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Here is one result of a labour of love in which I have been involved for the past three-plus years.

I have been translating (from French) and contributing to the work of Michel Cartier, whom in my opinion is the francophone world’s answer to Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan rolled into one.

In this video, at the end Michel offers a brief glimpse of four possible worlds in which we may want to live .. consumerist, a (renewed) participative democracy, an environmentally conscious world, and an oligarchic soft fascism (security state).

It’s up to us, he says.  Which will it be ?

The very-professional voice-over has been provided by my friend Brian Moffatt (@bmo). 

There are a few corrections left to make in spelling, as the compilation has been done by francophones – coming soon.

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Are You Ready for the 21st Century ? from Michel Cartier on Vimeo.

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It’s no secret that there’s trouble in many, or most, countries on many fronts.  Economic, social, governance, security, education .. and so on.

The way(s) we live, the infrastructure upon which we live, the social and economic conventions … we have imagined and created them all.

There are nigh unto 7 billion people on the planet.  There are only several thousands who are in positions of power, who are the leaders and the decision-makers.  Everywhere I have ever travelled on this planet, when I have met people one-on-one, it seems to me that (with the odd exception) people want to get along, people are curious about each other and want to understand and help each other.

I have never really understand the notion of ‘competition’ between countries, for example.  We are all on this one lonely ball of rock, water and molten lava, spinning on our axis whilst hurtling in a big circular loop through space around the sun.  We aren’t going anywhere in particular.

Oh, I understand that many people will say competition between tribes and species is natural, instinctual, fundamental.  But, isn’t the magic of being human that we are suppose to be conscious, capable of reason and growth in our individual and collective intelligence … and then able to apply it to ourselves and how we live ?

Why can’t the 7 billion TELL (and then force the necessary changes) the several thousands that they want the place governed for the benfit of all peoples, not just those with power and money.  Will it take “off with their heads” ?  I certainly would like to think not.   But no doubt I am naive.

Here, via Rob Patterson, is a YouTube clip of Annie Lennox (one of my all-time favourites) and David Gray, about the collective folly of not changing.

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Full Steam – Annie Lennox and David Gray



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Ed Lawler is a reknowned management thinker I have studied for years.

He was just interviewed (by Karl Moore, a management professor at McGill University) for the Toronto Globe and Mail on the need for new management models in the Interconnected Era.

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New World Needs New Management Model

Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak with Ed Lawler, who is a professor at the Marshall School [of Business] at USC [University of Southern California] and the director of the Center for Effective Organizations. Good morning, Ed.

Ed Lawler: Good morning.

KM: Ed, you told me earlier that you are thinking about a book on Management 3.0. What do you mean by Management 3.0?

EL: Fundamentally, we need to think of a whole new approach to managing complex, large organizations. We certainly have the “command and control” era, which started way back with scientific management, and progressed over decades, really, to greater and greater levels of sophistication and expertise in how to make it run. That seemed to fit a certain kind of production-driven economy.

Clearly, starting in the 1950s, we began to say it has its limits, we have to use our workers differently, our employees differently, and I think that generated Management 2.0, which was around employee involvement, participation and moving more knowledge and information and power downward in the organization so people could add more value. And I think generally, it did impact the way most corporations operate.

The problem, of course, is that I think we are yet in another era. The economy has changed radically since then, the work force has changed radically since the sixties and seventies, and of course the economy has changed … globally, and everybody knows all those points.

So it’s kind of surprising, in many ways, that Management 1.0: command and control, or Management 2.0: high involvement or high performance, and various names for it, were [still considered] suitable.

I think we do need a Management 3.0, which recognizes the impact of information technology, different work forces, diversity in the workplace, and so forth.

So what I have been trying to do in a new book is say what that looks like, and yes, I have incorporated certainly some of the things that we did in Management 1.0 and Management 2.0. I think it really has to have a different philosophy and a different orientation with respect to both organizational design, how we treat the work force, how we think about the work force and basically how we lead in this kind of economy and in this kind of competitive environment.

KM: Ed, that is very interesting, but I need to know more about 3.0. What is it? Tell us about it so that we can begin thinking about it as managers.

EL: In many ways, to zero in on it, you can pick particular areas on how you would do that differently, or how you would manage, or general philosophy. Let me just pick one and carry it out: leadership, for example.

With the movement away from command and control management to high involvement management, we became fascinated with leaders and ascribed a lot of the effectiveness of organizations to the behaviour of leaders and so forth, and I think that has gone way too far.

We have lost a lot of the managerial blocking and tackling that people in supervisory positions have to do in order to make organizations effective. It seems to me that, if you are going to have a valid, viable 3.0, it has to include the right blend of leadership behaviours. Yes, where you inspire people by a sense of mission, sustainability, accountability – but also have a valid management approach which deals with fundamentals like goal setting and work specifications and product evaluation produced by employees. So we do not want to lose some of the key managerial skills as we have, I think, in searching for these magical leaders who are going to inspire and direct people.

KM: It is kind of a balance between leadership and management in these people: You have to be a leader but also, if you are not a manager at the same time, I think it’s Henry Mintzberg who talks about it, it’s dispiriting.

EL: Yes, I think that is exactly right, it is the balance. We have spent a lot of time training people on leadership, which some people learn and some people don’t, to be frank, and we have lost a lot of the fundamental manager skills or [they] were never developed. We still see managers doing terrible basic management – like performance reviews are done just awfully and the answer seems to be, “Well, let’s just eliminate them.” Well, to me, that is just insane. How are you going to direct and control behaviour if you do not have some kind of accountability and some sort of reviews that look at people and give them feedback and give them a sense of direction?

Just knowing that we are going to [have] sustainability as a major thrust of the company does not translate into day-to-day behaviour very easily. You need to be able to make that translation from the sense of vision and mission and so forth, to actual behaviours, and that is the managerial part of being an effective manager and leader.

KM: How about how we design organizations? How would that be different under 3.0?

EL: I think it depends substantially on what business you are in, how sophisticated the business is, and how complex it is, but I see much more self organizing, much more use of information technology, social networks, and perhaps even internal markets to create the forum and allocate financial resources within organizations, and that’s an area where there would be enormous differences.

In a book that Chris Worley and I did called Built to Change , we emphasized very strongly structures that would give people external interface with the market so that nobody is more than 2 or 3 degrees separate from the external market. I think that’s the right emphasis and we need to build on that kind of thinking because touching the market, being interfaced with the market, helps direct peoples’ behaviour internally and gives them a sense of how the business is doing and certainly motivates them to perform well.

So, I think that piece of the design is critical. What I don’t think we did enough with, in the Build to Change book, is to emphasize how organizations can be built out [using] social networks and how money can be allocated to innovations and start-up operations and how they can be converted from ideas to actual operating businesses.

KM: Is that something like the Wikipedia-tion, the LinkedIn, the Facebook-ization, if you would, of the world?

EL: Yes, I think it is, and that certainly relates to why I think it’s viable now and has not been in the past, and it has to do with a lot of people co
ming into organizations, partly the younger group, of course, but also more senior people are now much more familiar with those technologies and it is much more viable to use those technologies to organize.

So you are starting to see large companies, like the Ciscos and the IBMs, trying to take that technology which they have sold to consumers and say “How do we use it internally to create a more adaptable and flexible organization?” The one thing we clearly know is that Management 3.0 has to leave room for very adaptable and flexible organizations so that yesterday’s competitive advantage is ready to be today’s, yesterday’s business model is going to have to be pretty radically changed quickly, in order to keep up with the rate of change that exists today in the environment.

If there is a new normal coming out of the recession, I think it is one of change and one of innovation that companies have to be able to do that. Particularly if they are in knowledge work or situations where intellectual property and technology is the key to their business.

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Read the rest of the interview here …

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Ever since hearing of "Social Business Design"  – a term associated with the Dachis Group’s positioning as a blue-chip expertise-and-experience based consulting firm focusing on helping enterprises operate more effectively in an interconnected business environment, I have been struggling to clarify for myself what is meant by the term ‘socially calibrated’ as used in the Group’s tag line.

"Social business design helps companies reinvent themselves into dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections"

Please do not get me wrong … when I say I am struggling, I am not seeking to criticize.  I think the firm is on the right track, and I think parsing the syntax and vocabulary we are all bringing to this new party is an important exercise … mission-critical, in fact.

Here’s what I find on the Dachis Group’s web site that addresses ‘social calibration’:

Hivemind

A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating. The social business hivemind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals. Physicists refer to this as “synchronous lateral excitation.”

Distributed governance
The social business hivemind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions: a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output. Employees approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.

Measurement and cultivation
Hivemindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions – analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on. The goal is always to gain insight into constituents’ attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and remeasured to move the dial.

The explanations on the site continue, explaining the importance of Dynamic Signals and Metafiltering, and culminate in analyzing the various elements of a connected enterprise-customer-employee ecosystem for meaning and this the co-creation of economic value for all parties to the ecosystem.

I like this.  I think that it’s becoming clear to many that we are into a world of increased and dynamic complexity, and that we need design principles and implementable practices that are based on the constant presence of flows of information and feedback loops within connected eco-systems of purpose and value.

This new environent has been building in scope, reach and intensity for years now.  I think that the Dachis Group has thought this through quite well.  But .. I am still wondering about ‘social calibration’.

As I read the site’s explanation of the Dachis Group approach, it brought to mind the "sense-making" approach that is being promoted and taught by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge Network, and other leading-edge thinkers and practitioners (and I have opined previously on the similarities to socio-technical systems theory and leading-edge OD (organizational development) principles and practices).

It was about three weeks ago that I started noodling on this.  Back then I made a few notes to myself regarding what I thought ‘social calibration’ might mean.  Here are those notes:

Social Calibration ?

I think it means that you look at the social ‘architecture’ of an enterprise, including its markets, customers and employees and how they interact with the organization’s business processes.

I think it means that (initially) based on observation and some knowledge of current patterns of behaviour in networks of people operating ‘on purpose’, you experiment with and implement

• new work designs




• hyperlinked productivity platforms for exchange and collaboration




• the aggregation and use of collective intelligence using tagging, enterprise search and other collaborative processes.

Before this, however, you set baselines or thresholds of organizational performance and productivity from which to measure forward performance,

And then you work at understanding what works, why it works and in what conditions it works really well or may not work.

From there you clarify where changes need to be made in leadership style, management practices, work design and organizational structure(s), internal and external communications and engagement, and performance measurement and support.

With an initial framework in place for watching and ‘nudging’ the ecosystem, you begin to show and publicize in realistic ways why these ways of working are important for both future organizational success and personal work satisfaction and enrichment.

How’s that for consultant-speak ?

I think that’s what I inferred, off the cuff, from the term ‘socially calibrated’.

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Please bear in mind that the above points were just rough notes I made to myself before I went looking at the Group’s web site.

I am left with my struggles with the term ‘social calibration’, which I do not doubt the Dachis Group has chosen carefully and wisely.

I think my struggle is with the question of "calibrate against what?", given that there are no real models of success against which to calibrate (which in my opinion is a large part of the ongoing frustration with the difficulty of calculating the ROI of implementing social computing in organizations).

Anyway … I don’t have any real answers to my questions, other than I think that if you compare my notes to the Dachis Group’s more complete explanation (on their web site) there are parallels and the general direction of thinking is aligned.

That said, I am sure we are all going to learn a lot about what works and what does not work in the coming decade.

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Thanks to someone I follow on Twitter (natch!), I recently came across a very interesting series of interpretive sketches of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia (Wikipedia link) by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

I’m not very surprised that the sketches speak to me.  At the risk of sounding less humble than I want to, I have had a number of people suggest to me that my writings on wirearchy speak in similar ways to some of the issues Deleuze and Guattari explore in their work on rhizomatic sociology.

Just to be clear – they were there longbefore me, and in much deeper and careful detail.

Back to the sketches (go look at them, yes, go .. they are full of wonder and whimsy whilst also conveying very clearly what Deleuze and Guattari were getting at).  As the blog author Marc Ngui notes:

"The drawings were created as a means of understanding the ideas being presented in the book.

Each drawing is labeled by chapter and paragraph."

Here’s one that is (for me, at least) very reminiscent of version of the wirearchy logo I have used for most of the past decade.

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An extract from David Armano’s recent post highlighting his and Jeff Dachis’ presentation at Web2.0 Expo …

The presentation below courtesy of the "embed" code provided in the post

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It’s Time to Clobber Social Media (And Get Down To Business)

We broke down what we think will be the building blocks of a more social business. Adaptations in people, process and technology. We talked about the benefits and value of “open cultures” (think Zappos) and the potential of connecting the ecosystem of an organization so that a new way of collaborating could co-exist with traditional hierarchy. (me .. see "wirearchy")

The audience seemed receptive.  More importantly, they seemed hungry.

Does social media really need “clobbering”? Not really—many businesses are reaping the benefits of communicating and engaging with their customers in new ways enabled via social technologies. We applaud this. And we think it’s only the beginning. Have a look at our presentation and let us know what you think. More importantly—ask yourself this: How ready for social business are you?

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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.

We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.

As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology.  Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.

The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.

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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.

In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.

Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.

Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.

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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles.  It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations

Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:

- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.

Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.

Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory

Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.

[ Snip ... ]

The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.

In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.

Adaptability

 “…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.

Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”

In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.

Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.

Whole tasks

Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.”  The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”

The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.

This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”

Meaningfulness of
tasks

Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.

This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.

In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration. 

The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.

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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia).  Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity while maintaining a fierce focus on the need for concentration ofn setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.

It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.

The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.

The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:

Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.

Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.

Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development.  A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.

Motivation – stimulating and enhancing  the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.

Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.

Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished -  information which can  be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation.  Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.

Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.

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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.

The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.

I’ll be glad to learn what you think.

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There’s a growing number of forms of experimentation with community development and social activism that combines a wide range of artistic expression (writing, painting, sculture, participative expression, video, dance, VJ, DJ, photography, mixed media, etc) with community development.

One such experiment that I think is exciting and holds great promise is the W2 Community Media Arts Centre located in the historiic Woodward’s development in the blighted-but-in-massive-transition Downtown East Side in Vancouver.  The transformation is fraught with hot-potato policitical issues such as social housing, gentrification, Olympic cleansing, creative city developmental forces, real estate developer opportunities and strong communitarian initiatives and forces throughout the area.

Here (below) is a piece from The Tyee by Steve Anderson and Michael Lithgow about the convergent integration of community, the arts and media, in which W2 is used as an example.

I’m happy to be able to say that I am a volunteer with the governance, planning and developmental activities of this innovative centre, and sit on the founding Board of Directors.  It’s a very interesting initiative.

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A New Vision for Community TV

Unbeknownst to most Canadians, cable companies and local community groups have been wrestling for control over community channel assets: the community groups want space on the TV dial and production resources; the cable companies want to call the shots, control the programming, and move their community channels in the direction of commercial television. Approximately $80 million collected annually from Canadians and earmarked for community programming, is at stake.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution is transforming citizens into media producers and every home computer into a virtual television station. In such a radically altered media environment, the question remains: what will community TV be in the 21st century?

Community Media 2.0

Community television is a throwback to a time when cable technology was new and the web was not yet born. It allowed anyone to create a program that could be seen on cable. Community television was the YouTube of its day; but things have changed. Downloading and streaming have precipitated a complicated restructuring of the television industry, brought on in part by new viewing habits. Traditional TV now seems to be on the wane.

But there are some things that are harder for the Internet to replace. Most television takes more than one person to make. The Internet cannot replace the studio space, hands-on training and possibilities for in-person collaboration and mentorship that community television allowed for. And it won’t replace the sense of place provided by a community production studio; a space where people can gather, work, learn and create together.

We are at a critical moment when traditional media ownership is more concentrated than ever, and yet we have perhaps the most participatory medium in history at our fingertips. As such, citizens need access to media literacy, knowledge and media production skills more than ever before. And Community Media Centres — modeled on the idea of recreation centres and local libraries — may be a crucial piece of the digital divide puzzle.

The physical rendering of the Internet

The Internet has become an engine of innovation, choice and free expression because it is a relatively open platform for citizen engagement and free enterprise. This open platform facilitates free association and collaboration, which then produces exciting projects like Wikipedia, Firefox, and citizen-powered events like ChangeCamp.

As noted in previous columns, various projects in the "terrestrial" world are integrating web practices and values like transparency, openness and participatory decision making, into their work. The new push by groups in many cities to revamp community media centres looks to be part of this larger process of physically rendering the Internet.

Community Media Centres are attracting interest because they are in many ways, a physical mirror image of the Internet. If nothing else, Community Media Centres are an open platform for citizen collaborations of all types.

Take a look at the description of soon-to-be launched W2 Community Media Centre in Vancouver:

"W2 will bring together hybrid art forms, community art practices, individual human development and community cultural development in a single environment. It will be home to a diverse grouping of Vancouver arts and community service organizations offering developmental programs in writing, radio and television production, painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, video and cross-media."

Like the Internet, W2 will allow community members to engage at a level with which they are comfortable, and to freely develop their own ambitions and capacities. The Internet is nothing if not an online space where intrinsic motivation and open communication encourage and enable personal and collective exploration, collaboration and creativity.

Community Media Centres could be the offline world equivalent of this open space, or rather a site where the offline and online can effortlessly merge. They are, in a sense, the next phase of social media, bringing to life the collaborative potential of the Internet in physical production spaces that mirror the complicated technological capacities of commercial studios.

[ Snip ...

The offline web

With the popularization of the Internet, it was only a matter of time before people figured out that online practices and values can have a place in our offline world. The beginning of what might be a long bleed of practices and values to the terrestrial may have begun with growing interest in participatory events. But why stop there?

As the desire for open systems and practices gains momentum, we can look to these and other hubs of open collaboration as an exciting new social nexus. A network of networks, you might say, much like the Internet.

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I’ve used the captioned phrase often in presentations about the impact of the Web on our societies’ institutions and commonly-accepted social dynamics.  I think it’s correct .. think about it for a minute.  We often see waves crashing on the shore .. where did the wave (or more accurately, the forces that created the wave) start, and how long ago ?

I used to write about this kind of stuff (see the 2nd excerpt below) more often in the past, and used to reference quotes from Stan Davis in his book Future Perfect to reinforce my points. (e.g. Spring 2002 –  “From Hierarchy to Wirearchy – the future of workplace dynamics”, in The Futurist’s Cyber Society Forum)

If “knowledge is power” then I think we can imagine that Euan’s forecast of a new Enlightment may well happen, at some point in the future.  The alternative is grim indeed, in my opinion.

Alvin Toffler wrote a fair bit about “knowledge is power” in the 1990 book PowerShift, noting that of the three main sources of power (violence, wealth and knowledge, “knowledge” is the most refined, of the highest quality.

For our societies to move into “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibiity and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology” …

… something important, credible and effectve will have to be done about 1) the general quality of public education and 2) reining in the amount(s) and type(s) of disinformation associated with advertising-driven mainstream media.

Leave it to Euan Semple to put it into clear words everyone can understand.

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Social Business

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What I believe is happening, as more of our society becomes more connected and computing power and bandwidth become pervasive, is the equivalent of the advent of the printing press. Before the printing press “the truth” was pretty much under the control of the monarchy and the church. Without access to the ability to produce expensive and labour-intensive manuscripts most people’s ability to communicate was confined to word-of-mouth. With the advent of the printing press access to knowledge and understanding became widespread and the ability to instigate “mass communication” became more accessible to more of the population. Arguably the result was the questioning of the authority of the Church which led to the Reformation and ultimately the Enlightenment.

Social tools like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikis and Blogging are placing in the hands of everyone communication tools that give them access to global audiences within seconds with virtually no cost and no gatekeepers. This has never been possible on this scale before and no one really knows what the impact will be.

In terms of the full impact of those social technologies we’re discussing here when asked recently in an interview how long I thought it would be before the impact of these tools was apparent, I suggested 50 years. This may seem like an unrealistically long timescale but if you think about it the Internet has been around for the best part of 30 years and most people don’t know what the back button on their browser is for! If we are talking about the impact that a networked culture will have on our institutional and organisational lives than 50 years is possibly a conservative estimate. I wonder what our equivalent of the Enlightenment will be maybe 50 or 100 years after the similarly disruptive intervention of networked mass communication?

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And yes, the Dachis Group is using the term “social business design” to brand their new consulting-about-social-computing business.

In a post announcing the Dachis Group’s new business and congratulating one of my friend’s good luck,  I pointed out that  the notion of “social business design” is basically a refreshment of the concepts first (or earlier ?) advanced in the late 70′s and early 80′s under the label “socio-technical systems and work design“.

The changes people are beginning to notice and feel as massive and historical have been coming at us for quite a while .. even pre-Web, believe it or not.

What a pedant I can be …

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Via Whitehouse.gov

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"The Open Internet: Preserving the Freedom to Innovate"
Julius Genachowski

The Internet is the most transformational communications breakthrough of our time. It has become essential to the fabric of the daily lives of Americans.

More and more, the Internet is how we get news, information, and entertainment; how we stay in touch with our friends and family; how we work and start new businesses; how we — and people across the globe — learn about our communities and express points of view.

The Internet has also been an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, economic growth, and opportunity. It has unleashed the potential of entrepreneurs and enabled the launch and growth of small businesses across America.

The key to the Internet’s success has been its openness.

The Internet was designed to be "future-proof" — to support ideas, products, and services that today’s inventors have not yet imagined. In practice, it doesn’t favor or disfavor any particular content or application, but allows end users, content creators, and businesses of every size and in every sector of the economy to communicate and innovate without permission.

Notwithstanding its unparalleled record of success, today the free and open Internet faces emerging and substantial challenges.

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I believe we must choose to safeguard the openness that has made the Internet a stunning success. That is why today, I delivered a speech announcing that the FCC will be the smart cop on the beat when it comes to preserving a free and open Internet.

In particular, I proposed that the FCC adopt two new rules to help achieve this.

The first says broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. The second says broadband providers must be transparent about their network management practices.

These principles would apply to the Internet however it is accessed, though how they apply may differ depending on the access platform or technology used. Of course, network operators will be permitted to implement reasonable network management practices to address issues such as spam, address copyright infringement, and otherwise ensure a safe and secure network for all users.

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