Why I am going to Socap09: can we re-invent currencies?

This post was originally posted on the Socap09 blog

I read recently on Edge.org an essay from Douglas Rushkoff entitled "Economics is not a natural science".
In the article, Douglas reminds us that the current economic system we take for granted is a result of history. It goes back to the middle ages, when people went from bartering what they were producing, and the main measure of value was the amount of food that could be produced from an ecosystem, to currencies based on how much gold where held in central banks. Scarcity was no longer in the ends of mother nature, but rather it became disconnected from it, and in the hands of the rulers of the land.
Since then, currencies has evolved to no longer being connected to gold either, they are just an artificial instrument to regulate exchange within and across nations.

Comes the internet, and another phenomenon appears, that Xavier Comtesse describes in his essay on "Direct Territories": we are now living in a world at the intersection of several and often conflicting layers. There is the geographical layer, several government layers (from local to national), a business layer (the corporation that spans across nation), and many other community layers. With the internet, stakeholders from these layers that typically did not have access to the discussion now can have their voice heard and can contribute to the balance of powers. Yochai Benkler in his book "The wealth of networks" gives very good examples of how this power is being re-distributed, and of the opportunities but also the risks it represents.

Today the economic crisis shows us a world where many people are without a job while there is enough work for everybody if we want to fix the issues at hand. Douglas Rushkoff concludes his essay by saying that "the economic model has broken, for good. It's time to stop pretending it describes our world". So what can we do from here?

- From the internet came the Open Source community, that has shown us how a large group of developers who were not bound by any constraint other than their own desire to contribute could self-organize to build and maintain very complex systems.

- And from history, we learn that it is possible to go around the lack of liquidity in situations of crisis by using our own currency: in 1934, and because there was a shortage of cash due to the stock market crash of 1929, a business man in Switzerland created the Swiss Economic Circle, now called WIR Bank. They started with 16 members, and there are now 62,000 businesses strong. They eventually returned to managing real currencies in 1952, but the system worked well to help businesses out of the crisis in the meantime.

One opportunity at Socap09 is to derive from these lessons and to consider what the ideal currency should be used for social capital markets, that would allow us to restore the right balance for a more sustainable world. I am looking forward to having such a discussion...

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Look for Haute Couleur ad this Sunday 8.23.09 in the NYT Magazine

"Media-Vent™ 8.23.09: NY Times Magazine on Empowering Women"

Look for Haute Couleur ad this Sunday 8.23.09 in the special issue of the NY Times Magazine on Empowering Women

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Echo is nice, but ...

Echo is nice, but until I know better Reframeit is better because it resolves a big issue for commenters, which is that comments should not be something controlled by the original content owner. If we want freedom of speech, shouldn't we be able to comment anything anywhere?


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I also just discovered auto-post from posterous, so now this should go to my Facebook, Twitter, and to my Open Business blog. A blast!

via google-wave-robot

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Google Wave complexity does not come from UI

From What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way at blog.enterprise2open.com:

"But then another task needs to be dealt with - protecting users from the complexities of the platform and helping them find ways of use, here usability of apps and sites built upon Wave must be better than what we’ve seen so far … this messy UX above reminds me of some platforms best forgotten."

Google Wave complexity does not come so much from a messy UI but rather from lack of etiquette. Once you understand the way it works and you start cleaning up your interactions, you are back to a nice and manageable environment. The stability on the Google Wave sandbox is still an issue, but otherwise using it (as an end user) is easy, and the promise that it will be better than email feels very real.


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Top 150 social capital blogs updated

I originally published the list in May 2009.

The list has been very stable. You can find the updated list here


2 new comers in the top 10:
A. Fine Blog - http://afine2.wordpress.com moving up from #16
Social Entrepreneurship - Change.org - http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org moving up from #11

Two blogs moved out of the top 10:
NextBillion.net | Development through Enterprise - http://www.nextbillion.net moved to #12
Stanford Social Innovation Review : Opinion Blog Entries - http://www.ssireview.org/opinion moved to #11

If you are planning to go to Socap09, these are good blogs to track...




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Reputation

From Masum at firstmonday.org:

"Reputation is a surrogate — a partial reflection representing our "best educated guess" of the underlying true state of affairs. Active evaluation by looking behind surface signals can corroborate or disprove reputations, while indiscriminate use degrades their reliability."

The Halo effect is a factor that will impact reputation and typically will create a disconnection between perception and the underlying true state of the affair. When a company does not perform well on the stock market, it is easy to rationalize that the CEO did not do a good job. The same CEO doing the exact same things in a market where the company does well would be presented as a reference for good management. The good read on the matter is "The Halo Effect" from Phil Rozenwieg.

But if/when we can resolve this problem, then there is a big potential. From the report:

"just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner."

I believe that this is a key element to making capitalism more sustainable. Definitely something worth working on!





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Internal Evangelist of the Year - by the Adoption 2.0 Council

If you are an "internal evagelist" or know somebody that
contributes to bringing change within your organization, the Adoption
2.0 is launching a "Internal Evangelist" award, here is a great
opportunity to capitalize on the effort...

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2009 is the year for enterprise 2.0

2009 is the year for enterprise 2.0, the data keeps pouring in...


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Great slides from Netflix on the freedom and responsibility culture

Great slides from Netflix on the freedom and responsibility culture (thank you to Yves Granger for bringing this up).

This reminds me of Deming who talks in his book "Out of the crisis" about empowering people to do their job by providing them with the right information, and then manage by statistics, only addressing exceptions, things that get out of the standard deviation.

Freedom and responsibility is also what keeps things under control at Burning Man, a temporary town in the middle of the desert where thousands of people show up once a year. No police, no authority, self discipline to keep things under control.

William Bernquist talks in his blog about "postmodern leadership", and it is good to see it is happening at Netflix too.

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Interesting detail.

"Joltid, a company owned by Skype's founders, merely licensed some of the system's core technology to eBay when it sold Skype to the auction giant in 2005. Joltid now says that the license has been revoked and eBay is infringing on its rights by continuing to use the technology. The case is scheduled to go to court in June of 2010 but eBay is trying to replace the technology in the meantime. It may not succeed."

Interesting detail. It seems that whoever worked the acquisition of Skype by eBay forgot something, and it is now biting back...


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83% understand the meaning of Enterprise

"83% surveyed understand the meaning of Enterprise 2.0 and even how it can help their business. Over half of organizations consider Enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and Success yet only 25% are actually doing anything about it, but this is up from 13% in 2008."

83% understand the meaning of Enterprise 2.0, 25% are doing something about it, up from 13% in 2008. Clearly we are still in the learning phase. The good news is that we are moving up the bell curve.


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Testing Google Wave - part 2

I was one of the lucky users recently getting a Google Wave account (they just opened up their system to 20,000 users). And I have spent some time playing with the system.

There is a lot of chaos on the sandbox platform, which is still somewhat unstable (it crashed on me 3 or 4 times while I was testing). And since you only get one account you have no real friend to talk to, which means most of the conversations are happening through the discuss bot, with everybody doing everything at the same time.

It is interesting to see how things are slowly getting organized, and people get organized, figuring out how to use the system. As a result content also gets better organized. And in the end, I was surprised to find myself in an environment that feels very much like what I experience with blueKiwi (disclaimer - I work with blueKiwi).

True there are bells and whitles, like the clean up bot (removing blank blips) or the rosy bot (translations), or the twetty bot to publish your blips to Twitter, or the bloggy bot to publish a wave to a blog. But really what you have underlying is a communication platform where the key element is that it is organized around conversations.

First you create a wave, then you invite people to it. Just like in bK when you first create a note (or a poll or an event or other), and then you publish to specific people or to groups. And this is the key to the user experience.

This is different from what you typically see out there with other vendors, or with regular email, where you think first about individual people or a group, and then you send them a message.

This is the difference between an efficient way to communicate and a not-so-efficient way to communicate.

If anything, this first Google Wave experience makes me feel very good that blueKiwi has had the right vision from the beginning, and the Google guys thinking about what a modern communication platform should be agree with the general concept...

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Reframeit lets you keep your content where you can manage it: your blog

If you comment on blogs, you should consider using Reframeit! While IntenseDebate allows you to share your comments with others, the content remains on the IntenseDebate service. With Reframeit, I can publish my comments to my own blog, which is a better place for me to keep my own content. Something worth looking into...


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Testing Google Wave!

I was one of the lucky guys getting a Google Wave account recently (they just expanded to 20,000 accounts. While it is a bit disorienting at first, using wave is as great as what you can imagine from the launch video. I can't wait to be able to invite my friends...


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Facebook or Twitter are learning experiences

"Facebook or Twitter are learning experiences", we are still in the process of discovering how to use social media and how to manage communication through these platforms. I like the way Adriana describes the state of the industry. Worth watching...




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Adoption 2.0 council

From ITSinsider | What (2006), Why (2007), now How (2009) for Enterprise 2.0:

"Yes, the baby was born in ‘06, started crawling in ‘07, and now is running around like a maniac with boundless energy in ‘09. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is now a healthy child, growing stronger and more willful every day (just a cabinet door away from getting into trouble…) I returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week rejuvenated, as I’d hoped to.

The number UNO issue on the minds of this year’s customer conference attendees was: HOW THE >>>> DO WE DO THIS??? Customers wanted to hear from other customers, not us (the so-called experts in Enterprise 2.0). The best sessions for me were definitely the unconference sessions where real practitioners could talk frankly about their challenges and share their successes."

Enterprise 2.0 is getting traction, the time is right for the people involved to discuss "best practices", and this Adoption 2.0 council is a great way to get started. I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of this effort...


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Web 2.0 and Swarm Intelligence

From National Geographic Magazine "Swarm Theory" article:

"No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing."

Web 2.0 technologies create a platform to enable swarm intelligence. The article is not recent, but still very relevant. And this is a very good way to explain what is going on, rather than talking about culture and usage.


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Facebook and the public timeline

From www.readwriteweb.com - "The Day Facebook Changed Forever":

"After we wrote this post, Facebook HQ emailed to tell us that the first wave of users who get this feature will have their messages made public by default because their profiles were already marked as public, but that when they open the feature up to subsequent users - those users will have default privacy settings that match their pre-existing profile privacy settings. Unfortunately, in our tests so far (see our screencast) - we haven't been able to successfully change our default message settings back to friends-only, it stays stuck on public. When we switch our test account from profile public to profile private and then back again, the default for message posting gets stuck at "friends of friends!"

So there are some kinks to work out here. However, it appears that we may have jumped the gun and assumed something that was not said in the Facebook blog post: that the experience of all users was going to be like the experience of the first users. The feature appears not to be working correctly and it certainly wasn't communicated about well, but Facebook now tells us that it will not be opening things up quite like we characterized in this post."

Facebook and the public timeline: are they doing it or not? is this good or bad? What is sure is that the potential impact on users is big, so this is not a good place for confusion...


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A growing acceptance of social networkin

From i-penny.com:

"A June survey released by Facetime, makers of a gateway appliance for managing Web 2.0 applications, revealed the growing popularity of social networking applications in the workplace. Out of 1199 survey respondents, all IT professionals, there were more who felt that social networks played an important role in the business world than those who didn't. What's more, it appears that the IT folks are now seemingly OK with providing access these networks behind the firewall - even those that don't approve of their use!"

A growing acceptance of social networking in the workplace - good news for the Enterprise 2.0...

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