Communities

communities of interest and practice

the reality of missing out

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When Tim Berners-Lee invented the Worldwide Web he made it free and open source, so others could build upon it. In the early days it was quite open with individuals sharing knowledge through blogging and collectively building knowledge with wikis, the largest being Wikipedia. But as more people joined the web two things happened.

Commercial forces found ways to monetize their audiences. They built attractive ways for people to get online as easily as possible. They even hired psychologists and anthropologists to study human behaviour and then devised ways to manipulate it. They aggregated this data and used it to sell targeted advertising. All the giants on the internet use targeted advertising — Amazon, Google, and especially Facebook.

Meanwhile, many people found blogs to be too much work, and wikis to be confusing. They wanted convenience so that they could connect with their grandchildren. Facebook was the solution. It was convenient and allowed easy sharing and connections. But convenience, like a principle, has a cost.

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beyond civil society, governments, and markets

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Binary thinking is an easy sell. It appeals to our emotions which we developed as children. Binary thinking blinds us. It’s not black and white, or right and wrong, or even Left and Right. Human society is many shades along various spectra. But often politicians and others tell us it’s a simple, binary choice — ”You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.’‘ —President George W. Bush (2001)

Thinking of our society as only Markets and Government (Institutions) ignores the influence and potential of families, communities, and the volunteer sector.  For instance, Public-Private Partnerships are not inclusive. They ignore the Civil sector.

“Every day I’m told our society, our system, has two sectors: the public sector and the private sector — the former referring to government and its agencies, the latter to the market system and its businesses. I’m also told that one sector or the other, or both in partnership, say as a public-private hybrid, offers the best way to deal with this or that domestic policy problem.

Our politicians, policymakers, and media commentators constantly rely on this public-private framework when they talk about fixing America’s health, education, childcare, housing, welfare, infrastructure, energy, communications, and environmental issues. Some proposals call for broader government programs; others urge more privatization; a few recommend improving public-private collaboration.” —David Ronfeldt

Incorporating the third sector, civil society, into decision making is becoming evident in our connected world, especially with an ongoing pandemic.

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new societal infrastructures

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Continued from — nine shifts

In 2004 Bill Draves and Julie Coates wrote Nineshift: Work, life and education in the 21st Century. That was the same year I started blogging here. Nineshift is based on the premise that during the first two decades of the 21st century, there will be a major shift in how we spend 9 hours of each day.

“There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.”

The authors put forth that society would significantly shift what we do with those nine hours and this would be complete by 2020.

  1. People Work at Home — “Work is an activity, not a place.”
  2. Intranets Replace Offices
  3. Networks Replace the Pyramid
  4. Trains Replace Cars
  5. Communities Become More Dense
  6. New Societal Infrastructures Evolve
  7. Cheating Becomes Collaboration
  8. Half of all Learning will be Online
  9. Education becomes Web-based

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after the shit has hit the fan

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The proverbial shit has hit the fan. Were you ready? Did you have a knowledge network that you could depend upon to make sense of your digital world?

“When the shit hits the fan you want your inside information flow to be at least as fast as what is happening outside. In most organisations this is not the case … If you have a big enough, mature enough, fast enough set of internal conversations taking place then you will be better able to work out what is happening and what to do about it.” —Euan Semple 2020-03-17

For the first time ever, most students in schools in many countries are learning at a distance [850 million out of school as of today]. For the first time ever, in some countries, more people are working remotely than going to a place of work. The network era starts in 2020. Everything before was a prelude.

The new normal, when it comes, will be different. Teaching will be turned upside down. So too will curricula, academic disciplines, and their institutions.

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leadership through cooperation

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One of the few areas where most nations cooperate is in infectious disease control. For nation states, cooperation is the best option in this type of ‘prisoner’s dilemma‘.

“On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization was alerted about a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown etiology in Wuhan, China, which prompted international concern of the potential public-health impact of an outbreak of a new virus [COVID-19] … With the now global spread of the virus, the urgency of a coordinated international response has amplified … This multi-pronged approach to curtail the outbreak, strongly supported by existing R&D, is a testament to the collaborative response of international organizations and the research and clinical communities … The initial global response to the 2019-nCoV outbreak illustrates the power of rapid communication and the importance of sustained research and collaborations that can be leveraged in future outbreaks. Sustained cooperation is essential to their resolution.” —Nature 2020-02-03

In Canada, special funds of up to $1 million per project have been allocated for rapid research into the recent outbreak of the novel corona virus [COVID-19]. Other nations, institutions, and corporations are also cooperating on molecular assays to diagnose COVID-19, including — China, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, USA. A special English-Chinese translation engine for scientific and medical use is being made freely available to researchers around the world by UK-based St. John’s Innovation Centre.

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RTFM

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If you find that people on social media have a tendency toward anger and outrage there is one action we all can take to diffuse the situation. It’s simple, but first we have to stop and think. If there is but one practice that will help make social media more civil, it is to always read the full article or reference before sharing and especially before commenting. In short — RTFM.

I recently posted a link to an article on Twitter — How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class — with this quote, “In effect, management consulting is a tool that allows corporations to replace lifetime employees with short-term, part-time, and even subcontracted workers, hired under ever more tightly controlled arrangements … Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind the structural inequalities that are dismantling the American middle class.”

I don’t agree with the entire article but there is some truth that large consultancies have helped to get rid of middle management, blocking career growth for workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, and shifting non-management personnel to contracted or part-time workers.

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anger, outrage & belonging

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A topic of conversation in our monthly coffee club video call this morning was polarization — how different sides increasingly do not listen to each other but instead amplify their own positions. We can each come up with several examples, either from the political, or cultural spheres. Social media have made us all spectators in various clashes, as I noted about the Internet of Beefs. Each side is focused on winning but in the end, like many a divorce, neither side does.

“Listening to SCAN on the radio this last week, especially on the AM band—and then watching and listening to much of the Impeachment trial on TV and radio—it became clear to me that the Republican and Democratic parties are like divorced parents fighting over children who are also taking sides. Typically of people who don’t get along, they make broad and demeaning assumptions about each other, full of characterization and dismissiveness. Whether they are right or wrong about each other are beside this simple point: they are locked in a conflict that will only be resolved, unhappily, when one or the other wins. —Doc Searls 2020-02-01

Unfortunately — in an economy fueled by advertising — taking a neutral position does not make business sense. Constant outrage brings more eyeballs, so that is what both mainstream media and consumer social media encourage. Outrage has made Facebook so successful. Leaning toward neutrality — like the news outlet Ha’aretz does — is a dangerous business position when advertising pays the bills.

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“the future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty”

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In spite of the criticism about social media, I still learn a lot from a platform like Twitter. The passing of Esko Kilpi this week has me reviewing some of his wise words, and there were many. This is a series of his tweets from 2012.

Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.
An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity.
The Internet transforms our understanding what “local” is, makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction.
All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts.
The unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective.
Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.

Esko said that in order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity you need to first cultivate diversity and by this I would say the autonomy of each learner. You also need rich and deep connections, but these are not enough if you don’t also have meaningful conversations, which can be enabled through social learning. If you look at most training and education, including micro-learning or whatever is the latest fad, this counsel is often ignored.

The best advice from Esko — in my opinion — was to hack uncertainty and hedge risks.

“The future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty and hedging risks through post-blockchain smart contracts, learning, and social capital.

The main question is perhaps not what skills we should have in the future, but how we hedge the risks that are inbuilt in our world, our unique knowledge assets, the know-what, the know-who and know-how of our life.” —Esko Kilpi

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Graham McTavish Watt

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The only person to ever have guest blogged here is Graham Watt, a friend for almost 20 years. I met Graham as I was beginning my freelance career in 2003. With no commute or regular hours I could cycle during the day and drop by the local café for a chat. Graham was semi-retired when I met him and we had many conversations on various topics over the years. Here are some of his words that he shared with me.

Graham died last night (2019-12-23). I will miss him.

Graham’s memorial service will be held at the Mount Allison University Chapel, in Sackville, NB on 26 January 2020, at 1:00 PM

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turmoil and experimentation

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Renee DiResta discusses the challenges brought about by the printing press — invented in Europe in 1450 —  and compares these with the current effects of digital networks in — Mediating Consent.

The printing press, invented approximately 50 years before the 95 Theses, extended Luther’s reach from the door of the cathedral to the entirety of Europe. His criticisms of the Church were the first use of mass media: critiques of Catholic doctrine in pithy, irreverent pamphlets, produced at scale and widely distributed. As a result, Luther ushered in not only Protestantism, but an entirely new media landscape: one in which traditional gatekeepers — the church, wealthy nobles — no longer held a monopoly on the information that reached the people. The Catholic Church responded, of course, with pamphlets of its own — defending Catholic doctrine, refuting the new heretics, fighting the battle for hearts, minds, and Truth. —RibbonFarm

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