Leadership in a networked world is making our networks and communities smarter so they are able to make better-informed decisions. In early 2020 New Brunswick’s Education Minister, Dominic Cardy, worked very hard to make his network smarter. “When Canada’s chief public health official, Dr. Theresa Tam, was talking about there being no need to “panic,”… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Democracy
a global human sensemaking platform
The thinking that got us into this mess will not get us out of it. If we are to create a new economic order it has to move beyond civil society, governments, and markets. A quid pro quo between private firms and public authorities will only reinforce the status quo. “A new economic order requires… Read more »
strong ideas, loosely held
Blogging is one way I make sense of the world. I have now written over 3,300 posts on various topics. My ways of seeing the world have changed over the years and blogging has helped to keep my thoughts in a state of perpetual beta — strong ideas, loosely held, in order to deal with… Read more »
prebunking the conspiracy theorists
In confronting the post-truth machines I looked at different types of fake news and what could be done to counter them — Propaganda, Disinformation, Clickbait, and Conspiracy Theories. I mentioned that the researcher danah boyd defines agnotology as — “the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance”. Today, as ever, many forces are at play promoting… Read more »
the reality of missing out
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… Read more »
beyond civil society, governments, and markets
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 —… Read more »
new societal infrastructures
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… Read more »
the end of control
Did print enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution? “ … just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin.” —Gwynne… Read more »
our natural stupidity
The platform monopolists and the surveillance capitalists are at war with us, citizens of the world. They have engaged some of the best minds — from psychology, cognitive science, usability, addiction research, human factors engineering, anthropology, etc. — so that our evolutionary developed cognitive biases are used against us to sell us more crap. Some… Read more »
constant doubt and outrage
When I was visiting Rome in 2012 I met a fellow tourist, an older gentleman from Australia, who told me that he had stopped a pick-pocket on the train who was trying to lift his wallet. He had cried out and grabbed the thief’s hand. As the train came to a stop, the locals on… Read more »
Next Workshop 14 September
Join our Community
e-book series
Recent Conversations