7) Record and upload a video on YouTube

With initiatives like this, the 2010 meeting promises to be the most broadly inclusive ever.

Finally, The Forum has a sophisticated user engagement plan. Rather than trying to convince Barack Obama to be on WELCOM chatting up a storm with Nicolas Sarkozy and Ban Ki-moon they are beginning with the participants most likely to use networks to solve problems.  First up are wonks like me – members of the  Global Agenda Council’s that I wrote about in my last post.  This includes constituencies such as academics, scientists, journalists and other who love to discuss and communicate ideas.

They also appear to be focusing on young people who are more likely to turn to networks to collaborate.  In 2005 the Forum has established the community of Young Global Leaders, consisting of hundreds of leaders under the age of 40 from around the world and myriad occupations and sectors.   These young adults are recognized for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.  With many of them being part of the Net Generation, they understandably will fully exploit the tremendous potential a system such as WELCOM has to offer.

The Kiosk integration is also a nifty way of drawing attendees into WELCOM.  Everyone at Davos needs the Kiosks to sign up for activities and communicate.  Now they need WELCOM.

I’ve been using WELCOM for the past year and it’s a solid step forward.  But the Forum is still in the early days of curating the behavioral changes needed for the collaboration at Davos to be extended all year long.

But enough of this, I’ve got to get signing up for some sessions.

Music to my ears.  Evidence is mounting that the world and many of its institutions are stalled and need reinvention — from the financial system, the old model of government, the media, our energy and transportation systems, our cities, the university, science and even democracy. Needless to say, transforming these is a daunting challenge that will require the efforts of many parts of society.

“Global multi-stakeholder cooperation lies at the heart of the Forum’s mission to improve the state of the world,” says Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum. “We have to rethink our values – we are living together in a global society with many different cultures. We have to redesign our processes – how do we deal with the issues and challenges on the global agenda. And finally, we have to rebuild our institutions.”

Most significantly, our systems for global problem solving are broken. Says Professor Schwab: “We have to look at the Forum meeting in the context of what’s happening in the world … and we see that, clearly, the present system of global cooperation is not working sufficiently. So we want to look at all issues on the global agenda in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and we want to address in particular the issue of global cooperation.”

While the Davos event is often misrepresented as a meeting of the business and political elite, this year’s 2,500 attendees will again include a broad cross-section of society, with representatives from business, government, the media, science, religion, the arts and civil society.

Nearly half of participants come from outside business, including more than 30 heads of state or government, at least double that number of government ministers, over 100 heads or top officials from international organizations and NGOs, over 200 leading academics, and more than 200 media leaders.  There will be over 30 social entrepreneurs present, and there will be almost as many labor leaders as central bankers participating, with over a dozen representatives from each category.

Like me, many attendees will have participated in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative, which began following the 2009 Forum. The Initiative is a multi-stakeholder dialogue addressing many of the challenges confronting our world today. Over the last year we have been developing recommendations to help adapt and improve the structures and systems of international cooperation.

Now, I appreciate that such an initiative sounds grandiose. Is it delusional for the Forum to try and pull off such an ambitious undertaking?  My response: If not the World Economic Forum, then who?

To achieve new models for global problem solving we have to overcome a major obstacle: The world is organized around nation states based on national economies and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The idea of national sovereignty dates back hundreds of years with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. After World War II there were many bold initiatives to create better systems of global cooperation, including Breton Woods, The United Nations, The General Agreement of Trades and Tariffs (GAAT), The Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later the World Trade Organization and now the G8 and G20.

But, as evidenced by last month’s UN Climate Change Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, the existing structures are increasingly inept at fixing what ails the world. Contrast the Copenhagen failure to the growing global networks and movement of millions of people motivated to turn back warming.  Evidence that the solution to global problems is not to create some global government.  Rather there are new possibilities on the digital age to create networks involving business, government and civil society.  The Forum is a case in point — a global collaboration that is actually making the real progress in solving global problems on many fronts.  I for one am in!

Some might say this is all just talk and no action.  Wrong there too.  At the 2009 meeting, I participated with Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, in presenting an idea called the GreenXchange (GX) project to a group of about 80 CEOs of large companies. Over the last year several other companies have been working to incubate this idea and this year at Davos it will be formally launched. My company, nGenera, is supplying the GX’s technology platform pro bono, because we think this idea is so important.

The GreenXchange is a clearinghouse for unpatented innovations (“know-how”), patent pledges, and patent licenses related to sustainability. Companies participating in the GX will be able to make both patented and unpatented “know-how” available for research uses and commercialization on standard and transparent terms and conditions.

Nike conceived the GX because there is too much duplication of effort in sustainability, and collaboration on shared challenges is a proven way to reduce costs and increase innovation. Companies face very similar sets of sustainability challenges — how to reduce resource consumption and achieve greater efficiency — but without the ability to share learning and best practices in response to those challenges, good solutions fail to take hold or make a broader impact. The GX was created to address this problem by making it easy to enable sharing and promotion of industry best practices leading to sustainability, while making sure that credit is given where it is due. The GX will also help reduce some of the barriers separating innovators from entrepreneurs in the sustainability space.

In the short term, the GX will make it easier for companies and individuals to identify, share, and obtain licenses to available technologies. The GX will enable rapid identification of commonalities in technology across industries and in turn identify gaps in available technology. In the long term, the GX will create a clearinghouse of public license offers for entrepreneurial development, innovation, and technology adoption. This is the sort of creativity the Global Redesign Initiative is designed to promote.

Contributing to the brainpower of the Global Redesign Initiative is the Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils – over 1,000 experts representing more than 50 thematic areas of international cooperation (e.g. Water Security, Pandemics, Migration). Approximately 3,000 participants drawn from the Forum’s industry, governmental, civil society, academic and media communities provided input.  They were selected as the most innovative and relevant thinkers to capture the best knowledge on each key issue and integrate it into global collaboration and decision-making processes.

I have spoken to many other members of the Councils over the last year.  Most of us were impressed at the high-caliber and sincerity of the discussions.  Our job at Davos will be to not only challenge prevailing assumptions, monitor trends, map interrelationships and address knowledge gaps, but to propose solutions, devise strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of actions.

I’ll be blogging and tweeting throughout to let you know how it’s going.  Stay tuned.

As always, please leave a comment if you hit any snags or have any suggestions.

For those that may not recall, Clay came up with a pretty cool angle in relation to the Architecture of Participation (you can read a “lightly edited” transcript of a speech describing it here). The underlying argument was that just like gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution (the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden people needed to get drunk to cope), the sitcom was the critical technology of the 20th century (the increase in free time was so sudden people filled it with TV shows).

From that base, he went on to explain that we’re now waking up from this collective bender, and the “cognitive surplus” wasted on watching television can be put to better uses in a new Architecture of Participation. So, as the argument goes, if you wonder where people find the time to make an edit on Wikipedia, it’s probably from taking it away from all that time wasted watching Gilligan et al. In this argument, doing “something” – no matter how trivial it may sound (see: LOLcats) – is better than doing “nothing”.

So the question I’ve been struggling with is how the use of social media is playing into this cognitive surplus argument. While social media is often seen as synonymous with the age of participation, as I’ve argued before (see here and here), in many cases people are using as a new medium to passively absorb content – often in bite sized pieces. While a few people get busy contributing, co-creating, etc., I believe many more don’t. And one might argue that when it comes to the passive absorption of content, social media actually represents a step backwards in human development – we get smaller and smaller bits faster and faster, at the expense of bigger experiences that take more time to develop and absorb.

Now perhaps this is just part of a still evolving process that remains in its early days – over time we’ll all figure out how to “better” deploy or cognitive surplus away from activities that waste time. But perhaps many of us won’t – and the reality is that many (and perhaps most) people don’t want to use their cognitive surplus for more valuable activities.

I often think about this around 9 pm each night. You see, I get up around 6 am to start my day. The bulk of daylight hours are spent at work (and commuting back and forth), and then the bulk of the remainder is spent with my daughter. Once she’s asleep, the last thing I generally want to do is participate in anything. I’ve been up and active for 15 hours, I’m tired, and I just want to relax – watch TV, read something, whatever.

Now I’m lucky in that throughout the day, I have the opportunity to engage with social media in a variety of different ways – one of the perks of the type of job that I have. So I can blog, tweet, comment, offer up ideas, and all kinds of stuff like that. But I know many people who work in jobs that don’t allow that – not because the workplace rules are too rigid, but because the demands of their jobs keep them acutely focused on the task at hand. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, senior executives, small business owners, carpenters, etc.  They don’t have a lot of free time throughout the day (noting that many do use social media as part of their job in one way or another, which I’m excluding from the “cognitive surplus” discussion) and they have similar demands on their time at home. If I ask them if they’d like to co-create something at the end of their long day, they might just punch me in the face.

These people do use social media during their “down time” though. But as I informally survey them, a lot of the activity is closer to the passive, “wasting time” side of the fence that’s not that dissimilar from watching TV. But instead of fully developed stories and plot lines, it’s often sifting through a collection of short messages, silly games, and the like. And it leaves me wondering whether how many of us use or “cognitive surplus” is really going to change, and if so whether it will end up being for the better. Really not sure.

1. How valuable and what are the benefits of Web 2.0/social media tools to military families with love ones who are deployed? Is this a critical necessity, or merely a useful addition to your options?

2. What impact would there be to families, with loves ones who are deployed, if Web 2.0/social media tools were NOT available to military members serving over seas?

3. When communicating with your love ones who are deployed, which social medium do you use most frequently?

The result has been an incredible 230+ comments, many of which are carefully crafted responses telling personal stories.

I thought I’d point out a few of those responses here:

“When my husband first deployed to Iraq in 2002 we used chat with webcam alot. This allowed our son then aged 2 1/2 the chance to see Daddy and communicate with him. For the longest time he was convinced his Daddy lived in the computer. It also allowed my husband to watch our newborn baby grow up and regularily hear his cries. The interaction that the social networking sites allow the soldiers and the families are of utmost importance–it makes the seperation a little bit easier by allowing the soldier a glimpse into the daily happenings at home.”

“Without the social networking tools, the immediate communication will be lost unless they can get a call thru and there isn’t always time to stand in a line and wait to use the phone. The nice thing is they can go to any base or outpost that has internet and get a quick message thru to say “hey I’m ok” when on a long mission or they aren’t back when expected due to problems. I also know of other families that would use the video feature on different messaging software to see their children. I would say there isn’t even a word for the peace of mind it gives parents, spouses, etc to be able to have almost immediate contact with their soldier and Marine.”

“Generationally, we have seen communications methods change in a deployed environment from letter writing, telephone calls e-mail to social media networks, each with accessibility, timeliness and cost pros/cons. The current generation has grown up with the hi-tech / real-time communications options and the previous generations are adopting them. If the tools were not available, I think it would adversely affect morale and possibly lead to decreased enlistment/re-enlistment. Perhaps some partnership can be accomplished between DoD and the media providers to better secure these sites or communities within those sites for military member use.”

“As an ex military member and a spouse whose husband is currently deployed, I say Security and Safety are first and foremost. We personally only use email correspondence and are looking into web cams but are concerned about security of his location. I agree these social networks can be great morale boosters however, if these are in anyway unsecure and can place our troops and/or their mission in harms way then stop them now, no questions asked!!!! Years ago families survived without them and although I know they are wonderful for morale, unless the governement can be 100% certain that no breech of security exists by using these then I say better safe than sorry and we can learn to live without them.”

I’d encourage users to visit the forum and scroll through some of the responses. They paint an amazing picture of how consumer Web 2.0 technologies have allowed those deployed to keep in touch. Through the forum, the DoD was also able to get a feel for what tools are important for families (Facebook and Skype seem to be the most popular) and what some of the risks might be (e.g. a webcam revealing someone’s location). As stated in a followup post, the next steps will be learning how to mitigate those risks and implementing training programs and policies to allow families to safely use social media tools.

I’m no fan, but the mainstream appeal is clear: the video has almost 13,000,000 views. I’ll allow Wired.com to explain what happened next:

On YouTube’s business blog, technical account manager Chris LaRosa and music partner manager Ali Sandler describe how Chris Brown and Sony Music managed to capitalize on the 12 million-plus times people have watched the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video, which shows Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party boogieing down to the Chris Brown song “Forever.”

“The rights holders for ‘Forever’ used [YouTube's content management tools] to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes,” they wrote. Not only did the song rise to No. 4 in the iTunes music store and No. 3 on Amazon, partly as a result of YouTube’s links, but Sony and Chris Brown also collect a share of revenue from Google’s text ads on the page itself.

The wedding video is inspiring people to click through from YouTube to Amazon and iTunes at twice the normal rate, according to LaRosa and Sandler. And the effect appears to be spreading to YouTube’s official music video page for the song, where they say the click-thru rate has increased 250 percent over the past week.

And the kicker:

Unfortunately the newlyweds depicted in the video aren’t making any money from the video’s millions of views, which would have surely helped defray their wedding and honeymoon costs. YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Neilsen confirmed that Sony is the one monetizing the video, and that the people depicted in the video are not part of the revenue equation.

This is very frustrating. Worse still is YouTube’s prideful gloating about finally monetizing a video.

Sony’s implicit logic is that because that they own the rights to the music they could have the video removed. Since it remains online by their good graces alone, they are entitled to all click-through revenue that the video generates.

This makes sense legally (it shouldn’t) and is exactly the kind of arrogance I expect from Sony. It’s also a terrible way to engender consumer loyalty. The increased Chris Brown sales would not exist were it not for the video. Taking advantage of content creators and then leaving them out in the cold is not a viable long-term strategy. If users feel that their work is going to be leveraged by others to great effect, they’ll stop sharing it.

An even more egregious example of the one-way flow of content control was South Park’s Internet Meme episode. Viacom felt entirely within its rights to take the likeness of iconic Internet/YouTube celebrities and use them in the episode to generate ad revenue. If those same Internet celebrities uploaded clips of the episodes that featured their claims to fame to their own YouTube channels they would receive takedown notices. This is completely unfair.

Both of these are examples of a larger issue at play which is tightly knit with copyright law. The use and compensation surrounding content between individuals and media companies is not bidirectional. YouTube is not only complacent, but jubilant at the prospect of allowing its users to be exploited. And worst of all, I had to listen to a Chris Brown song to write this post.

Something has to change.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC. The two-day conference was a fantastic opportunity to hear some of the leaders in open government thinking, including:

• Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO – “The Innovation Imperative“
• Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO – “Town Hall Meeting – The IT Dashboard“
• Dave Weinberger, Harvard Law and Cluetrain Manifesto – “Transparency as a Virtue“
• Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media – “Government as a Platform“

(If you’re interested, those talks are available via Adobe Connect here. Click on the linked headshot of the speaker you’d like to watch.)

I sat in on some great panel sessions as well:

• Openness, Information Sharing, and the Use of New Media in DoD
• Case Studies in Citizenship Engagement
• Transforming Citizen Engagement with Congress
• Embracing a Collaborative Culture

It was also great to connect with some of the participants and speakers through the conference’s live Tweet grid. If you’re interested in more links and insight, just search the hashtag #OGI on Twitter.

Throughout the conference I picked up on a few core themes that seemed to run through all the sessions. While the official themes were Government to Government, Government to Business and Government to Citizens, the following seemed to be the three focal points for moving forward with open government initiatives.

1. Despite the hurdles, collaboration is possible

You may be familiar with the memorandum President Obama issued in January to all heads of departments and agencies in the Federal Government. Aneesh Chopra highlighted this in his opening address, crediting the memo with enforcing the ‘three pillars of open government’: transparency, participatory and collaborative. Since that memorandum, new government collaboration projects have surfaced and already-existing projects have enjoyed being in the spotlight of case studies and media writeups.

One great example is the Transportation Security Authority’s (TSA) ‘Idea Factory’, which is also featured in the White House Open Government Innovations Gallery. The Idea Factory, boasting the slogan “Innovate. Collaborate. Succeed”, is a two year old project connecting some 50,000 geographically dispersed employees across countries. Tina Cariola, the Idea Factory’s Program Manager, said the TSA needed a way to tap the knowledge of all of their employees across the organization. She had clear guidelines: the site had to be up and running within only a few weeks and was to be designed as more than just an online suggestion box.

The result was a dynamic community allowing employees to interact and collaborate with each other around ideas. What’s really interesting is the fact that the Idea Factory was originally rolled out as an innovation program, yet the community has turned into a powerful tool for employee engagement and communication. TSA management is actually using the Idea Factory as a way to monitor the workforce ‘pulse’, providing insight and awareness of key trends among employees.

Currently, the Idea Factory is seeing around 300 ideas submitted per month, and after community and management review, 1-2 of those are being implemented.

Tina’s tips:
-Establish cross-functional teams when originally establishing your collaboration strategy and reviewing user generated ideas (lawyers, IT, management, HR)
-Publicly recognize key contributors and leaders within the community. This could mean award ceremonies as well as involving that individual as ideas are selected to advance to the next stage of development.

Cases like these demonstrated for the audience that despite the oft-cited security and IP risks, collaboration within, and even across, government departments is possible. In many instances, government employees’ experience in dealing with sensitive information was seen as a real asset when making the shift to a culture of collaboration.

2. Open innovation on a continual basis

Perhaps my favourite part of the conference was hearing about departments opening up and making considerable efforts in the areas of citizen and business engagement. By governments building an effective platform for participation, sharing information and inviting participants to build off of that, communities can be established where innovation can come from anywhere at anytime, RFP issued or not. Aneesh Chopra presented the platform idea via a “Menu of Open Government Tools”, empowering others to develop their own initiatives in a cost-effective manner:

A shining example here is the Department of Defense website DefenseSolutions.gov:

“A portal through which innovative companies, entrepreneurs, and research organizations can offer potential solutions to the Department of Defense. This portal, and the team behind it, are designed to encourage companies that have never considered doing business with DoD to participate.”

Aneesh Chopra also outlined the open dialog initiative wherein the White House invited citizens to draft policy recommendations for a Presidential Directive. Using well known collaborative tools such as IdeaScale and MixedInk, the three stage process produced thousands of votes and comments and can still be seen at each individual phase here:

1. Brainstorming
2. Discussion
3. Drafting Recommendations

For me, this marked the transition from a mindset of closed, project-based, incremental innovation to a government prepared to take good ideas from anywhere. As Aneesh pointed out, “Great ideas get funding, regardless of the rules“.

3. The need to provide compelling experiences

Last, but not least, I felt a real sense of urgency for government agencies to rethink their interactions with participants; the need to provide compelling experiences. This includes with other agencies, government employees, businesses and citizens.

Tammy’s talked about the power of great experiences before. As the idea of government as a platform takes off, I think this becomes even more crucial. Talent, customers, processes and selected information reside outside of the traditional boundaries of the organization. How people interact with the platform out ‘there’ is what’s important. Why should they engage? What’s the reward of doing so?

Part of this comes in presenting information in a consistent, clear, interactive and useful way. The IT Dashboard, as presented by Vivek Kundra, was a great case study here. The searchable and customizable dashboard is so compelling it has attracted more than 30 million visitors since it was launched…on June 30! It’s been effective, too. One presenter spoke of a case where nearly 45 projects were halted at once when someone interacting with the data raised some red flags about cost management.

By making all this data available for mashups and other innovative services, everyday people are allowed a view into government with far more relevance on their personal lives than, say, just tables of data. And when people are compelled to take action, change happens (e.g. 45 projects get halted because of poor contractor performance). A few weeks ago I posted an interview I did with Zappos about engaging potential talent. The same principles apply here when engaging the public. Compelling comes in the form of personal, emotional, and/or relationship-based interactions.

David Weinberger labels this human touch as ‘the spiritual lure of the Web’, in the The Cluetrain Manifesto:

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.

Citizens and business are beginning to engage with government in interesting ways because of new expectations of a two way exchange of information and learning. New social tools are combining with changing mindsets on openness and collaboration and are starting to demonstrate the real power of that ‘return of voice’ in the form of effective citizen and business engagement.

Fortunately, both companies are run by astute and innovative CEOs who are very customer-focused and known for stepping up and openly communicating with the pubic and their employees. For example, as soon as the acquisition news broke, the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, sent an email out to employees addressing the transaction and primary questions that he assumed they would have. He also assured them that the relationship will help both companies grow and that they would be keeping their culture and teams intact. Not only was the letter sent out via email, but in true 2.0 fashion a blog post was immediately created looking for questions, comments and feedback from employees, customers, basically anyone. To date the majority of comments have been positive in nature with a few customers looking for assurance that the “Zappos way” will not go away. As one Zappos and Amazon customer said: “Amazon is good, but Zappo’s is GREAT!” I believe that this is the general consensus and that Zappos customers will be extremely disappointed should service quality slip at all moving forward.

On the public front, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos dealt with a fairly public blunder last week when some copies of George Orwell’s book 1984 and a few other novels were remotely deleted from individual’s Kindles after it was realized that they were illegally sold. Ironically, a very Big Brother thing to do with a book about Big Brother. Recognizing the backlash that the move had caused with customers, Bezos immediately issued an apology on the Amazon Kindle community. Bezos said “Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” To date there are over 570 responses to the apology with many customers posting that they understood that Amazon was put in a tough spot and stated how appreciative they were for Bezos personally stepping up to communicate with them. Zappos, which has masterfully conquered social media tools like Twitter could be a great partner in moving Amazon further along in their use of social media to deal with issues like this. Hsieh himself has over 1 million Twitter followers and tweets consistently about everything from company news to his personal thoughts and favorite quotes.

Even though all public communications state that Zappos will remain operating independently, you have to believe that there will be at least some disruption. Hopefully for Zappos employees and customers that will be minimal and both company leaders will continue the transparent dialogue with all stakeholders. Given both companies’ alignment with social media it won’t take long for any customer and employee issues to surface publicly, so managing the challenges that are inevitable in any merger or acquisition is crucial. Many questions will only be answered over time. What do you think? Did Zappos make the right move? Will Zappos be able to maintain its service levels and culture now that it is part of a larger entity? Will Amazon customers expect Amazon to adjust its service to meet the level that Zappos has set with its own customers?

I started looking at Yahoo! Answers quite awhile ago because it’s a type of prosumer platform – people ask questions, and the community provides the answers. Sadly, most of the answers are terrible – and the only time people I know find value from it is when they’re looking for a laugh. Why this might be is a subject for another time. Today I want to focus on how terrible answers from the platform are bubbling up to the top of Google Search.

The last time I was reminded of this was when I googled “average baby size”. It seemed like a straightforward request for some factual information. But the top link was from Yahoo Answers. The “best answer” highlighted at the top (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of one vote) noted that the average was 6 to 8 pounds, which is quite a large range. Other answers, of which there were 5 (each with zero votes), included a variety of guesses in the same range, and a very helpful Coco who answered “Don’t know, but all the babies I’ve seen ranged from 5 to 8 pounds”, and helpfully listed his or her source (worked at group home for teen mothers).

It’s something that’s very hard for me to reconcile – how does the world’s best search engine cull through the 13,800,000 sites that have some information on this topic, and provide a top link to a site that not only fails to provide a good answer, but doesn’t appear to have very much activity related to it (i.e. the grand total of 1 vote placed on the answers)? Are that many people linking to it?

For a more humorous example, you can google “how to defuse a bomb”. Yahoo Answers is again #1 for me, and like in the previous example the question has been declared “resolved”. Which seems odd, given the best answer (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of two votes) is “Why do you have a bomb?”. At least I’ve heard a hypothesis behind this one – the site pops up on a number of “check out these funny answers” type sites, which might lead to a lot of traffic.

But still, it seems very odd. I’m curious to know if someone can explain how these sites are getting to #1 in the face of both common sense and the fact so few people have bothered to vote on the Yahoo answers. And I continue to be convinced that there must be a better way to search for things waiting in the wings so long as results like this keep popping up.

A lot of people run into these etiquette errors as they are getting used to a new social network. I have a presentation that I’ve delivered several times (often for fifty bucks and bus fare) where I describe LinkedIn as a Grey Flannel Suit and Facebook as a Hawaiian Shirt. It’s good to have both in your wardrobe, but if you show up at a board meeting in a Hawaiian Shirt you look like a goof and if you show up on a boathouse roof in a Grey Flannel Suit you look like an ass.

How one uses the status update is important here. Since LinkedIn should be your grey suit, unless for some reason you want a nutty online professional persona, it should only refer to a new accomplishment, position, or company or a request for work-related information or a decision. A lot of young people, consider status updates on Facebook to be lame, but those old people that showed up late on the scene to ruin it (like me and many of my friends) use it as an opportunity to be provocative or to try and show off their (Editor’s Note: should we qualify this?) sense of humour. The whole point of Twitter is frequent updates, but as Mark suggests, if you are reviewing your cat’s moods too often, most people will quickly vote with their feet (and unfollow button). Like most people, I ignore Plaxo’s plaintive and earnest pleas for an update. And Bebo? To paraphrase favorite philosophers, “what the fruck is Bebo.”

There are a lot of services that enable immediate updates across multiple platforms. I wouldn’t recommend any of them though since they can’t automatically determine whether a message is appropriate for a medium. In fact, it probably can’t even use contractions. What annoys you the most about status updates?

Recent and upcoming barcamp invitations that I’ve received have featured themes ranging from product development, to entrepreneurship, to better government. The public sector, in fact, seems to have gone barcamp-crazy. Colleagues Anthony Williams and Alex Marshall have chronicled barcamps in these pages already this year.

As an organization that evangelizes mass collaboration, it shouldn’t be a surprise that nGenera has been a sponsor of E2Open, the official unconference for one of the industry’s higher profile annual conferences, Enterprise 2.0. We’ve co-sponsored it for the past 2 years with our friends at SocialText and there have been some terrific discussions and presentations produced as a result.

But, here’s the history of barcamps that many who associate them with tech-oriented origins don’t know: the origins of the modern barcamp are nearly 25 years old! Begun under the semi-clunky name “open space meetings,” the modern version was dreamt up by a diverse bunch of souls, heavily dominated by org dev and other liberal arts majors that agreed to break the rules and try something new.

The open space meeting (now coined “Open space technology“) was born. I knew when I got my first barcamp invitation back in 2006 that this concept felt eerily familiar. The reason for the familiarity was that I had participated in my first barcamp-by-another-name a decade earlier. I remember it well, as it was such an unfamiliar way to conduct a learning session.

The open space format was the principal meeting method for the capstone retreat of a year-long Austin leadership program for which I had been selected, called Leadership Austin. I remember vividly sitting around in a giant circle of more than 50 people in a very large, conference room, uncluttered by tables, powerpoint projectors, or other gadgets.

The rules were, to say the least, unconventional compared to any meeting that I’d participated in, up to that point. Looking them over again, I still marvel at their simple power. The barcamp/unconference generation has developed its own iteration of meeting protocol as well. But, if you are considering a barcamp in your future – either as a participant, presenter, or both – I urge you to scan the original. I think you’ll appreciate their elegance and the insight that this group of liberal arts innovators had to produce such a powerful form of in-person collaboration.

Wikinomics is the second site to test drive this technology, the first being The Huffington Post, which is using the feature for an “interactive investigation” of Obama’s proposed health care bill.

The quick instructions for use are as follows:

What Insight is and how to use it:

Insight is a tool that allows readers ask questions or leave comments in-line, or simply give quick feedback, on the specific parts of content that they find interesting.

To get started, readers just:

Step One: Highlight text with their mouse that is interesting to them.

Step Two: Leave feedback, ask a question, or add an in-line “Insight” (cite your facts when possible).

Step Three: Register for Insight when prompted (users can leave a comment or rating 10 times, as a “temporary user”, before we require them to regsiter).

There is a screencast available if you click the “Learn more” or “What is this?” link on the application.

Radio: Teenagers do not listen to traditional radio because they are able to listen to online streaming music that is advertisement free and enables them to choose which songs they want to hear.

TV: Most teenagers still watch television but the consumption varies seasonally with popular programs (i.e. Teenage boys watch more TV when it’s football (soccer) season). Advertisements are a turnoff so many turn to internet channels to watch ad free programming. It’s getting harder for youth to find the time in their busy schedules to watch TV.

Newspapers: “No teenager I know of regularly reads a paper.” Most are reluctant to pay for a newspaper and when they do, prefer those that are compact for easy reading on the go.

Gaming: Girl gamers are becoming more numerous. Consoles that enable chat via internet are popular and negatively impact phone usage. PC gaming has no place in the market as it can be downloaded for free.

Internet: Most teenagers engage heavily in social networking. “Teenagers do not use Twitter”

Music: Teenagers listen to a lot of music but are very reluctant to pay for it. Most do not listen exclusively to music but rather do so while multitasking

Mobile phone: 99% of teenagers have a cell phone, and upgrade it every 2 years.

These revelations are not groundbreaking and if you are familiar with our research or Don’s books (Growing Up Digital and Grown Up Digital), you would find uncanny similarities between Matthew’s anecdotal findings and our 8 Norms of the Net Generation.

However, what IS surprising are the reactions that this paper is getting from the business community. Edward Hill-Wood, Matthew’s supervisor, claims that dozens and dozens of fund managers and CEOs have been e-mailing and calling all day. Others cite that this report has generated 5 to 6 times more feedback than the average Morgan Stanley research report. This goes on to show really how large the generation gap is between baby boomers and today’s digital natives. It seems that the impact of an internet savvy generation can no longer be ignored as executives turn their undivided attention towards understanding the Net Gen.

But before taking Matthew’s views for granted, I’d like to point out a few areas of caution. First, the findings are not supported statistically but rather represent solely the views of Matthew and his friends. Secondly, it’s important to take into account the context in which this research was conducted. Matthew is from London, England and being a 15 year old intern at a bank, must come from a solid educational background. In other words, his views may not be indicative of other teenagers… Net Geners in Japan certainly update their phones more frequently than once every two years and I for one do use Twitter as well as read newspapers on a regular basis…

The Twentieth Century business challenge was the mastery of scale and scope. Organizations that mobilized productive effort at the best volume, cost and quality were the ones that dominated the economy. To meet this challenge, organizations optimized around strong hierarchies and the division of responsibility. Only top leaders were expected to worry about the overall goals, freeing workers to focus on performing the defined work. Strong units or “silos” formed, allowing each component skill to be developed to high levels of competency and providing excellent control through strict accountability. Frederick Taylor explicitly worked to remove knowledge from the daily production process and to center knowledge in a few managers and engineers. Value was maximized by making organizational behavior routine.

Over time, those value creation techniques themselves became routine – and lead to commodity models. The skills remained necessary, but were not sufficient for success. For the past three decades, we have been slowly bringing knowledge back into our work:

• Encouraging production workers to think about improvements
• Encouraging sales people to take initiative and responsibility in dealing with customers
• Learning and continually improving processes and routines

Now, the dominant challenge is one of mobilizing intelligence, harnessing the smallest units of insight, and leveraging specialists. Organizations must encourage people to invest their discretionary effort – to use their particular knowledge and capacities in ways that continuously contribute to the success of the whole:

Achieving more flexible ways of combining different forms of knowledge and expertise to come up with something better than any single function could achieve

• Tapping multiple experts to innovate faster
• Responding to the market and environment more fluidly and effectively

These activities require collaboration.

Today’s constantly-evolving Web 2.0 technologies offer substantial advantages as we work to meet these challenges. They:

• Bring people together and let them interact, without specifying how they should do so
• Cause patterns and structure to appear over time
• Offer significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, letting people find helpful colleagues, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.”

My colleagues, in the research for Wikinomics, identified exciting examples of these new technologies in action creating new business models, including:

• Peer-to-Peer Production – Applying open source principles to create products made of bits – from operating systems to encyclopedias
• Open Platforms – Inviting participation of external partners to build new tools, leverage databases, or invent applications
• Ideagoras – Giving companies access to a global marketplace of ideas and uniquely qualified minds to extend their problem-solving capacity, and
• Prosumer Communities – Giving customers the tools they need to participate in value creation.

The examples in Wikinomics – many of them unique and compelling examples of new companies – illustrate what the science fiction writer William Gibson has said: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

But the advantages of Web 2.0 are not confined to “new economy” companies, nor to those full of Gen Y workers. The business use and resulting benefits of the new tools of collaboration are available to any organization – even the most traditionally hierarchical and siloed. As Andy McAfee writes in his upcoming book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, due out this fall, “the story of how businesses use technology is about to become a lot more interesting.”

The key for all organizations is to reframe collaboration not as something to do in addition to other priorities – but as a fundamental way to address all business priorities. There is little on any corporate agenda today that will not benefit from mobilizing people with widely diverse skills and views to work together effectively. This capability is:

• The key to successful innovation – bringing ideas together that have never before been combined
• The core opportunity for re-thinking obsolete business models
• An essential element of employee engagement – creating commitment and stimulating discretionary effort
• A powerful tool for strengthening the customer experience and your brand presence
• New possibilities for continued efficiency through shared learning and new approaches.

Granted, shifting to collaboration can be difficult. Reshaping a hierarchical organization into a collaborative enterprise goes against the grain of five centuries of Western tradition. It requires that we move yet further away from cultures based on loyalty, reciprocated with protection and care, and that we give us the notion of individual autonomy. It will mean accepting performance-based arrangements and recognizing our mutual interdependence.

Collaboration asks individuals to step up to a higher and more complicated level of contribution than was necessary in a hierarchy. It challenges us to interact with peers in new and unfamiliar ways – negotiating directly rather than running to a boss for protection or arbitration; dealing with rich content that flows through infinite links.

But the business opportunity presented by collaboration is substantial, in part, because it is difficult. Mastering collaboration presents the opportunity for significant competitive advantage. Old approaches (scope, scale, cost), although always important, add little value. As technology enables a very different level of performance, smart competition will shift the playing field. This train is leaving the station.

As recently as six months ago, the question may have been how best to “manage collaborative technologies” – how to experiment with interesting new applications inside a traditional organizational design. Today, the bar rising. Today is about managing the enterprise collaboratively – solving business problems through collaboration – achieving business outcomes through collaboration.

Don’t get left standing on the platform.

While browsing the CoSN website (which, by the way, is loaded with resources for educators looking to bring technology into their schools), I came across a really great video called “Learning to Change, Changing to Learn“.

The video itself is simple, interviewing a handful of young people about the impact of technology on their lives. What’s amazing is some of the insight in their answers.

Here are some of my favourite quotes:

“If I didn’t have computers, I would say a lot of my hobbies that make up most of my time, I wouldn’t have. Because, well, I learned Japanese, and I learned a lot of that through the Internet.”

“That’s the cool thing about technology. You can change things whenever you want.”

“When you have access to everything, you learn how to know yourself better because you are forced to decide what to use and what not to use.”

“What we’re doing in gaming – coordination and communication – is very similar to what we’re doing at school. In the game, we have to talk to each other, we have to coordinate what we’re going to do in order to make sure that we do it well.”

And my personal favourite:

“I would say that being able to experiment with technology, is really what makes it technology. If people didn’t sit there and experiment with test tubes back in the days of Newton, nothing would have happened. It’s paving the way for us to move forward as a species and a civilization.”

The video can be seen here.

The main problem is that people who contract such viruses are contagious before their symptoms become visible, making it extremely difficult to determine that a person has caught the virus before they transmit it to others. The Japanese government has recognized this issue as one of the main challenges in fighting potential pandemic and has planned an experiment to see if Japan’s advanced internet and cellular phone infrastructure can be used to help address the issue. As elementary schools are one of the main breeding grounds for contagious illness, the experiment will begin by giving each of the students at a particular elementary school a GPS-enabled cell phone and ‘infecting’ a few children with a fictitious virus. The students’ movements will then be tracked, and the parents of any children that have come in contact with infected students will be advised to take their child to a doctor so that students that do contract the virus can be diagnosed much faster, thus preventing them from spreading the virus any further. Due to the exponential nature in which viruses spread, even a small decrease in the amount of people infected by each carrier of the virus will have a major impact.

Although using GPS to track interactions can only inform people of possible infection and cannot predict the actual spreading of the virus, this strategy has the potential to be effective in slowing the spread of highly contagious viruses that warrant such extreme action. Equipped with the information that they have been exposed to such a virus, people can check with their doctors to ensure that if they have contracted the virus, they will be treated and not spread it further. Whether the health system could handle an influx of checkups in such a situation is a concern, but it is certainly better than dealing with a full-blown outbreak.

Despite the potential that this experiment has to lead to a strategy that could drastically reduce the spreading of an epidemic, the idea that the government could track people’s locations has caused great concern and cries of “Big Brother”. Privacy is a concern that many have when it comes to the internet, but most often, the discussions of privacy revolve around the danger of predators and the concern that corporations are gaining too much personal information about consumers. When it comes to fighting a serious epidemic though, the consequences of inaction are much greater and location information could be the best defence we have.

Because of its nature of individual matchups between the pitcher and the batter, baseball lends itself to the collection of stats. Bill James and his band of sabremetricians help to collect detailed information about each player.  As the group would tell you, three of the most “traditional” baseball stats, batting average (treats a single and a grand slam as equals) and wins (can you team hit at all?) are useless. Total Average was the rage in the 1970s (it was updated after base stealers received too much of a premium because hitting a single and getting caught stealing means you did your team no better than if you struck out), fielding percentage (penalizes a shortstop for booting a ball that a fatter guy wouldn’t have reached).
Still, we are just talking about offensive contributions. The Times article describes how technology can enhance statistics even more.  From the article:

Which shortstops reach the hard-hit grounders up the middle? Which base runners take the fastest path from first base to third? Which right fielders charge the ball quickest and then throw the ball hardest and most accurately? Although the game will continue to answer to forces like wind, glaring sun and the occasional gnat swarm, a good deal of time-honored guesswork will give way to more definite measurements — continuing the trend of baseball front offices trading some traditional game-watching scouts for video and statistical analysts.

Such a platform allows for marketers to engage in targeted advertising, government organizations to gain a better understanding of its citizens, and most importantly for people like you and me to surf seamlessly through the web for content that are relevant to our individual needs. It makes use of our digital footprints in the form of a combination of Facebook profiles, e-mails, online transactions, Flickr albums, APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) and more. It essentially is an exchange of our personal data in reward for tailored web experiences. But is this a fair trade-off?

After all, disclosing more facets of our self identity may compromise our security (see article on how algorithms can now determine social security numbers solely from a birth date and place) and certainly relinquishes personal privacy. However if you live in the US, you may no longer need to fuss over the issue, with the potential introduction of a federal Online Privacy Bill.

If successful, websites will have to give surfers the option to “opt in” to give consensus to third party data collection, behaviour monitoring, and identity tracking with the default being not opting in. If the user accepts, cookies are installed. This is not applicable to first party cookies, those that enable Amazon to remember your favourite searches or YouTube to track your viewing preferences.

Apart from the average online user, the bill will also have a huge impact on corporate stakeholders such as advertising firms, search engines, and manufacturers. Some for the better and others for the worse. Here are a few reactions:

“You see countless targeted ads as you Web-surf each day. This kind of business would face significant challenges should such regulation be enacted, and effects would ripple throughout the Net. Most Web sites [use] a range of ad networks and offer additional behavioural targeting; an opt-in system could cripple the Web as users could be asked for opt-in for every [targeted] ad on a page.” -Fernando Ruarte, co-founder of ad network Glam Media

“If you have no cookies and no data, in many ways it will make search engines more valuable and, potentially, make Google (GOOG) even more valuable,” – Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of the Chicago marketing consultancy Denuo.

“Advantages would accrue to companies that have already amassed much data on their customers and potential customers. This includes both major advertisers like Procter & Gamble (PG) and online giants along the lines of Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT). It would be harder for new market entrants to build, or buy, impressive databases in a cookie-restricted world.”

Do you think this attempt to put control back in the user’s hands is admirable? Or do you think that it’s not worth the hassle; privacy after all is a relative concept and if there’s a will, there must be a way…

Furthermore, is it worth it to stunt the progression of a new web extension that is the Semantic Web?

Google’s announcement late yesterday about the launch of the Google Chrome Operating System puts Microsoft square in its sights. The announcement is chock full of little jabs clearly aimed at Microsoft:

“the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web”

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code”

“The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.”

“we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

“we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google”

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. “

The best news is that the description of the upcoming operating system reads like a response to the “top 10 pet peeves” that people have with today’s bloated systems. Here’s a few of them:

• Fast: boots in seconds
• Web based user experience
• Large footprint – works on browsers on Win/Mac/Linux
• Universally accessible data
• Open source – code will be opened “later this year”
• Range of devices – from netbooks to desktop systems
• ARM and x86 support

Can’t wait to see the Microsft response to this. No doubt they’ve imagined this day might eventually arrive – but they’ll need more than bing to counter the Google threat. If anything, the conclusion here is that the OS itself is no longer the seat of competitive advantage. It’s not even clear how much leverage the desktop computing environment is going to have long term anyway if game console and mobile phone manufacturers have their way. This is less about Google getting into the “OS business” and more about the shift of computing into the cloud – the only platform that matters. Apple, Google, Microsoft and a huge number of wild cards are all jockeying for position there, and each bring very different competitive assets to the table. It promises to be an interesting horse race.

Inspired elsewhere, I think this image captures the emerging competitive dynamic nicely:

When a colleague turned me onto the site Eternal Moonwalk earlier today, I was impressed not only by its creativity and mission, but importantly by its global reach and age range of collaborators.  The project was set up by a Belgian radio station, Studio Brussel, to encourage people from all walks of life to upload their own 10-second version of Jackson’s signature Moonwalk.  Submitted videos are aggregated and spliced together to form a continuously flowing Eternal Moonwalk.

In true 2.0 fashion, the project empowers fans to share their favourite uploaded Moonwalk video on any number of social platforms and capitalizes on the most popular web content for its “how-to” Moonwalk video from YouTube.

Snippets of different users’ uploads, and even their rehearsal videos, are now also popping up on the video sharing site.

Among the 000s of videos uploaded so far, there have been solo Moonwalks, group Moonwalks, corporate Moonwalks, Lego Moonwalks, cat Moonwalks, ballet Moonwalks, video game Moonwalks…Well, you get the idea.

Beyond the tribute, what I find quite fascinating about the eternal video are the tiny snippets of insight into people’s homes, workplaces and even into their wildly diverse personalities. While certainly not all contributors are doing so to honour Jackson (some are just enjoying the spotlight), I appreciate that the project allows people to reflect in their own tiny, yet symbolic way. Some videos are subdued, but most are quite happy and in sum, they demonstrate that Jackson impacted many people’s lives in his short 50 years.

The distance walked in each video is recorded and at about 2 metres/dance, I hope we reach the moon before gravity catches up and slows the project’s momentum. (That would be about 384,403 km, or 192,201,500 walkers.)