Canada Best for Starting a New Business

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Via Dane, is the World Bank Group’s Doing Business analysis of where in the world is best for private enterprise. Canada ranks first for ease in starting a new business.
So what are you waiting for? Come on over and start a new business. Maybe here in downtown Sackville, population 5,000, complete with a university and only 20 minutes from an airport, with direct flights to Toronto & Montreal and next year to New York. I just need a few more people to help me start a work commons :-)

Another Bubble?

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On no, is there an OS tech bubble looming around the corner, ready to burst on some unsuspecting souls? Maybe P.T. Barnum was right.

Shades of 1999! I met a venture capitalist who told me lovingly about his "early round of financing" for a company that had a nice-sounding idea behind it but didn’t yet have either a domain name or working code. Then I met another VC with a similar story. And another. And I saw business cards exchanged to the tune of buzzwords I thought had died in the dot-com crash, plus a bunch of new ones that have popped up since then.

I thought giddily for a minute that I should run to the Office Depot across the street from the Argent Hotel (where the conference is being held) and grab some blank CDs. I could then come back to my room and make a slide presentation for a business that would develop a VoIP-based multimedia wiki that would track disintermediated community-generated podcast blog reviews. It would be based on open source software, of course. And cross-platform. And extensible and highly scalable.The above quote is from NewsForge reporting on the current Web 2.0 conference. I somehow thought that open source was going to be a little bit different, but we seem to be rapidly climbing the hype curve. I also thought that 2006 would be the year that OS goes mainstream, but it’s getting a lot of press now.

As much as I may be an open source evangelist, I promise not to get caught up in the hype. Open source to me means not only good, cheap software for the masses but is a foundation that enables smaller businesses to compete and survive against the multinationals. OS is not the answer to all of our problems, nor is it the best way to get rich quick, though there are people making money on it. Let’s just use some common sense when we talk about open source.

Learning Landscape

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Jay Cross uses a landscape analogy to describe informal learning:

Courses end; learnscapes persist. Organizations and their members are living things, and the landscape/learnscape analogy invites us to consider nature, symbiosis, interconnections, genetic make-up, adaptation, the change of seasons, and life cycles. People are not plants, so the analogy doesn’t stretch into self-expression, thinking, identity, personality, and collaboration.

This got me thinking about how useful I’m finding ELGG, the learner-centric environment, which has the tagline “learning landscape”.

Elgg lets you set up a personal presence online and then use it to interact with others!

Create your own weblog, journal, store of files like photos and Word documents, communities, social networks.

Use Elgg to enhance reflective thought, your development, your resource base.

Share them with your friends, teachers, instructors and other Elgg users. YOU decide who can see what!

Unfortunately, since no one can pronounce or understand the name ELGG (I’m told it’s a Swiss deer), I suggest a petition to change the name to “learning landscape” or something like that. It looks like ELGG is making very exciting progress and it will be a heck of a lot easier for me to convince my clients to use it if they can pronounce it ;-)

The New Workplace

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In the Future of Work Agenda October issue, the authors discuss the hidden economy, driven by the movement of knowledge workers to smaller towns, creating much-needed revenue for the local economy:

What makes all this interesting – and important – is that these "free agents," entrepreneurs, and remote employees of large organizations based elsewhere are essentially "exporting" their services outside the local economy – thereby importing income that they then spend locally on food, clothing, toys for their kids, home improvements, recreation, restaurants, and all the other necessities of life.

They go on to call for the creation of Business Communitiy Centers (PDF), which are similar to the Innovation Commons that Boris Mann has proposed. The authors are also offering to manage the networking of these centers or BCC. Their approach seems to be much more of a top-down or franchise model than the grassroots, community-led initiatives in Charlottetown and Vancouver:

And, in the spirit of full disclosure, we are currently in the process of forming that national management company precisely we can promote and support Business Community Centers around the country. And we are actively discussing the BCC concept with several different commercial property developers and local economic development groups at this very moment with the goal of launching one or more of them in the very near future.

The BCC is an interesting concept but there doesn’t appear to be anything in these articles that the Queen Street Commons hasn’t already discovered and done.  Yes, Canadians are leading the way in creating a new workplace model, so let’s get the word out.

Another Commons Node

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I first stumbled on the idea of a work commons when I saw the San Francisco-based Gate-3 Work Commons, which is now closed because they ran out of money. I don’t know the details but it seems to have been a "build it and they will come" type of operation. Meanwhile, here in Canada, the Queen Street Commons is based on a more grassroots model. On my recent visit to PEI, I met with Robert Paterson at the QSC and saw a dynamic community. The model seems to be working. Even more recently, Boris Mann is actively pursuing the creation of an Innovation Commons in Vancouver. Early seeds are being planted for a potentially large network.
With more people working from home or having clients spread all over the world there is a growing need for work Commons to share knowledge and provide social support. The QSC is a good example of "think globally and act locally". I am still hoping to get a Commons started  in Sackville, as there is a lot of interest from the many independent contractors and artists in the community. Once we get a few more going we may have the makings of a "wirearchy" (see previous post) of Commons as a viable alternative to The Corporation. We have the technology (cheap broadband, low-cost hardware, open source software) we just need to keep working on the business models. At least there are now pioneers like QSC that we can use as examples to learn from.

The Future of Work

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From Jon Husband comes this definition; “Wirearchy is an interconnected hyperlinked structure of negotiated (either implicit or explicit) agreements based upon accessible information and knowledge, credibility, trust and results.” Meanwhile, Small Business Trends talks about the rise of entrepreneurs, similar to the 19th Century rise of the mercantile class, while  the Future of Work blog calls for freelancers of the world to unite. All of this connects to Dan Pink’s prognosis for the coming conceptual age in A Whole New Mind, which followed his book Free Agent Nation.

In my own work, I am living much of this. I’m currently in Montreal working with Mancomm Performance, where I’m an associate. Most of my clients are looking for analysis as well as creativity. I also work and volunteer with other organisations, including a charity and an Alternative Energy Co-operative. My work roles include independent consultant, sub-contractor, asssociate or partner. My business connections are a “wirearchy” dependent on mutual trust. I have completed projects where I have never met my partners face-to-face.
I know that this work model is not pervasive, but with more downsizing, mergers, buyouts, lockouts, and other disruptions to the stability of the salaried employee, I’m betting that this will be the future for my children.

ELGG 0.3 Available

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ELGG is an open source system that facilitates communities on the web. It has several functions including blogs, file uploading & sharing and social networking. You can create communities and groups on the fly, so there are no built-in constraints. The user decides who to connect with and what information is available for viewing publicly, personally or only for selected groups.
Version 0.3 provides multilingul support that is easy to implement with only a single text file that can be localized for your particular needs. I’ve been impressed with version 0.2 and see many improvements with the latest version. Other good news coming down the pipe is that ELGG will likely integrate easily with the Moodle open source learning system. Then you could have small pieces loosely joined – one for communities and the other for more formal learning.

Cool New Tools

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This past week I’ve started using two new web applications.
BlogFlux is a blog monitoring service, similar to Technorati, but with one really exceptional module – MapStats. You can see the MapStats button on the navigation bar to the left, under External. Ever since I created this website, I have had a statistics service that gives me the number of visitors, number of pageviews, popular content, etc. MapStats gives this information and more – it’s contextualized by geography and behaviour. For instance, I now know that someone in a specifc city (or at least their server is there) came to my website following a Google search for a specific phrase. Everyday I can see how many people actually came onto this site and what brought them here. This is excellent feedback. BlogFlux filters out all of the RSS pings, comment spammers and trackback spammers so that I get an accurate picture of real people coming to this site. And of course, this service is free. BlogFlux is only available for "real" blogs, and yes they do check, as I can attest.
The other Web 2.0 tool is Writely. This is an online collaborative  word processing application. It’s like a wiki, but much easier to use and invite other collaborators as you go. Current functionality is with MS Word, but the developers are looking for an OASIS translation library in order to make it compatible with OpenOffice.org. So far, it’s a simple and efficient tool for collaborative document development. Writely even supports embedded pictures in your Word document.
Both of these services are in Beta, so you have to be willing to accept some glitches. BlogFlux has been very quick in addressing any issues that I’ve raised (thanks Ahmed). They have even reduced the javascript file for the MapStats button from 22kb to 8.4kb [now 2.8kb], so pages can load quickly.
I would recommend BlogFlux and MapStats for any blogger and I think that Writely is the first of what will soon be a basic tool for everyone – the web-based word processor.

Learn@Work Week

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I’m a bit late, but I guess I should underline the fact that it’s Learn@Work Week in Canada; an event kicked-off by CSTD. Our Premier of New Brunswick is the honourary chair. For me, and many of my colleagues & associates, every week is learn at work week.

In reviewing my own learning, I see that t it has been a very long time since I took any formal instruction. I find that much of what interests me is expensive and for the high price I feel that it’s not focused enough on my personal learning needs. That’s the dilemma with training & education programs. To be able to make any money you have to find an audience that’s willing to pay for the offering. However, in order to attract more people you have to make it less personal. I would love a personalised training program, but I couldn’t afford it and conversely, I find that the more general offerings aren’t worth my time and money. That’s the learner’s dilemma.

Currently, all of my learning is informal.