Queen Street Commons

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The Queen Street Commons had its official opening in Charlottetown today and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of enthusiastic people. Robert, Cynthia and Dan were charming and excellent hosts. It’s really a simple idea – make some workspace available in the downtown area for a reasonable price. Then set some basic rules and let the members grow a common space to work, learn and share. So, for $35/month you can have some cool urban office space as well as a lounge, conference room and a kitchen to hang out in.  On top of that, you get to talk to some interesting people whom you may not have otherwise met.
I look forward to the day that the next Work Commons is created – maybe in Sackville(?).

Communities and Chaos

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Peter Bond has a good article (with explanatory diagrams) that looks at communities of practice (CoP) from a biological perspective. He sees these communities as balancing between chaos and structure. The more chaotic, the more energy and innovation is evident. In chaos little gets done but as structure is added over the life of the community it loses its energy.

This suggests that the process of CoP development be approached as if they were transitory organisational phenomena that may act, but only for a finite period, as the source of the motivation for change and as the vehicles for change.

One inference I can make from Bond’s article is that loosely joined technologes would be more appropriate for CoP’s than single structures, like a CMS or web portal. If the nature of a CoP is temporary then it would be best to have individually-controlled pieces that can form and re-form over time. This ability is currently available from a combination of blogs, RSS, tags and feedreaders.
In my experience working with single structure CoP’s (password controlled access to a single site) I still find the much more open blogosphere is a better (more flexible) environment for community building because the tools are in the hands of the individual. This flexibility, and the absence of a controlling hand, help to maintain the balance between chaos and structure.

Fewer Left Brain Careers

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Following up on my post on Productivity, I noted that Dan Pink has referred to this AP article about the decline in demand for traditional technology jobs:

"In this country, we need to train our engineers to be at the leading edge," Gray [executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers] said. "That’s the only place there’s still going to be engineering work here."
At Stanford, career experts are urging engineering and science majors to get internships and jobs outside of their comfort zones — in marketing, finance, sales and even consulting. They suggest students develop foreign language skills to land jobs as cross-cultural project managers — the person who coordinates software development between work teams in Silicon Valley and the emerging tech hub of Bangalore, India, for example.

The writing is on the wall. If your work can be automated or outsourced to a cheaper labour market then you had better be looking for a new career.

Blue Ocean Strategy

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Blue Ocean Strategy is a book with a similar theme to Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next. It states that the economic world is divided into two kinds of oceans, red ones and blue ones. The red oceans are existing markets while the blue ones are new markets. While red oceans account for more revenue, red ones generate greater profit. This is an interesting premise – and inherently makes sense – but I’ve only read the executive summary. Not sure if there’s any more meat in the book than you can find on the web site or in the summary. Any comments?

Productivity

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Worthwhile’s Anita Sharpe mentioned productivity measures and how the US Government measures output instead of real productivity. Anita quotes Kevin Kelly (10 Rules for the New Economy) :

"Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do. . .Where humans are most actively engaged with their imaginations, we don’t see productivity gains — and why should we? Is a Hollywood movie company that produces longer movies per dollar more productive that one that produces shorter movies?" 

A similar question came up at Nine Shift on whether "productivity is no longer a valid measurement".  Dan Pink sees the world moving from an Industrial/Information economy towards a Creative Economy. These new economic conditions, created by Asia, Automation and Abundance will require "right-brain" skills in design, synthesis and empathy. If you agree with Pink, which I do, then it becomes obvious that industrial era measurements will be useless in the next economy.
Unfortunately, most measures of creativity are not as clear-cut as those for more technical and physical skills. In the interim, we will have a mismatch between what is measured and what really matters.

Learning About Sharing

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Note: This is a re-post from last week due to a system change (Drupal 4.4 to 4.6).
One interesting observation I made this week is that not everyone is as open to sharing their thoughts and opinions in a public way as my fellow bloggers are. Coming from a community of practice that shares ideas and uses sharing mechanisms like Creative Commons, public Furl and Bloglines archives, you sometimes take for granted that everyone has this outlook. I came across some strong opinions that knowledge is power and it must be kept to oneself or a small circle of people. I keep on learning :-)
Seb also referred to this related paper.

Web 2.0

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Web 2.0 is the common term used to refer to the new generation of web applications and systems that enable community or many-to-many relationships. BusinessWeek has a recent article that summarizes many of the converging and diverging factors influencing this next phase of the Web:

Indeed, peer production represents a sea change in the economy — at least when it comes to the information products, services, and content that increasingly drive economic growth. More than two centuries ago, James Watt’s steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, centralizing the means of production in huge, powerful corporations that had the capital to achieve economies of scale. Now cheap computers and new social software and services — along with the Internet’s ubiquitous communications that make it easy to pool those capital investments — are starting to give production power back to the people. Says Benkler [Yale professor]: "This departs radically from everything we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution."

Commerce is changing as a result of this new business platform, with successful examples such as e-Bay and more recently Skype. The graphic provided in the article is a good visual of the change from the Web 1.0 to 2.0, with Web 2.0 described as:

Many-to-Many: File-sharing, blogs and social networking services are connecting masses of people simultaneously. Their collective efforts are spawning new services including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and free netphone network Skype.

For an ongoing discussion of Web 2.0, including its influence on higher education, go to What’s Web 2.0? which is run by Will Pate.

 

Inkscape – Open Source Graphics Editor

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Open source applications are slowly crawling "up the software stack", making proprietary enterprise software development more and more difficult. Inkscape is an open source scalable vector graphics editor affiliated with the Open Clip Art Gallery project.

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Comments from any users would be appreciated. I’ve just downloaded it and will test it out when I get a chance.

Innovation & Disruption

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If you were interested in my previous post about Clayton Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation in his book Seeing What’s Next, then read these two articles by Dave Pollard. Dave has taken Christensen’s theories a step further and integrated other models to come up with a more prescriptive strategy for companies to approach innovation. His recommendations are boiled down to six steps, which he explains in detail in his posts:

  1. Research the strategy canvas for your industry [based on Blue Ocean strategy];
  2. Find out from each segment of customers (including low-end and current non-customers) what they value and what their unmet needs are;
  3. Compare the strategy canvasses to the needs of each segment;
  4. Find the gaps;
  5. Brainstorm and ‘imagineer’ how you can effectively, competently and profitably fill them; and
  6. Experiment, test, qualify and then roll out the qualifying innovation opportunities.

Now I just have to put these ideas to work in our latest start-up initiative …

A Culture of Dependence

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I’ve referred to Robert Paterson’s posts many times before and I like his approach of looking at the systemic causes of our economic and learning challenges. Rob has recently posted a document that outlines how to build a post-industrial economic model. It makes much use of the work of Rob Cross and Richard Florida. The premise is that we have to change our culture by developing loose networks that can become social spaces and later incubators for change and economic development. Rob gives some case studies in his paper and from a short distance I have watched this happen on PEI and it’s quite exciting. I think that this statement sums up Rob’s perspective:

Adventurous people create sustainable jobs not government. Buildings don’t create sustainable jobs. Creative people create sustainable jobs.

A different perspective comes from Moncton. David Campbell is a new featured blogger on CBC Radio One, where he discusses economic development. My reading of his blog is that we need to get more outside investment into the province so that we can create more jobs. Jobs equal economic development.

When Irving, UPM-Kymmene or any of the other large forestry companies in New Brunswick start closing their plants and laying off thousands of people (like Nackawic), I hope Veniot, Taylor and the NDP lady [CBC Radio political pundits] will be prepared to shoulder some of the blame. They, in effect, help shape public opinion on issues such as this. The forestry industry is a critical economic driver for the province. The industry is sending a very clear message. The government is delaying and the pundits are calling for politicians to "stand up" to the industry. "Fight for the rights of New Brunswickers".

One perspective is to grow our own business (Rob Paterson calls these jobs but many are in fact independent workers) while the other is to find large corporations that provide us with traditional industrial jobs. I think that being a salaried employee within a corporation is a state close to indentured servitude. The larger the corporation, the more dependent you are. You are dependent on someone or something else for your wage and in return you yield to the corporation. A population of salaried workers is in effect a dependent population – dependent on the corporations for jobs, security and economic vision. David’s reference to Nackawic shows how one town became completely dependent on one multinational employer, who left them on short notice. I see these two views as offering the choice of a new vision that will take longer to implement but will be more sustainable while the latter looks to continue the dominance of managerial capitalism. Rob’s view of local networks (of small businesses and free agents) that create local wealth and social security is more robust than David’s model of attracting more external capital to create jobs for indentured servants.

Given the extremely low costs of international communication today, we can connect to almost any market in the world, so our geographical location is no longer a limiting factor to our economic growth. Our culture of dependence is.