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Why transparency and privacy should go hand in hand

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We can’t afford BP to go it alone

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Twitter’s users dictate what’s happening

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Will publishers rise to the challenge?

A new report says that a growing portion of adult internet users are concerned about their digital online identity.  More than half (57%) of internet users over age 18 say they have used a search engine to look up their name and see what information was available about them online, up from 47% who did so in 2006. And a big surprise: Despite their reputation for being reckless with their online reputations, it turns out that young adults, what I call the Net Generation,  are the most active online reputation managers.  More than any other age group, they care about what others can see or read about them.

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Young people are the most active online reputation managers

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Wikinomics and the Era of Openness: European Innovation at the Crossroads

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Change.org features global problem-solving podcast

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Rebooting the University

The global financial crisis of 2008 was a wake-up call for the world. But while many
people were calling for updated regulations and even the breakup or nationalization of
the big banks, it became clear to us that restoring long-term confidence in the financial
services industry would require more than government intervention and new rules.

The world needed a profoundly new approach to governing the global economy, including a new modus operandi for financial services based on business principles like transparency, integrity and collaboration.

Evidence soon mounted that the crisis was spreading to other sectors. The Gulf Oil Spill, a sovereign debt crisis, the failure of world leaders to forge a meaningful agreement on climate change in Copenhagen. One event after another underscored the impotence of our conventional approaches to solving global problems. It seems that many of the institutions that have served us well for decades—even centuries—are frozen and unable to move forward.

And yet, through all of the haze and the turmoil we see cause for genuine optimism. In
every corner of the globe, a powerful new model of economic and social innovation is
sweeping across all sectors—one where people with drive, passion and expertise take
advantage of new Web-based tools to get more involved in making the world more
prosperous, just and sustainable.

And just as millions have contributed to Wikipedia—and thousands still make ongoing contributions to large-scale collaborations like Linux and the human genome project—we are convinced that there is now an historic opportunity to marshal human skill, ingenuity and intelligence on a mass scale to re-evaluate and re-position many of our institutions for the coming decades and for future generations.

A follow-up to Wikinomics, the best-selling management book of 2007, our new book
Macrowikinomics offers nothing less than a game plan for all of us to fix a broken world.

Drawing on an entirely new set of original research conducted with countless collaborators in fields such as healthcare, science, education, energy, government and the media, we tell the stories of some of the world’s most dynamic innovators, from a global citizen’s movement working to reverse the tide of disruptive climate change to for-profit startups that are turning industries ranging from music to transportation on their head.

We argue that collaborative innovation is not only transforming our economy but all
of society and its many institutions. Now the onus is now on each of us to lead the
transformation in our households, communities and workplaces. After all, the potential for new models of collaboration does not end with the production of software, media, entertainment and culture. Why not open source government, education, science, the production of energy, and even health care?

As this book shows, these are not idle fantasies, but real opportunities that the new world of wikinomics makes possible.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

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Privacy worries continue to grow

But a new poll that shows just how little Grandma and Grandpa know about it must be giving the new law’s supporters a serious case of heartburn.

That’s because seniors are not just a key voting bloc in the upcoming mid-term elections, but a group that’s been showered with some sweet upfront benefits — like $250 checks as a downpayment to close the notorious Medicare drug benefit “doughnut hole.”

Read the full article on NPR’s Health Blog.

The panel of seven judges must now select six books to go into a final shortlist. The winner is the book deemed the “most compelling and enjoyable”. This year, the winning writer will receive £30,000, while the prize money for other finalists has doubled from £5,000 to £10,000.

Wikinomics was short-listed for the Book of the Year Award in 2007.

Other books in the running this year include The Big Short, Too Big to Fail, All the Devils Are Here, and How Markets Fail.

Now in its sixth year, the Business Book of the Year Award is a feature of the business and publishing calendars. This year’s awards ceremony and dinner – attended by top names from the worlds of finance, economics, business, media and publishing – will take place in New York on October 27, 2010.

The judging panel this year includes: Jorma Ollila, chairman of Nokia and Royal Dutch Shell; Shriti Vadera, former UK government minister and adviser to South Korea’s G20 presidency; Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times; Helen Alexander, president of the CBI, the UK business association; Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School; and former European commissioner Mario Monti, president of Milan’s Bocconi University and the Bruegel think-tank. Last year’s winner, Liaquat Ahamed, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his book Lords of Finance, has also joined the panel.

The Smart Swarm details many lessons to be learned from nature, such as the behavior of ant colonies, which have inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes.  Termites can help us find climate-control solutions, and schools of fish showed the U.S. military how to model a team of robots.

When it comes to organizing ourselves in society, we often default to traditional hierarchies.  This model has worked well as a way of organizing work, establishing authority, deploying resources, allocating tasks, defining relationships, and enabling organizations to operate.  Whether the ancient slave empires or Greece, Rome, China, and the Americas; the feudal kingdoms that later covered the planet; the corporation of industrial capitalism; or the bureaucracies of Soviet style communism, hierarchies have been with us since the dawn of human history.

Even the management literature today that advocates empowerment, teams, and networking takes the command-and-control method as a premise:  Every person in an organization is subordinate to someone else. Hierarchies also define the relationships between companies.  Every company is positioned in a supply chain whose subordinate companies it controls and who is in turn beholden to its clients or customers whom it serves.  In the old model of economic development, worker bees are to be supervised in their honey production.

The basic concept is here to stay, but traditional hierarchies have growing limitations.  Over 20 years ago Peter Drucker described managers as “relays—human boosters for the faint, unfocused signals that pass for information in the traditional, pre-information organization.” Communication from the bottom up is often limited, except through formal labor-management relations.  Hierarchies are  typically bureaucratic and employees lack motivation. Increasingly they are insufficient as a way or organizing for the fast-paced economy where human capital needs to be unleashed for innovation, value creation, and customer relationships.

Then along comes the Internet, a communications medium that radically drops transaction and collaboration costs.  Work can be organized on new project models, where the genius of human capital can be unleashed from its old command-and-control constraints. Employees can forge their own self-organized interconnections and form cross-functional teams capable of interacting as a global, real-time workforce. Loosening organizational hierarchies and giving more power to employees can lead to faster innovation, lower cost structures, greater agility, improved responsiveness to customers, and more authenticity and respect in the marketplace.

Where does this lead us? Marshall McLuhan, now the patron saint of Wired magazine and former cameo star of Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning Annie Hall, drove the idea that media revolutions define the shape of human experience into the global consciousness. Indeed, he can be credited with the modern materialistic (as opposed to the ancient religious) concept of global consciousness. In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, he described the concept:

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.

The Smart Swarm is full of practical guidelines about what nature can tell us about how to build better human organizations.

This is a growing ecosystem supporting U.S. middle-class labor as well as capacity to generate emissions-free electricity. “For wind turbines, which have large components like towers, nacelles and blades,” according an American Wind Energy Association, or AWEA, spokesperson, “transportation is a big part of the cost.”

Read the full article in Wired.

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Cognitive surpluses and deficits

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Climate activists spoofed on Twitter

The UN’s official report called for more rigorous conflict-of-interest rules; wider representation of dissenting views among practicing climate scientists in its final reports; and a limit on the number of reports scientists can take a lead role in producing. But what caught my attention was the emphasis on improving transparency in climate change research, something we addressed not once but twice in the soon to be released Macrowikinomics.

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Can wikinomics help rescue the IPCC?

Today, 20 per cent of the power generated in Denmark comes from wind. Green energy technology and services account for 12% of national exports. And while North American carbon emissions have risen by around 30 per cent since 1990, Denmark’s emissions are actually lower than they were two decades ago.

In our new book Macrowikinomics, Don Tapscott and I cite Denmark as a leading example of how the citizens, government and private enterprise can collaborate to drive green energy innovation. I think we got it mostly right, but energy analyst Jeff Rubin has a new post today that reveals details that alter the overall picture somewhat. . .

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Does the green state of Denmark really show the way forward?

A little over a year ago Mark C. Taylor caused fury in academia with his pronouncement that graduate education today “is the Detroit of higher learning.” “Most graduate programs in American universities,” he argued, “produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”

More recently, the Economist suggested that America’s universities could do the way of its car companies, citing high drop-out rates, bloated administrations and soaring costs as leading indicators of decline. ”The most plausible explanation [for the apparent decline]” it claims, “is that professors are not particularly interested in students’ welfare. Promotion and tenure depend on published research, not good teaching. Professors strike an implicit bargain with their students: we will give you light workloads and inflated grades so long as you leave us alone to do our research.”

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American universities: the Detroit of higher learning?

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Mass collaboration to improve climate data — a new frontier in citizen science