Communities

communities of interest and practice

platform collapse

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The robber barons of the 21st century are the platform owners. They have combined the power of network effects with a 20th century corporate capitalist, winner-takes-all approach. Amazon is choking the book publishing industry, Google is dominating advertising, and telecommunications companies are using their control of the pipes to directly compete with service providers. Now Uber is going after the taxi and car rental industries, getting to be larger than established rental car brands, with none of the overhead. All of these companies provide initially good services to customers. But over time their monopolistic tendencies kill competition and the entire ecosystem of innovation.

I wrote the above paragraph is 2014, not mentioning Twitter, which until recently was where journalists, institutions, and governments shared what was happening and fed the algorithms that showed what was trending. In some ways Twitter was the pulse of the world and helped drive the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and many other causes. It was the main source of visitors to this blog when I deleted Google Analytics several years ago, as a way to ignore vanity metrics.

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exit left authoritarian father figure

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John Batelle notes that many of the thousands of people who were fired from or have left Twitter after Musk’s purchase of the company were women. He provides links to the profiles of 17 of these women.

“Twitter was probably the most intentionally open, accommodating, and thoughtful work culture the Valley has ever produced at scale. And it’s not a coincidence that a healthy percentage of Twitter’s senior executives were women. Nor is it a coincidence that nearly all of them have left. I started keeping a list of the extraordinary women I worked with over the past few years who have recently departed the company. And just for posterity, and perhaps for you all to add to, I present it here. Think about all the men cheering on Elon’s ‘Hardcore’ philosophy, who agree with him that the people below, and countless others, are unnecessary. Read through these names, click on their profiles, and ponder the roles they played in the nuanced ecosystem Twitter once was.” —John Batelle 2022-11-28

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culture eats sanity for breakfast

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Last year I came across a book — All for Nothing — about the collapse of the German Army in Prussia during the Second World War. It is written from the perspective of a young boy and the characters are mostly civilians. My mother, as a young girl, lived through this.

People in the book for the most part cannot comprehend a Soviet invasion or the defeat of the German Army. These are impossible concepts for them. Everyone in the book sees events from their unique, egocentric bubble. But then people start dying randomly and everyone becomes focused on survival. There are some acts of generosity, especially at the end of the book, but for the most part it’s everyone for themselves.

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“warts and all”

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Helen Blunden is the inaugural winner of the ITA Jay Cross Award (2016). Jay had a significant influence on my life and it was sad to say farewell in 2015. Helen’s latest blog post in many ways reflects some of the challenges that Jay faced. He was outside the mainstream. Jay was constantly shifting his business model. He was always looking for ways to be innovative but not a slave to the status quo. Helen has also been transparent and open with the challenges she has faced, doubly so as a woman in business.

“Some time ago, I asked the question Should I Get Off YouTube?

The reason is that after getting off social media, I’m reflecting on every single aspect of my working life and my output that I have shared online since 2011.

With over 500 videos of working and sharing my lessons, experiments, projects, questions out loud to the world, I realised that I had an immense body of work that I put out to the world. Some of which helped me in my working life but in many aspects, putting myself ‘out there’ meant that I was also at a greater risk of failing publicly because showing the ‘warts and all’ is bad for business. To be successful in business is to create illusions.

And so fail I did. I never was a good illusionist.

Instead I wanted to build a model that wasn’t following what others were doing. In some way, I wanted to lead something new and different – something inspirational.

In particular, I baulked at the idea of having to build myself into a ‘thought leader or entrepreneur’ and then base a consulting business where I had to rely on being at the whim of platform algorithms; to build a business around my expertise, which then I could extract huge amounts of money from subscribers or corporate customers.

That business model never sat well with me as I espoused continual and lifelong learning NOT as a ‘thought leader’ of lifelong learning.

There was always a contradiction that never sat well with me because I was always learning.” —Helen Blunden 2022-10-22

As Hugh McLeod so articulately captured, there are challenges to being either a sheep or a wolf. Helen is a wolf.

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better stories for a better world

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“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following.” —The Atlantic 2022

A decade ago I saw three factors in the production of what is generally called social capital:

  1. Intellectual Capital (ability to collect, retain & share information
  2. Social Capital (ability of people to work together)
  3. Creative Capital (ability to combine diverse ideas)

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community sensemaking

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We had a great conversation today for our monthly Zoom call with the perpetual beta coffee club. We had folks on the call from Japan, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, USA, Canada, and Spain. The diversity of perspectives really adds to our collective understanding, especially since this is a trusted space amongst peers.

A couple of books were recommended in the conversation.

The World of Yesterday

Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy

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finding the wisdom of crowds

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“Opinions have never been formed in a vacuum. They’re infectious, as people copy one another. And when this process is made visible it sets off public opinion trends. As more of the public square has moved online, we’ve seen how these can grow monolithic and bitterly factionalised, stifling potentially important public deliberation: take, for example, the hysteria that shut down public discussion of lockdown trade-offs.” —The wisdom of crowds descends into meme wars

Is the print era irretrievably over and are we seeing the end of objective media, as described in the article above? But did print really give us objectivity? In Europe the printing press enabled individual interpretation of the bible and the Protestant Reformation which to this day keeps forking off new branches like a berserk open source software project. On the other hand, print enabled mass literacy, but also yellow journalism.

The rise of yellow journalism helped to create a climate conducive to the outbreak of international conflict and the expansion of U.S. influence overseas [1866-1898], but it did not by itself cause the war. In spite of Hearst’s often quoted statement—“You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”—other factors played a greater role in leading to the outbreak of war … The dramatic style of yellow journalism contributed to creating public support for the Spanish-American War, a war that would ultimately expand the global reach of the United States. —Office of the Historian archive

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ITA Jay Cross Award 2022

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internet time allianceThe Internet Time Alliance Award — in memory of Jay Cross — is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.

Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.

Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance — Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and myself — resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

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there is no public in the global market

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Two years ago, just after the pandemic was declared, I suggested that we need to go beyond civil society, governments, and markets — toward a commons or noosphere — to deal with the entangled complexities facing us. My assumptions at that time have not changed much to date.

  1. The three organizing forms for society, chronologically — Tribes, Institutions (Governments), Markets — are widely applicable across history.
  2. Each form builds on the other and changes it.
  3. The last form is the dominant form — today that would be the Market form (market volatility today is increasing inequality and turmoil)
  4. A new form is emerging — Networks (Commons)‚ and hence the T+I+M+N model.
  5. This form has also been called the noosphere.
  6. I have found evidence that what initiated each new form was a change in human communication media — T+I (written word), T+I+M (print), T+I+M+N (electric/digital).
  7. I believe we are currently in between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.
  8. This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement.

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