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http://www.we-magazine.net
“we” will, “we” will rock you! We dedicated we to the empowerment of many given to us by the internet.
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Editor in chief: Ulrike Reinhard Art Director: Bea Gschwend www.we-magazine.net Business development: Ulrike Reinhard Associates: Steffen Bueffel, Bea Gschwend, Ulrike Reinhard Translation we_end: Paul Morland, Berlin Translation Digital Natives: Edward Bradburn Editor: The Fast Learning Organization: Paul Morland, Berlin Editor: Creative Commons and Global Voices Online: Sebastian Hirsch, Schwedt Proofreader: Bernhard Angerer Contact: whois verlag, Faehrweg , Neckarhausen phone: + fax + mail: we@we-magazine.net Frequency: four magazines per year Print-on-Demand: www.lulu.com Photos: by Fotolia + Bea Gschwend The we_magazine is licenced under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike . Germany http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/./de/
http://www.we-magazine.net
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we’s we like: Homeless World Cup we_files
(Ulrike Reinhard)
(Bea Gschwend)
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(Bea Gschwend / Ulrike Reinhard)
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content Ten Futures
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(Stephen Downes)
Volume
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Towards a New Enlightenment and the Tasks of a Natural Religion (Stuart Kauffman)
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We care – Corporate Social Responsibility
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(Line Hadsbjerg)
The World is Talking. we is Listening! Global Voices Online (Interview with Ethan Zuckerman)
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You Don’t Have to Ask we for Permission! Creative Commons (Interview with Joichi Ito)
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We The Media
(Interview with Dan Gillmor)
From Youtube to wetube We are Hiring Indians Playing for Change
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(Draft by Henry Jenkins)
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(Sugata Mitra)
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(Jeff Cobb)
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The Fast Learning Organization – Enterprise 2.0 (Interview with Willms Buhse / Soeren Stamer)
content We Create – Costumization and Beyond
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Volume
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(Dennis Hilgers / Frank T. Piller )
Digtal Natives
(Jonathan Imme)
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We Distribute, Shape and Share Information, Knowledge and Cultures (Régine Debatty interviewing Platoniq)
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we_on lulu.com
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we_end
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(Ulrike Reinhard)
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> we observes and leads the way into a partcipatory future. > we means emergent net culture. > we is positively disruptive. > we is an attitude. > we means sharing. > we means collaboration. > we believes in collective intelligence. > we means holistic and network thinking. > we is smart because of the network of “Yous” WE is more than you & I. > we means responsibility. > we doesn’t mean control. > we means a real change in power. > we doesn’t mean copyright but creative commons. > we is diversity and harmony. > we means partnership. > we connects people, ideas and thoughts around the globe. > we is authentic, humane, creative. > we believes in the freedom of speech and ideas. > we means openness and transparency. > we points to potential uses of social media. > we detects trends. > we reflects and discusses the experiences, related to social media. > we describes the transformative nature of social media in economy, society and culture. > we is open to authors around the globe. > we engages into the current and future developments driven by social media. > we embraces cultural diversity. > we reflects and discusses the experiences, related to social media. > we describes the transformative nature of social media in economy, society and culture. > we is open to authors around the globe.
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we’s we like
Homeless World Cup – we talk football! – Author: Ulrike Reinhard / www.homelessworldcup.org
What is the Homeless World Cup? The Homeless World Cup is an international football (soccer) tournament, where teams made up entirely of homeless people compete. The event is held annually and, as of , is in its sixth year. Why have a Homeless World Cup? There are one billion homeless people in our world today. In the USA there are . million homeless people. Here each person costs society around $, a year to be homeless. It costs $, per year for one place in an emergency shelter in New York. The Homeless World Cup exists to end this so we all have a home, a basic human need. We use football as a trigger to inspire and empower people who are homeless to change their own lives. We do this firstly by creating a world-class, annual, international football tournament; and secondly, by inspiring and supporting grass roots football projects working with homeless and socially excluded people all year round. Does it work? The Homeless World Cup is a life changing event for all participants. From Argentina to Australia, South Africa to Portugal,
Cameroon to Brazil, Germany to England homeless people take a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent their country and change their lives forever. % of players go on to find a home, come off drugs and alcohol, get into education, jobs, training, repair relationships with friends and family. True grit spirit and glory of grass roots and international football. Who can play? Players ... > Are male or female and at least years old and > Are or have been homeless at some point after . . , in accordance with the national definition of homelessness or > Make their main living income as street paper vendor or > Are asylum seekers currently without positive asylum status or who were previously asylum seekers but obtained residency status after st December or > Are currently in drug or alcohol rehabilitation and have been homeless at some point in the past two years (post ..) > Have not taken part in previous Homeless World Cup tournaments.
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> Homeless World Cup Melbourne – December nations, players, max. of per team, outfield players, goalkeeper plus substitute players > Founders: Mel Young, Co-founder The Big Issue Scotland, and Harald Schmied, editor of Megaphon, a street paper in Austria.
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We can be individuals only because we are members of groups. David Weinberger
we_files_ > www.we-magazine.net/category/we_files/
The old model is about control. The new model is about openness, transparency and participation. Ulrike Reinhard
we_files_ > www.we-magazine.net/category/we_files/
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We are true ”small pieces“ of the web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing. David Weinberger
we_files_ > www.we-magazine.net/category/we_files/
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we_phrases
We are the champions Queen, Freddie Mercury
What we can do Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. (apabiz)
From YouTube to WeTube Henry Jenkins,
Yes, we can! Barack Obama,
Now we Can Begin Crystal Eastman, socialist feminist,
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The slowest car we’ve ever built
We can work it out
Audi R,
Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney
We Call it Life
We’re for dogs
Competitive Enterprise Institute,
Pedigree TV Commercials
We is me We Clothing,
We are the champions Queen, Freddie Mercury
We are the World Goddy Leye, videoartist – Kamerun
We can Pediatric Brain Tumor Network
Author: Bea Gschwend and Ulrike Reinhard
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we is looking for bloggers all over the word! What does we mean to you? What does we mean in your city, country, culture? we invites YOU to blog on we-magazine.net Join we by sending an email to: we@we-magazine.net
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get your printed version of we_magazine volume_ simply by typing in we_magazine on lulu.com
November, , Open Space: DNAdigital Location: HomeBase Berlin Digital Natives meeting Top-Management By invitation only.
February, , Launch of we_magazine Vol. Location: HomeBase Berlin – event partner of we_magazine . pm panel discussion . pm launch party
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The global mind will to a large degree be inscrutable. Stephen Downes
We will have full sensory coupling with the virtual world, making the virtual world every bit as ‘real’ to us as the real world. Stephen Downes
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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes is a designer and theorist in the fields of online learning and new media. Born in Montreal, Downes lived and worked across Canada before joining the National Research Council of Canada as a senior researcher in November . Currently based in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the Institute for Information Technology’s E-Learning Research Group, Stephen has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata as well as the emerging fields of weblogs in education and content syndication. Downes is widely accepted as the central authority for online education in the edublogging community. He is also widely accepted as the originator of E-Learning .. Downes was the winner of the Individual Blog award in for his blog OLDaily.
www.downes.ca
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Ten Futures Author: Stephen Downes
Drawing on Richard MacManus’s
Future Web Trends, this is a bit linear, but has the virtue of identifying future trends, not things that are around today.
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The Pragmatic Web Forget about the Semantic Web. Whether or not it ever gets built, you can be sure that we will be complaining about it. Because while the Semantic Web gives us meaning, it doesn’t give us context. It will give us what we can get from an encyclopedia, but not what we can get from phoning up our best buddy. The pragmatic web, by contrast, is all about context. Your tools know who you are, what you’re doing, who you’ve been talking to, what you know, where you want to go, where you are now, and what the weather is like outside. You don’t query them; they carry on an ongoing conversation with you. The pragmatic web is chock-full of information, but none of it is off-topic and none of it is beyond your understanding (and if you need to know more, it will teach you). The pragmatic web isn’t just a web you access, read to and write to, it’s a web that you use every day. .
Global Intelligence While from time to time our computers are going to appear pretty smart, some of them even smarter than we are, they will be dwarfed by the emerging global intelligence or world mind. This won’t merely be the invisible ’hand‘ of the marketplace, this will be the whole body. And it won’t be based on the mere one-dimensional system of valuations of things in terms of capital, it will be composed of multi-dimensional interactions of wide varieties of media, including all of what we call ’media‘ along with money, votes, population movements (aka traffic), utilities (power,water, gas, oil) and resources (minerals, food) and more. The global mind will to a large degree be inscrutable. We won’t know what it is trying to do, what it wants, what it thinks are ’good‘ and ’bad‘, or whether it is even sane and balanced. That won’t stop a slew of populists from claiming to ’know‘ where the global mind is headed (a la evangelists or Marxists) – though of course, except at a very macro level, the destiny of an individual is independent of the destiny of the global mind. The global mind is the sort of thing that raises questions about the meaning of live, the value of ethics, and the nature of knowledge. Our answers to these questions over the next few decades – even as global climate change and wars and natural disasters ravage our populations – will shape the course of society through the next centuries. .
Extended Reality We think of ’reality‘ as being constituted of the physical world and then of ’virtual reality‘ as being the digital world, or as we sometimes say, ’virtual worlds‘. The two worlds are very different in that, well, one world is real and the other is not. ’Extended reality‘ is a digital version of the real world such that the digital version is as real as the real version. What that means, pragmatically speaking, is that if it hurts in the extended world, it hurts. We will have full sensory coupling with the virtual world, making the virtual world every bit as ‘real’ to us as the real world. This reality will not just be a simulation of ’reality‘. Rather, what will emerge as the combination of the two is a kind of ’hyper-reality‘, where objects exist both in the physical world and the digital world (think Spinoza rather than Descartes). The physical world and the virtual world will act as one; eat in the
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’virtual‘ world and your body (such as it is) in the ’real‘ world will be nourished. How could this ever happen? Well, take something like, say, ’money‘. Is it real, or is it virtual? If you spend money, do you give the other person something real or something virtual? Money is a perfect example of something that can exist in both realms. That’s what makes it such a powerful force in today’s society! But if money – which, when you think about it, was tangible, solid gold and therefore the last thing you would think couple become virtual – then what else? Food, say? We will live in an age of biochemical manipulation. Yesterday, we could create synthetic virtual worlds biochemically with drugs – ’take a trip and never leave the farm‘. With sufficient computational power, we can create the worlds directly through interaction with computer systems. But we can also – by manipulation of matter electronically – create the ’fuel‘ that makes continued presence of the body possible. Doing something in the ’virtual world‘ has real-time direct biochemical consequences, some of which are constitutes of energy inputs, which are converted to ’food‘ – or at least, the biochemical consequences of food. .
Mobility We will again in the future become a species of nomads, moving in tribes and herds through society, grazing on energy and information inputs as they become available. This will happen as a result of a convergence of two factors. First, we will no longer be in want. At a certain point in time, sooner than we thing, the technologies we have put in place to ensure the continued uneven distribution of resources (which we then use to extort labour out of deprived populations) will become moot. It will not be possible to maintain wealth technologically; there will be no ’means of production‘ unique to a certain privileged class of people. Hence, we will not need to hoard food and other possessions; we can simply take what we need from the ambient environment. Secondly, we will by then be in the habit of needing much less. Consumer goods – ubiquitous today – will become expensive and impractical in the future. Owing a library of books, for example, will be a ”wealthy man’s folly“ – a lot like keeping a Spanish Galleon in the back yard to support your own personal trade link to China. We will have few possessions, and those mostly as keepsakes or mementos. ’Rooted‘ people will be thought of in the future the way we think of ’nomadic‘ people today – unable, for some social-cultural reason to mesh with the rest of society. .
The Human Grid Human minds will continue to be efficient and effective processing systems, able to assimilate megabytes of information in seconds, intuitively recognize patterns, make decisions, and communicate ideas. Consequently, human contributions to the ’economy‘ (the system of production of material goods for the sustainment of life) will consist primary of providing mental ’inputs‘ to the production engines that actually do the work (much the way we ’drive‘ tractors today, but at a much more complex level). Consequently, organizations will be able to derive value by enabling human minds to cooperate in the coordination or operation of elements of production. By contributing our thoughts and opinions on everything from celebrities to the
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weather to tomorrow’s sports scores, computational systems will be able to derive the algorithms that will process iron ore, grow grain crops, and harvest energy from the wind and the sun. It will be understood by these programmers that pop culture is a metaphor for the instruments of production, and that therefore human cognitive capacity can be mined directly by tracking thoughts and opinions about popular phenomena. The collection of these thoughts and opinions from a network of people, all interacting with each other in an environment that includes entertainment, sports and other pastimes that engage the mind will be called the ’human grid‘. Smart Objects This is discussed in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction a bit, where he describes a hotel that instructs its owners on how it should be built. Objects – even everyday objects – will have a built in capacity for at least a primitive level of intelligence. More importantly, these objects will be connected with other objects. We don’t expect a lot of intelligence from strawberry jam, for example, but we expect it to at least know about what types of bread and peanut butter there are in the house (your current mobile dwelling), to be able to monitor its compliance with your physical systems, to be able to suggest itself as a solution to current needs, to be able to offer relevant instruction, or to at least provide some input to the overall ambient room’s conversation with you. Your use of a product – whether it be strawberry jam, a fishing rod, or an auto-gyro, will have an impact on a whole network of other human and non-human systems. Taking the vehicle out for a spin, for example, will prompt a host of services to prepare themselves for your eventual arrival (and, indeed, you might not be going back). When you land – wherever that happens to be – your personal needs will already be in place (including any artifacts that you may have left behind). Consume a bit of strawberry jam and the global production system will conspire to manufacture that much more (assuming, of course, that it believes you will live to consume it and will have the inclination to do so). .
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Holoselves No person can be in two places at once, of course, but one’s avatar can travel one place while you travel to another, so when it comes time for that meeting in Colorado, you just shift your sensory input matrix to the holoself sitting down at the desk in Denver. Time for a lunch-time walk, so you transfer to the next holoself, which has been waiting patiently (like a book on the shelf) for you to pick it up in the Amazon eco-reserve. In the evening (after a holoself meeting in Zurich) you settle in with your ’real‘ self in Cairo for a nice evening meal and a show at the Pyramids. Holoselves are, for all intents and purposes, artificial humans – you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference, and when they’re legally occupied by a human, have all the rights and responsibilities of a human. People will naturally prefer to own their own dedicated holoselves, but it will be possible to share holoselves (the physical structure adapts to suit the host intelligence). Actual cognition (sensation, reflection, and the like) takes place partially in the ’real‘ brain, partially in the ’holo‘ brain (after a certain point the distinction between ’real‘ and ’holo‘ brains becomes more philosophical than practical – asking ”Am I the
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same person in Cairo as I am in Denver“ is pretty much the same as asking ”Am I the same person tomorrow as I am today?“ The neat thing about holoselves is that they need not be human; the need just enough resident intelligence to input and process (coherently) perceptions and to communicate with other (holo and non-holo) instances of the controlling intelligences. This will lead to numerous holo-fads, like holo-birds, holo-fish, and more. .
Living Art When sentential utterances (words and sentences) are abandoned as a means of communication, it will become more natural to convey thoughts and information in multi-modal multi-sensory artifacts. We are beginning to see these even today with things like lolcats and YouTube videos. As our powers of expression (and the tools that helps us) become more sophisticated, we will create complex multi-faced forms of expression, the most advanced of which will (almost?) qualify as ’life‘ and will most certainly quality as ’art‘. Consider, just to gain an idea of this, how one wizard might express a thought to another in Harry Potter. Certainly the wizard would not write a note. Rather, the wizard would conjure an object of some sort – like a message owl, say. But the artifact will not ’carry‘ the message; the artifact will embody the message. On receipt of the of the ’message owl‘ the person would not merely read or be told, but rather, would interact with the owl – have a conversation with it – such that the subtleties and nuances of the message are expressed in a way that the recipient can understand them. We think of communications today as means of carrying ’information‘. This function will not cease in the future - we’ll still need to say ”My name is Johnny“ or ”I have an apple“ to people in the future. But we’ll say it in such a way that everything the recipient could want to know – the type of apple, the genetic history of the apple, the provenance of this particular apple, my preferences and opinions, stated and implied about apples, the current market value of apples – will also be contained in the message, not necessary (and not typically) in sentences, but through a range of conventional multimedia iconology (kind of like giving somebody a white rose to say ”let’s be friends“ and a red rose to say ”let’s be more“). We will, of course, also have ’living graffiti‘ – buts of badly created living art that clutter city streets and cling to walls – they’ll have to be flushed with high-powered steam hoses into the organic recycling facility. And we’ll still have spam – but at least when the message is delivered, you’ll be able to eat it. .
Global (Non-)Government This is kind of an obvious one, but it should be clear that we will not have ’nations‘ in any geography-based sense of the term in the future. This will become necessary due to the clamour of refugees trying to get to the highly developed regions of central Asia and Africa from their economically backward homes in North America and Europe. Many of these will be brought over by formally American and European corporations, which will relocate to the centre of their major markets in India, the Congo and China. In any case, the concept of government will have been radically redefined by that time in any case. Government will be no longer of geographical region but rather of sectors. We see
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a good example of this in its infancy in standards development. Standards are not managed by national governments; they are rather managed by councils with (interested) representatives from around the world. More and more, sector councils will govern affairs. Fisheries, for example, having recovered from the panic of the early s, will have been removed forever from national control. Energy production on the global grid will have followed. Many other industries – aviation, telecommunication, food production, finance – are already being governed in this way. The big change will happen during the mass-democratization events that (I expect) will take place in the middle of the st century. The sector councils will be badly managed by the corporate oligarchy that created them – they will act against the best interests of people (though it will take a disaster greater than Bhopal to demonstrate that to people) and will serve to preserve the privilege and wealth of a few. This, combined with the world wide ’free movement‘ – arguing that people, as well as capital and trade goods, should be able to move freely – will cause a crisis and an economic collapse. Governments will move militarily against corporations, which will agree to a power-sharing structure. For the most part, after that, government will disappear from the lives of people. There won’t be elections or anything like that; rather, people will participate directly in the management of sectors in which they are involved. Because people will have (what we today call) guaranteed incomes (but which
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amounts to free necessities of life) it will not be possible to coerce people in managerial hierarchies, and so corporate governance will be by networked decisions – each person will create creatively and ’pseudo-entities‘ composed of temporary collections of simultaneous inputs will achieve corporate outputs. That’s how the first mission to Mars will be managed. .
Cyborgs This is a pretty easy one. The only thing preventing us from merging humans and machines today is that we cannot yet build machines at the scale and complexity required for human-machine interaction. Human inputs operate at the microscopic level, and require complex interactions. Even something so clumsy as replacing an organ requires that we grow – rather than make (though there are some few exceptions, like the artificial heart) – the organ, and then deal with interactions we couldn’t design for with anti-rejection drugs. But it should be evident that with biocomputing and nanotechnology we will be able to build, say, neural nets that can be installed alongside our existing cerebellum and can take over functionality as the original equipment wears out. Most likely, the initial successes of cyborg technology will be in artificial perception. Replacing eyes, ears and other sense organs will succeed because base mechanical devices will be able to interface (much like a computer peripherals) with sensory input layers. Parts of these will also be created; we already have an artificial hippocampus.
There will, of course, be a large-scale industry in the psychology of cyborgs. Can a person be a ship and not become insane? How do we keep such a person occupied? Several of the technologies outlined above – like holoselves, for example, will be crucial. Metaphor will become reality – and it will become a major ethical issue – and a human right – to know one’s actual situation.
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We are at a hinge of global history and need all we can muster to manage safe passage. Stuart A. Kaufman
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Stuart A. Kaufman Originally a medical doctor, Kauffman is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, and a seminal member and an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Also a MacArthur Fellow and a Trotter Prize winner, Kauffman has published three major books, among them is At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (), which the Oxford University Press says ”weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science – and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.“
http://reinventingthesacred.ning.com
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Towards a
New Enlightenment and the Tasks of a Natural Religion Author: Stuart Kauffman
We are at a hinge of global history and need all we can muster to manage safe passage. A global civilization of some form, perhaps homogeneous, perhaps ever diverse, is emerging, driven by globalization of our economy and communications. We face global warming, peak oil with the potentials of hunger and resource wars. Our diverse civilizations are being crushed together. In response there is, by some, a retreat into cultural and religious fundamentalisms, often hostile. Ways of life, some with roots thousands of years old, hang in the balance. To guide ourselves, we need a shared sense of the sacred, a global ethic beyond love of family and friend, a sense of fairness, and in much of the first world a faith in democracy and free markets. Much of the first world is commoditized. We need new values in which we can find our way to a sustainable economy with meaningful work for us all that does not despoil the planet. We need whatever transitions in population size and energy resources are needed to balance the planet. The total system we are living in and creating is so complex none can know what the consequences of our choices may be, yet we must act wisely as best we can.
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I believe that part of what we need is a new “world view”, scientific and more. It calls for a new enlightenment, and a natural religion that can create a safe shared sacred space for all of us across our ancient traditions and modern secularism. It invites us to a global ethic that can change our values as part of facing the challenges above. In the West, and now much of the first world, we remain dominated, knowing it or not, by a scientific world view called reductionism. This view was most simply stated by French mathematician Simon LaPlace in the early th Century. He imagined a vast intelligence. Given the positions, velocities and masses of all the particles in the universe, this ’demon‘ could, using Newton’s laws, calculate the entire future and, because Newton’s laws are time reversible, the entire past of the universe. This is a stunning view. This reductionism has three deep features. First, it is deterministic because Newton’s laws are deterministic. With the advent of Quantum Mechanics a century later and the Copenhagen interpretation, this determinism has weakened. Second, and profoundly, this view holds that all that happens in the universe is describable by natural laws, such as Newton’s, Einstein’s, Schrodinger’s. I will sharply challenge this view. If I am right in what I say, it may be the deepest challenge to Western science since this view was formulated by Descartes, Galileo, and Newton. If I am right, it changes everything. I may not be, however. The third aspect of the reductionism of LaPlace is that it is “nothing but” determinism, in which all that is real in the universe are particles in motion. Today we would include physical fields. Then organisms, values, agency, meaning, doing, a couple in love walking the banks of the Seine, are all nothing but particles in motion and not ”ontologically“ real in their own right. My recent book, Reinventing the Sacred, challenges this view. First, even many physicists, including Novel Laureates Philip Anderson in ”More is Different“ in Science , and Robert Laughlin in ”A Different Universe“, challenge the adequacy of reductionism even in physics. In its place is an ”emergence“ that cannot be reduced to particle physics. Laughlin notes that a single iron atom is not rigid, but an iron bar is rigid, an emergent property he says. And he points to ”organizational“ laws that are not reducible to physics. An example of an organization law is my own theory of the origin of molecular self reproducing systems by the ”spontaneous“ emergence of a set of molecules that catalyze, or speed up, the very reactions by which those molecules are formed. This is experimentally verified for simple systems. The theory is not reducible to physics. It is an organizational theory about properties of complex chemical reaction networks, largely independent of the details of the chemistry. I am with my physicist colleagues as a biologist. While the physicist might, in principle, explain the properties of the human heart as it exists, he/she cannot deduce or simulate and confirm the coming into existence of a complex biological organ such as a heart in the evolution of the universe and biosphere. I discuss this in detail in Reinventing the Sacred. Thus, hearts are ontologically real, and not reducible to physics. So too are a couple in love. Beyond life, agency has arisen in the universe. We humans are agents. We act and do. We value. Only happenings occur in physics. Yet we modify the universe on our own behalf. So do bacteria. I believe a simplest molecular ”autonomous agent“ able to act on its own behalf is
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an open thermodynamic system capable of self reproduction and of doing a thermodynamic work cycle. Again this is in ”Reinventing“. With agency comes values, doing, and meaning. The most startling claim of this new book is that the Western scientific belief that all that occurs in the universe is describable by natural law appears to be false, challenging years of Western intellectual history. I need to explain Darwinian adaptations and preadaptations, or exaptaions using Stephen Jay Gould’s term. If we asked Darwin the function of the human heart, he would say it is to pump blood. But it makes heart sounds and wiggles water in the pericardial sac. These are not the functions of the heart, Darwin would say, and add that the heart was selected, so exists in the universe as a complex organ, because it pumps blood. Now preadaptations and their startling implications: Darwin’s idea was that a property of an organ or organism, of no selective use in the current environment, might be of selective value in a different environment, so be selected and a new function would come to exist in the biosphere. I will give one example. Some fish have swim bladders, sacs partially filled with air and water, that adjusts neutral buoyancy in the water column. Paleontologists believe that swim bladders arose as Darwinian preadaptations from fish with lungs, or lung fish. Water entered some of these lungs. But now there existed a sac with water and air in it. It was poised, preadapted by chance, no design, to function as a swim bladder. So swim bladders evolved by further natural selection. Now: Did a new function come to exist in the biosphere, neutral buoyancy in the water column? Yes. Did it have consequences for the further evolution of the biosphere? Yes, new species, new molecules.
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Now I come to the big question: Do we think that we could say, ahead of time, all possible Darwinian preadaptations for all organisms alive now, or even humans? We all seem to agree that we cannot do so. I’ve asked thousands. Two of the reasons it seems impossible to prestate such preadaptations are these: How would we prespecify all possible selective environments? And how would we prespecify features of one or more than one organism that might come to be preadaptations. It seems impossible.
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If correct, it seems that this has massive consequences. You see, we cannot do what Newton said, say for a billiard table and balls: state the variables, the balls, the laws among them, the initial positions and velocities of the balls, the boundary conditions given by the edges of the table, compute the forward trajectory of the balls. We cannot do so for the biosphere because we do not know before hand that swim bladders, livers, lungs, will arise and alter the subsequent trajectory of the biosphere. We do not know the variables beforehand. The same is true for economic and cultural evolution! But in turn, this means that there seems to be no natural law for the evolution of swim bladders! A natural law is, most think, a compact description of the regularities of a process. Can we have a law for the emergence of swim bladders? No, we cannot even prestate their possibility, let alone have a law. If all this is true, it appears to shatter our Western scientific world view that all that unfolds in the universe is describable by natural law. No. In its place is a ceaseless creativity we cannot know or state beforehand. I wish to call this natural creativity a fully natural God. With Gordon Kaufman, no relative and Harvard theologian, who has been writing about God as creativity for over a decade, I want to distinguish between the Creator Agent God and the creativity of that God. I say at this stage in the evolution of our cultures we no longer need the Creator Agent God. We need the creativity. And we have that natural creativity! It gave rise to the biosphere, us, our economy, cultures, and perhaps the abiotic universe as well. One of the reason, I think, that we have always sought God or gods, beyond hope for good hunting or victory in battle, has been our awe at what the natural creativity of the universe has given us. Is it more awesome that an Abrahamic God created all this is six days or that it all arose, in its vast intricacy, all on its own? The latter is so stunning that it is God enough for me, and for many. There appear to be three theological stances towards this creativity. We can hold to a theistic God who created all, including this creativity. We can see in this creativity in nature the active hand of an Agent God. Or we can, as I hold, see the natural creativity, partially beyond natural law, as awesome on its own: God as the natural creativity in the universe. From this we are invited to a sense of the sacred: All of life and the planet are this God’s work. And we are not made in this God’s image, we too are this God. From this sense of the sacred, we are invited towards a global ethic that extends profound respect for all of life and the planet. This global ethic demands acceptance of one another, an empathic embrace, even while we kill one another so readily. The implications point to the need for a new enlightenment and a natural religion. What are the immediate human implications? If we truly cannot know what will happen, then
reason, the highest human virtue of the first Enlightenment, is insufficient to live our lives forward into Gordon Kaufman’s “Mystery”. But we do live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. But how? We need reason, emotion, intuition, our entire biosocial selves. But in turn this means that we must reunite our full humanity. Western culture has certainly not undertaken this task. This task becomes part of a global task, for in it is Plato’s claim that we live for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We create these as well. If the dream of the final reductionist theory is a dream, if we live in a partially lawful, but also emergent and partially lawless universe, we must profoundly rethink our world and our being in it. Therefore, I say, we need a new enlightenment, and need it in a global discussion. But we need to house this cultural unfolding in institutions that include but is not limited to religion. Religion, more than most human institutions, embraces our full humanity in the richness of traditions thousands of years old. How can we co-evolve these traditions, keeping what is relevant now, respecting the diversity of our cultures, finding a sharable safe sacred space in the natural creativity of our universe? The tasks of a natural religion include not only reintegrating our full humanity – which will reach across religion, science, law, art, politics – it involves taking responsibility for our own sense of the sacred, and finding the global ethic we need. A natural religion, across all our religions, can help shape and shepherd the emerging global civilization. We are in the heroic stages of this emerging global civilization. It is up to us to shape its transnational mythic structure. The globe, its creatures, and our humanity are at stake.
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We can help create a win-win-situation when it comes to Corporate Social Respondibility that really makes a difference. Line Hadsbjerg
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Line Hadsbjerg Line Hadsbjerg is born in Denmark but raised in Kenya and South Africa. She studied Anthropology and English at the University of Cape Town, and went on to complete her Masters in International Development Studies in the UK. She has worked as a volunteer for Amnesty International in South Africa and India, and for the Red Cross in France. Her professional career has been primarily in the EU capital Brussels, where she worked in the Cabinet of Poul Nielson, Commissioner for humanitarian and development aid and later worked for a consultancy dealing with European affairs. Line then changed life-course, left Brussels and started a travel and destination management company in South Africa and Spain, before returning to her passion – development – and is part of the founding team and fulltime committed to betterplace.
www.betterplace.org
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We care:
Corporate Social
Author: Line Hadsbjerg
What is the company you work for doing for your life and the society you are living in?
Any ideas?
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Responsibility This is a question that many corporations are facing by their staff. It is no longer the green activists and lobbyists who demand that corporations tow the line in terms of fulfilling their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but companies are facing increasing internal pressure from employees who no longer feel satisfied with a monthly bonus. They want to know what the company is doing for society at large, and whether their work contributes to fulfilling their personal and moral expectations.
In the past, CSR was about handing over a huge check to a recognized charity at the yearly Christmas party, where clients and shareholders applauded the generosity, the Board of Directors was given a clean slate from which irresponsible actions of the past year were erased, and the marketing department used the occasion as a leverage for the next years PR campaign. But it did not take long for the press and green activists to pick up on the trend and start criticizing companies for ”greenwashing“ their CSR activities by using isolated initiatives to trumpet their ”greening up“ efforts, while disregarding gas house emissions, environmental impact and labour standards. We live in an age of instantaneous digital media communications, where perceptions of reality (whether justified or misguided) reach the general public instantaneously. It is important that ”greenwashing“ does not provoke general public cynicism towards industry’s very important role in alleviating poverty and environmental degradation. Our growing, global interconnectedness via the internet is a great opportunity, both for corporations, their employees and the public. ”WE“ can make a difference. ”WE“ can change the world to the better. Understandably, corporate giving is deeply linked to communication. The cynics will say that CSR initiatives are nothing more than misleading presentations, like the pretty green flower logo outside BP petrol stations. Milton Friedman, grandfather of monetarism, and his famous ’s article in The New York Times Magazine, ”The Social Responsibility of Business is to increase Profits“, wrote that ‘the one and only social responsibility of business, is to increase profits for shareholders’.
The question is: Is that such a bad thing? A good example is food companies, who start introducing recognizable brands such as organically grown vegetables, ”fair trade“ coffee, dolphin friendly tuna. Many of these corporations are responding to consumer demand of environmentally friendly products, there is profit to be made and thus it seems strategically reasonable to adapt the communication of their brand accordingly. Companies are learning they can increase profits as a result of their CSR efforts, not despite of them. The growing number of CSR consultancies, job listings for CSR experts, and websites listing green and ethically run corporations is testimony to the growing trend towards incorporating environmentally and socially sustainable practices into business models. You need only to visit the website of almost any recognized corporation, and there is reference to the company’s CSR initiatives and commitment to the environment and society. One could argue that corporations are not experts in the field, and at times their initiatives do more harm than good. However, industry has an important and powerful role to play, and through optimizing modern day technology, great strides can be taken to ensure environmental and social sustainability.
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Using the internet and digital media to communicate CSR efforts is becoming an increasingly powerful tool. Access to information is not only expected, it is regarded as a public right to know what companies are doing and how they earn and spend their money. Transparency is vital – customers and employees ask questions, demand answers, and public opinion can make or break the reputation of corporations. The power of ”WE“ is ever growing and puts pressure on companies and communication strategist to cut to the chase and be more open than they are used to in traditional PR. Corporations are obliged to be increasingly transparent, and company decisions need to be effectively communicated. A good example of how corporations can make an active contribution to their social and environmental surroundings, while simultaneously encouraging their employees, customers and stakeholders to be actively involved, is betterplace. A new webbased donation platform. betterplace.org along with other internet platforms such as Facebook and Kiva are using the internet to improve the plight of the poor. It connects those who want to give with those in need of receiving. Now the lives of school children in a village by Lake Naivasha in Kenya, can be followed and supported by individuals sitting on their couch at home anywhere in the world. Projects and their progress can be followed online, users can connect with other donors who support the same projects, and most importantly, supporters can receive direct feedback and dialogue from the project managers. In the case of betterplace, this technical function has been optimized for corporations. It is no longer about handing over a big cheque, but rather actively engaging employees, clients and consumers on all levels in deciding on where and how money should be spent, thereby enabling each individual to fulfill their social responsibility. Engaging employees in their company’s CSR initiatives is being taken a step further. Instead of rewarding top salesman with luxury travel destinations, sustainable tourism encourages corporation to pull up their sleeves and get their hands dirty by visiting the projects where development work is being done on the ground as an extension to their CSR practices. Once again, the internet, modern technology and the social power of ”WE“ make it possible for these trips to be followed by the rest of the team in the office through daily updates, video footage and feedback, bringing home the reality of the CSR initiatives. Taking CSR from the digital to the real world is the next step in dissolving boundaries and supporting grassroots initiatives.
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Optimising CSR for the future CSR it is on the up trend. But where to from here? And how do we best optimize the role of corporations in alleviating world poverty? Its place in corporate budgets is growing, and employees have an increasing interest in how the company they work for contributes to society at large. But what role will CSR play in corporate life in the future? Employees want to be involved in the decision making process, but are they also willing to be active givers? Present CSR efforts only fulfill a margin of the full potential that corporations have to make a real and significant impact on society. It is not only about distributing tax deductible profits to good causes, real change lies in the hands of the masses – the general public – and corporations could act as the lever to realize their giving potential. For example, millions could be raised through standardizing payroll giving so that, like taxes, a certain percentage of each salary is redirected towards a worthy cause. This would undoubtedly trigger greater enthusiasm and interest from employees, as it is their money, and they want to be in a position to decide where it is spent. This will also help make corporations more accountable as to who they support and why. It is often the case that people need easy access to giving. A good example that helps to lower the hurdles is ”round-ups“ – where the cents are rounded up to the next Euro, Dollar or whatever currency. A vast majority of the public are happy to see their remaining cents being rounded-up to a good cause, instead of having copper coins weighing down their wallets. Multiply these cents across thousands, even millions of people, and there is great opportunity to raise real funds from average people. That also is the power of ”WE“. This strategy can easily be incorporated by large supermarket chains and department stores, thereby actively engaging their customers to help make a big difference with small change.
Challenges & Solutions The challenge, as always, is who manages these funds. There is no need to delve into the past failures of development aid and misguided NGO’s to know that
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mismanagement often does more harm than good. However, once again the internet, and the transparency it offers can play a big role in ensuring communication lines and money flow are transparent and made public. Here the collective social network of ”WE“ can help to monitor, discuss and add to the public discourse and help corporations to make a change that their costumers and the public in general will value. ”WE“ can help create a win-win-situation when it comes to CSR that really makes a difference. Amongst the lessons that have been learned from past failures, is that solutions to poverty need to come from within, rather than a pile of aid given to the poor together with a string of conditions attached. Development needs to be both a top-down and bottom-up initiative. In line with more traditional development strategy, NGO’s need to fall in line with the national top-down development strategy, so that all parties work for common causes, and thereby have a greater impact. However, the greatest opportunity lies with bottom-up, grassroots initiatives – and this is where the role of the internet and our growing global network of WE can offer innovative solutions to development. Good examples of supporting grassroots initiatives have been on highly successful microfinance internet platforms such as Kiva, inspired by Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, which offered microfinance loans to the poor. Kiva is a good example of the ”average Joe“ uses the internet to lend a helping hand to another individual in another continent. Once again, it is about engaging people. Opening the channels of communication so as to access the lives of people and communities that in the past were either too geographically remote or only existed on the TV screens.
Giving needs to be made easy, not only for corporations but also for their employees and customers. Most people want to give and make a difference, but time is money, and so goodwill needs to be optimized in the most efficient possible way. Digital media and the internet are the key to lowering that hurdle, making information fast and accessible, and enabling corporations to communicate and facilitate their CSR initiatives.
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Growing the global village and the global social network It all boils down to identity. Identity of corporations, organisations and most importantly of individuals. And in addition to that an collective identity of WE that helps the invidiual as well as corporations to understand that the web connects us, our actions and even emotions. Communicating who we are in todays global society is becoming increasingly more important. The strength of a company is its people, and if each individual feels that they can identify with the corporation that they work for, and feel that their contribution has a lasting impact on society as a whole, it not only encourages loyalty but has a far greater social and environmental as well as societal impact. WE can change the world!
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In a world where economics is global, where politics is global, where security issues are global, it’s very important that I understand what people in China are thinking, what people in the Middle East are thinking, what people in Africa are thinking.
I think one of the interesting things that’s happening at this moment in time is that we have the ability to be part of many different tribes at the same time.
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman
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Ethan Zuckerman Ethan Zuckerman was a co-founder of Tripod.com, a web hosting enterprise, and later founder of Geekcorps. He currently serves as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His work at the Berkman Center has included research into global media attention, and the co-founding of Global Voices Online in collaboration with Rebecca MacKinnon. For some years he was also a contributing writer for Worldchanging.com, where he served as president of the board of directors. In January , he joined the inaugural Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.
www.ethanzuckerman.com
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The World is Talking. we is Listening!
Global Voices Online Interview with Ethan Zuckerman
we: I just told you about our new magazine, the we_magazine. Has your understanding of We changed since the digital media arised? Ethan Zuckerman: Well, I guess I would say that there is both the potential and the real change. I think one of the things that’s most exciting about the Internet revolution is this idea that we might be connected to people all over the world. And that we might expand to include the one billion people who are online now, the two billion people who’ll be online in about five years and eventually the + billion people all over the world. The truth is that it’s much harder than that; and that actually we haven’t done very well at connecting. The fact that we have digital networks that tie us all together doesn’t mean that we actually pay attention to one another and it doesn’t mean that we actually have dialogue with one another. And the truth is, I think if you look at the last – years of development of the commercial Internet, we’ve actually done a very very poor job of finding people who come from very different backgrounds than we do. I think in many ways, what the Internet has helped us is to find people who you have got a great deal of common ground with. The Internet has been very very powerful for people who have esoteric interests, specialized interests, who find friends in other parts of the world who have that common ground with them. Where we’ve had much less success is using the Internet as a place of dialogue between people who are coming from very very different background and who might have very different opinions.
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we: So what do we need to do to get this conversation started? Ethan Zuckerman: Well, I think the first thing we have to do is recognize that the conversation has to happen. I think one of the problems we have is a lot of the tools that we are building on the Internet are very good at similarity. So for instance, what has become very popular in recent years are sort of recommendation engines that try to find content based on other content that you’ve liked. So you can think about something like Reddit or Digg as engines that are very powerful for this. But these engines, if you are not careful, end up giving you recommendations from the same group of people all the time. I think once you’ve recognized that one of the dangers of the Internet is that you keep hearing from similar people over and over and over again, then you can try to take steps to change who you are listening to and paying attention to. Projects like the one that I have been running for the last three years or so, Global Voices, try to give you access to voices that you unlikely hear. Most people in North America don’t hear many voices coming out of China. We hear a lot about China. But we don’t hear a lot of Chinese voices. So by taking people in China who are writing online, translating that content into English and putting in online, we are giving you an opportunity to hear some different voices. But there is a real problem here. Less and less it’s not a supply problem anymore, it’s a demand problem. Historically, content from people in other countries was in very short supply. You had to get it through television news. You had to wait for the local newspaper to publish it. Now we have more than a hundred million people publishing online on a daily basis. The question is: Do you pay attention to it? And it becomes a very personal challenge. Who do you want to be part of that ”We“ that you’re talking about? If you want ”We“ to be people who share the same sentiments as you, share the same background as you, the Internet makes that very easy right now. If you want that ”We“ to be broader, the Internet makes that possible but you have to take the effort to broaden the ”We“. we: Global Voices – what do you think was the main driver that it became such a success.. Ethan Zuckerman: Well, I wish I’d shared your sentiment that Global Voices was a big success. I think at this point, it’s a very modest success. I think the ways in which it’s been successful largely have to do with people in different parts of the world feeling frustrated that they aren’t heard by a global audience. And one of the best ways to respond to this frustration is to say: Well, I’m sorry that people are not paying enough attention to my issues, let me pay attention to their issues. And I think there are a lot of people within the Global Voices community who realize this is interesting, here is a chance for people to find out about Madagascar. And now they from Madagascar get interest in finding out about China, in finding out about Columbia. And I think we’re having some success with that. What I think we really need to do to have more success with that is to figure out how to get this conversation beyond just the Internet and get it into mainstream media, get it into newspapers, get it into television. I think that it’s important to recognize that Internet media are still hitting a small popula-
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tion in most countries. In the North, we’re used to the Internet essentially replacing all the rest of our media. But even when we say that we’re forgetting that for, you know, a generation older that isn’t the case. And we are certainly forgetting that in developing nations that’s certainly not the case. The people who are getting the majority of their news from the Internet are a very small group. So we might win this battle of sort of broadening the media world online. But we have to win it offline as well. We have to get a greater population of people paying attention to news from different parts of the world and perspectives from different parts of the world. we: Why don’t they do it yet? What do you think? Ethan Zuckerman: I think it’s a very basic human tendency. I think we all tend to find ourselves as members of one tribe or another. And I think we tend to look for that news and information. There’s a term from social science called homophily, which basically means that birds of a feather flock together. If you put people in a room, people will tend to naturally gravitate towards people who have a similar religious, ethnic, economic background with them. I think that it’s ok to acknowledge that this is a very basic human tendency, but I think we also have to acknowledge that it could be very dangerous in a globalized world. If in a globalized world all I know is the opinions of highly educated Americans, I am not getting a very accurate view of the world. And in a world where economics is global, where politics is global, where security issues are global, it’s very important that I understand what people in China are thinking, what people in the Middle East are thinking, what people in Africa are thinking. But it’s a challenge. And right now our media world is not very well configured to let us hear these opinions. We have to fight against those structures and find a way to take advantage of technologies like the Internet to see these different opinions. we: You are also working on a project which is called ”digital democracy“. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Ethan Zuckerman: Digital Democracy is a research interest at Berkman. And one of the things that we are concerned about is asking question: How is the Internet effecting politics? And we know that there are some very basic answers. In US politics you see people using the Internet to raise quite a bit of money. It’s been quite revolutionary this year to watch Barack Obama from the left raise quite a bit of money, much more than anyone had expected, largely from small donations, largely done online. And this is sort of changing the landscape a little bit of American politics. But we’re interested in much broader issues as well. We’re interested in questions like: Will the existence of communication networks like the Internet change authoritarian societies like Birma or like China or even sort of softer authoritarian societies like Vietnam or like Tunesia? To what extent is adding information and the ability to broadcast information to these societies, to what extent is it going to change how government works in these societies. Again, I think we are probably overly optimistic. There were a lot of people three or four years ago arguing that it simply wouldn’t be possible to have the Internet in China without having democracy inevitably result from it. That turns out just to be not
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only false but also foolish. What we are really seeing coming out of the Internet in China is a great deal of homegrown nationalism. And this idea that democracy is somehow inevitable and is somehow tied to communication systems, I think one of the things we’re finding out is that that’s farcical. we: Do you see the same problems in this context than you just have mentioned in the Global Voices context? Ethan Zuckerman: I think they are intimately tied together. If you are studying Internet and democracy you have to be very cognisant of the fact that the Internet is still on a very early stage in most countries. I think you have to be very conscious of the fact that people are always looking for local voices and local opinions more than they are looking for those international voices and opinions. So I do think the two are very tightly tied together. we: So is We on a local basis different from We on a global basis? Ethan Zuckerman: I think there is ”We“ on so many different bases. I think one of the interesting things that’s happening at this moment in time is that we have the ability to be part of many different tribes at the same time. I live in a town of , people. And that’s one ”We“. And when I go to the university town where I check my mail and I get my coffee, that’s another ”We“. When I come here onto the Harvard campus, I have a very different tribe of people associated with the Berkman Center. At a conference like the one that we are at today, there is a lot of people that I know from doing a lot of work on the African Internet. And that’s another ”We“ that we are associated with. This is a really novel moment in time. Kwame Appiah, who is a Ghanaian philosopher based at Princeton, observes that it’s really only in the last couple of hundred years that people have had that opportunity to know people from that many different and diverse backgrounds. Before that, we would have known the people in our tribe and we might have known one or two other tribes that we encountered. But that idea that you could be part of a dozen, a hundred different groups where you could say ”We“ is a very new and novel concept. Frankly, as human beings we’re just figuring out how to navigate it, and we are not very good at it yet. we: Let’s look from the government point of view, you see already any impacts on these different kind of ”We’s“ you just described? Ethan Zuckerman: I am not sure I see a huge amount of that on the government level. Certainly, there’s been a government tendency to try to get people to expand that definition of ”We“. Certainly a very powerful force in the United States over the last or years has been this idea of affirmative action and trying to make sure that we don’t end up with involuntary segregation in schools and other public services. So we’ve had a great deal of government attempt to get people to blend. I think it’s been a limited success. I think it’s very important that people encounter at the elementary school level, at the highschool level, at the university level people from different backgrounds. But I also think that you see a good deal of self-segregation where people choose to live and choose to work. And you see perhaps less integration than you might expect. I think that this tendency for people to align themselves in tribes of one fashion or another
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is a very very powerful force and I think we underestimate how difficult it is to change that. I also think we underestimate how important it is. And I think one of the things that’s enormously important right now is having much better understanding of people from different countries and cultures. Unfortunately, the US is still sort of reacting to the tragic events of / in a xenophobic fashion and trying to find ways to build bigger barriers to restrict who’s coming into the country. That is a politically suicidal framework to take in a globalized society. The people who are the most open, who are the most global, who are the most integrated are going to be the most successful societies going forward. And we’re still sort of dealing with this psychic wound of that attack. And I think we are still reacting to it by putting walls up, very much on a political level. And I think in the long term, that’s probably a very dangerous tactic to take. we: Could you see institutions like for example the United Nations to take an important role in this process?
Ethan Zuckerman: Well, look, I think that multilateral institutions have always been trying to find a way to expand this global sense of a world community. I think at the same time, in the US, there’s a lot of scepticism of these institutions. I think some of that is played up for political gain, I think it’s very hard to find American politicians who will positive things to say about the UN. It’s been a real cultural trend here to pick on those multilateral institutions. It’s important to acknowledge that these institutions have done a great deal very well, particularly peacekeeping, which is a function we don’t hear very much about here. But I also think it’s probably asking too much from the UN to suddenly create the sort of global community that we are all hoping for. We’ve got to look at other forces. We particulary have to look at media. Media is how we understand the world. Most of us don’t have the opportunity to get in an airplane and visit another nations around the world. So what we know about those nations is from media, whether it’s from journalistic media telling us the news of what happens there, whether it’s entertainment media which gives us pictures which are sometimes very unfair of what life is like in other countries. We are a mediated people. And so we can only ask a certain amount from these multilateral institutions. We also have to ask a lot from these institutions that we are surrounded by.
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we: Regarding media: How do we achieve transperancy? How do we filter all this information? Ethan Zuckerman:I think we have to be a little careful when we talk about these questions of quality in media. This is an old conversation that hasn’t gone very well in the past. If you roll back through history, there was that sort of amazing movement in the late s and s within UNESCO called NWICO, the New World Information and Communication Order. And that’s what a lot of developing nations are saying: We demand better representation in global media. Look, we’ve seen that you can broadcast realtime imagery from the Vietnam war into American households. Let’s broadcast from SubSaharan Africa as well. We demand a certain amount of media equity. It’s a really interesting question. You know, do nations have a right to be represented in another nation’s media? It was such a provocative question that the US and the UK left UNESCO over the issue. The US only rejoined UNESCO a couple
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or Arabic. And this is a very smart recognition on the part of parents who realize that just having English isn’t going to be sufficient for a global society. That sort of awareness of global issues and how that changes education could be very very powerful. But I do think we have enormous changes that we probably need to make within our media system as well. Because again, I think that for the most part, that’s where we get this information and that’s where we get these perspectives. It’s got to be some sort of a recognition that just having a one-country view of the world isn’t sufficient for the future. And it’s going to put people on an economic disadvantage. we: So my last question would be: If you would have three wishes free for a new We, what would they be? Ethan Zuckerman: I think my first wish would be that everyone got to travel to a country radically different from their own and actually spend a lot of time. For me the reason that I mention
... is We on a local basis different from We on a global basis? of years back. So it’s an incredibly sensitive subject this question of quality. I think what’s interesting is that the landscape has shifted, that was a conversation that had a lot to do with restrictions of supply and demand. At that point, you had a very limited number of media outlets that could reach a global audience. Now we have literally millions of ... And the question is: What do people pay attention to? And here we’ve got to ask questions about market forces. It’s very very hard to compel a million people to look at a particular piece of media. Instead, you have to find a way to sell that media to a particular audience. And there are also questions about who’s actually going to pay attention to that media. So I think we need to change the way we look at these things. We need to figure out: How do you build media, inclusive media, that’s going go reach the sort of global audience that we care about. we: But we do need a different education system for this, don’t we? A different media literacy. Ethan Zuckerman: I think media literacy is part of it, I think education is part of it. But I also think economics is going to have a huge thing to do with this. I don’t know how this is playing out in Germany, but in the US, there are a lot of innovative new schools starting up that are trying to teach grammar school kids Chinese
these issues is that when I was years old, I moved to Ghana, West Africa, which is about as far conceptually as you can get from New England. And it really changed how I view the world in a very positive way. So I think my first wish is that everybody would have an opportunity like that. I think maybe my second wish was that everyone had someone who was emotionally relevant to them who lived in a very different place. Having that connection to someone who you love, whether you’re married to that person or whether that person is just a close friend, forces you to change your focus in a big way. And then I think the third would be that we find some way to rebuild newspapers and television in this world that do a much better job of paying attention to stories around the world because right now, frankly, we do a very very poor job a lot of the time. And it’s a situation that’s heading towards crisis. So I use a wish for that.
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What I saw with the internet was that it was a great way for people to innovate, to think and create without asking permission. An amazingly open thing.
The open Internet not only is an important business thing, I think it’s the pillar for democracy. Or I should better say the pillar for an open society in the st century. Joichi Ito
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Joichi Ito Joichi Ito, more commonly known as Joi Ito, is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki, an IRC channel and contributes to the Tokyo Metroblogging. Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons.
http://joi.ito.com/
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You Don’t Have to Ask we for Permission – Creative Commons Interview with Joichi Ito
we: Joi you are an entrepreneur and you invest a lot of money in startups, but you still spend a lot of your time on NGOs like Global Voices and others. Why are you doing this? What is your motivation? Joi: I used to work in mainstream media and with large corporations. And honestly I felt very stifled, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do without asking for a lot of permission. What I saw with the internet was that it was a great way for people to innovate, to think and create without asking permission, without having to wait until they are older. It was an amazingly open thing. And for me, innovation, whether it’s political innovation or technical innovation or any kind of positive change, is supported by this idea of the open internet.
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We have various layers: very early we had the ethernet, and then we had the Internet protocol TCP/IP, and then we had the web and now we have Creative Commons, which is very similar because it’s trying to create an open protocol that allows things to connect without asking permission. Because in the past, you had asked permission to connect a modem to the Internet. Then you had to ask permission before you set up a site. And now you have to ask permission before you use somebody’s content. And the idea of Creative Commons is to make a protocol that makes it easy to connect without asking permission. This makes it impossible for large companies and governments to control the interconnect. The non-profit things that I do and the for-profit things that I do are very similar because the for-profit companies that I invest in are trying to innovate in technology and social software by using the Internet. They are typically very small teams of people who create some product. And I think these small startups are creating the technology and the infrastructure that builds these open networks. And they have the DNA of the open networks. And the non-profits that I work in like Global Voices, Witness or Mozilla, Creative Commons, they are all non-profits that help try to coordinate all the people who are involved in trying to create this open Internet. For me I think that the open internet is not only an important business thing, I think it’s the pillar for an open society in the st century. we: With the rise of the internet – has your idea of ”We“ changed? Joi: Yes, very much. I think that ”We“ is a very good word because ”We“ used to mean your family and then it became your company and then it became your country and then it becomes the world. And then it becomes the non-human animals and the environment. I think that having the ”We“ as big as possible is a really important part. But: You can read all you want about other people, but unless you care, you don’t do anything. I was talking to a lot of American media people regarding Global Voices and asked: Why don’t you cover Africa more? They said: Americans won’t buy it, they don’t care. Because it’s not ”We“ to them. Right? And so I think that what Global Voices and the global internet is helping us do is to feel like everyone as a ”We“. we: Could you explain the difference between the concept of the copyright and the principles of Creative Commons? Joi: The way that copyright is used today is used to reserve all rights. So the typically under-copyright law if you scribble something on a piece of paper, you automatically have a copyright to that. But on the web, when you want to be very quick and you don’t want each person asking permission, what you need to do is to mark your work with the permissions you’re granting, which doesn’t have to be all permissions. So with Creative Commons there are certain licenses that don’t allow derivative works, some don’t allow commercial use, and so forth. But the idea is that you want to make it very clear what copyrights you have. The bigger part is that it’s better for society if you share because you’re creating a commons. Like educational resources,
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many people should share them and people should work together because it helps education globally. And so we are pushing educators not to use restrictive licenses but to share as much as possible. we: How sustainable do you think is the Creative Commons approach? Where do you see the pitfalls for the copyleft approach on the net? Joi: Well, copyleft is one of the pieces of Creative Commons. We are pushing people towards openness, but we will also allow for instance somebody to create a fairly restrictive license, non-commercial use, no derivatives, share alike. So Creative Commons goes all the way from copyleft to very restrictive licenses. We are creating a choice for everyone. If you look at our licenses, year after year they tend to become more free. That trend is important. If you give somebody a choice to become a little bit free, then they take it. Because the other approach is to say: here is a line, you’re either free or you’re not. That’s one way. And my way is: let’s get them in and then move them along the line. Because an educator, who should sign away almost all the rights is very different from a musician who signed to a record label, who can’t. But maybe he can just give away the sampling, for non-commercial use. Our mission is to make the world more free. But I think the way we do it is by creating examples and case studies. And so obviously the people who are philosophically similar to us we just can talk to them. But people who aren’t we have to convince them in other ways. And one of the ways you convince them is that they are going to make more money or the business is going to be more successful or they’ll become more famous. we: Why do you think it’s so hard to convince people? Joi: I think people have a natural fear being exploited. In many countries, big companies exploit people. And they don’t realize that sharing is not about being allowing people to exploit you. Imagine a blogger who uses a Creative Commons license. And they say: well, this means somebody could print out my blog and make a book and sell it. And I said: yes, but they probably won’t. What’s going to happen is that someone is going to want to use your site. If they don’t speak Japanese, it’s going to be hard for them to ask permission. But if you have a Creative Commons license on your site, they’ll use it and they will give you a link. And that link is actually worth more than money. But lot of people still think the old way, which is: if I do something I get paid. Rather than: if I do something I share and people come back to me and I gain value and then I can sell other things. Information is really a very hard thing to sell. Information is how you participate in a conversation. And once you are in the conversation, then you can sell other things like box sets and sign things. And I think that even if you are sometimes exploited, the benefit should outweigh the costs because some entrepreneur in Africa printing your book, that’s good for you because you’re not going to make money from that anyway you know. So I think a lot about it is conversation. A lot of it is letting somebody try a little bit and then feeling it, but I think we are getting very close to making a big impact.
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we: Will Creative Commons ultimately lead to the death of the author and the rise of an emerging but impersonal “We“? Joi: No, I don’t think so. There are communities like Wikipedia, Wikimedia who attribute to the community rather than themselves. And they are very much a ”We“. But I think that there are authors who are very single mode like documentary producers and others who don’t like the remix part. Creative Commons is going to try to provide a choice for every kind of creator. And I think different creators have different modes of creativity. It will be much easier to become ”We’s“ like Linux and these open source projects. But I don’t think the individual author will disappear because I think voice and perspective is important. we: Do you believe that there will be a time when all mass media content will be available legally to anybody anytime? Joi: Yes, I think so. I think that right now we are shifting modes. Where before the costs of production and distribution were so high that people had to recoup that costs by charging and having business models, the costs of creation and distribution of information now is becoming nearly zero. So once you have every single TV show, movie and song on your iPod, no one has to deliver it for you. Now it’s a discovery problem. How do you figure out what you want to see? How do you find the stuff that’s relevant to you?
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we: In the We world, the art of letting go seems to be one key to create innovative and creative ideas. Why do you think it is so hard for people to give away control? We teaches us that letting go means getting more. Joi: I think one of the basic fundamental problems is that happiness has been measured by what I would call pleasure. But money, things, fame... these are all things that even if you get some, you never get enough. Seeking pleasure is how we are used to drive ourselves and how politicians and the economy want the workers to drive themselves. But real happiness comes from finding something sustainable like a family and feeling good about what you are doing now rather than what you’re trying to get. That kind of thinking is somewhat philosophical, somewhat religious, but to me I think that’s the philosophy that drives the ”We“. And obviously, you have moments where you are goal-driven and you have to focus and do all this other stuff, but overwhelmingly, if you stop worrying about trying to become the richest guy on the block, have the best car, you more enjoy the participation in the community. Because human beings have a very social nature and participating and being part of a community, being part of a family, that has a huge amount of satisfaction and I think that’s been kind of lost as a goal for many people.
we: So how do mass media guys have to change? Joi: I think first of all, they have to realize that marketing their product is going to be the hardest problem, not the distribution. And so the whole way they think about things is going to be different. What they really need to understand is that the conversation and word of mouth are the key to marketing. And the only way you participate in the conversation is by sharing. The other thing is that the audience is now part of the conversation and part of the production. If you look at ”Lost“ and some of the really successful American and Japanese television shows, they adapt based on the behavior of their fans. I think they have to listen. And I think that really successful mainstream media guys are listening very carefully to what people are saying. And they are actually participating in that conversation.
Regarding Global Voices Online I was talking to American media people and asked: ”Why don’t you cover Africa more?“
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Americans won’t buy it, they don’t care. Because it’s not We to them. Joichi Ito
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Grass roots media are media by people who are not journalists but who occasionally do some journalism but provide information to each other, a highly valuable part of the emerging ecosystem. Dan Gillmor
It’s wonderful to see consumers becoming creators, but even more wonderful to watch creators become collaborators. Dan Gillmor
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Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor is a noted American technology writer and former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. He was one of the leading chroniclers of the Silicon Valley dot-com boom and its subsequent bust. Gillmor is also the author of a popular weblog covering technology news and the Northern California technology business sector, criticizing rigid enforcement of copyrights, and commenting on politics from a frequently left-wing perspective. Dan Gillmor is director of a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Gillmor worked at the Detroit Free Press and the Kansas City Times before moving to the San Jose Mercury News in . He left the Mercury News in January to work on a grassroots journalism project, called Bayosphere, launched in May . He is also the author of a book, We the Media, published in August , chronicling how the Internet is helping independent journalists combat the consolidation of traditional media.
www.dangillmor.com
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We – The Media! Interview with Dan Gillmor
we: One of your books is titled ”We – The Media“ What is your understanding of “we”? Dan Gillmor: The notion of ”We – The Media“ is that in an era of democratised media where we all, have tools to create media that are inexpensive and quite high quality combined with the democratization of access to what we create. We are doing something new that used to be the province of “they”, “They, the Media” – now it’s “We – The Media“. we: What are the biggest challenges for ”We“ in this context of a democratised media environment? Dan Gillmor: The challenges are many including how do we find the good material amid the flood of things people are creating, not all of which is useful to all of us at some level — some of it is, some of it is not. But what is useful to one person won’t be to another. How do we have shared experiences that we all learn from? How do we sort out what is trustworthy from what is not? How do we persuade people to behave with civility instead of anger and fury when they are dealing with
each other? And in terms of journalism: How do we make sure there is a business model, a sustainability model to support high quality journalism? Whether it’s a for-profit or non-profit or some combination as I expect it will be. Over time we need to be sure we have journalism that is sustainable. we: What do you mean by a sustainable business model? Dan Gillmor: Sustainability could be achieved in many ways. It can be done by someone who doesn’t try to make money, who just does it for the love of it. Perhaps like someone blogging
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about a local community. That is only sustainable as long as that person keeps doing it. So we need a lot of people doing it. Another sustainable business model in a not-for-profit world would be national public radio for example: users, which work on a small amount of subsidy and a large amount of user and donor contributions. And of course there is the for-profit model, which basically is: we provide a service or a product and you pay us because you like it or advertisers pay us or some subsidy method. But there are many different ways to support quality media. And we need to explore all of them. we: So what would be your vision of the ideal media ecosystem? Dan Gillmor: I don’t have a single idea of that. I think my best role is to watch what people do and try and help identify the good things. I do think a future ecosystem that we want would include the elements of today’s media and journalism that we all agree upon and then add to those the new kinds of things that people are doing. Many people are working in this field ... well, most of them will fail. The ones that will succeed we will all learn from and work to improve. we: How can grassroots journalism lead to a change of the media system in a democratic society? And on the other hand in a non-democratic environment? Dan Gillmor: Grassroots media are media by people who are not journalists but who occasionally do some journalism but provide information to each other, a highly valuable part of the emerging ecosystem. The difficulty whether whatever kind of culture is sorting out good from the bad, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy and to make sure that people get reliable quality information if that’s what they are looking for. The risks people take in non-free societies are much higher and I admire very much people who take risks of that sort. But it certainly is something that will have great potential to open up more closed societies or help open up. But this is not a magic solution to dictatorship or authoritarian rule. And we should not imagine that it is. But it is a very useful tool. we: What is your take on the problem of filtering and sorting the ever growing amount of information? Dan Gillmor: That sorting question is a difficult one and I don’t have a magic formula, but I do think we need to combine human intelligence with machine intelligence in much more powerful and easy to use ways than we have done today. When we do that, I think, we will end up with a phantastically valuable sort of tools and help from each other, which is the only way we are going to be able to sort it out. This is not solvable solely by human editors nor is it solvable solely by machine algorithms. It will be a combination. we: What role will ”We“ play in the future of media? What’s next that might strengthen the ”We“ in media? Dan Gillmor: I am very bad at predicting. I like being surprised. All I know for sure is that the devices will get more powerful, smaller, less expensive, that computing power will increase, storage will increase, bandwidth will increase most
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of the time in most places. The tools of media will become more easy to use and more affordable. Beyond that I do not have predictive power. I was surprised by things that happened after blogging. I think blogging is a proxy word for a whole set of new technologies that add up to conversation. It’s all about conversation as opposed to solely listening to lectures. So I look forward to the next surprise ... we: Traditional media have failed in understanding how the web, how their online audience and how business models are working on the web? Do you agree and what if they had not failed? Would that still have led to the rise of ”We“ Media? Dan Gillmor: Traditional media have a fundamental business issue that I don’t see a way to solve easily and that is that the advertising has been separated from the journalism. That is going to lead to the increasing inability of major news organisations to do what they have done. We leave aside whether they have been failing journalistically, in some ways they have. But in many ways they have done a great job. So the issue is not whether the business problems are going to continue, which they are, but how do we move from this system into the more broad, diverse, vibrant ecosystem that will support the kinds of journalism we all would agree that we need. And the market problem that’s occurring is a very serious one, but I think we are going to end up figuring it out. we: What do you think does this all mean for content? What kind of content are we going to see more? What kind of content are we going to see less? Dan Gillmor: I think we are going to see more of the content that people create themselves as opposed to what’s created for them. We will combine it in new ways and it will be mashed up. It will be in new formats, in new kinds of media tools and ways of looking at it as well as interacting with it and with each other. The specifics? — I have no idea. But it is very clear that this conversation gets more and more widespread, richer and much more difficult to keep track of. we: If you had three wishes for "We – The Media", what would they be? Dan Gillmor: I guess, globally, they would be for a increasingly faster pace of adoption through affordability and government willingness to see it. Off these tools and with bandwidth part of that, I would like to see societies widely understand that free speech and dissent do not equal being unpatriotic. In fact, that’s a very patriotic thing to do to dissent. I’d like to see more people feel that not only do they have something to say but beyond that, they have something to share. And to collaborate with others on the web. It’s wonderful to see consumers becoming creators, but even more wonderful to watch creators become collaborators.
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From Youtube to wetube Afterthoughts by Henry Jenkins on the DIY Summit (fragments of a blogpost) The 24/7 DIY Video Conference at the University of Southern California in February 2008 represented a gathering of the tribes, bringing together and sparking conversations between many of the different communities which have been involved in producing and distributing ”amateur“ media content in recent years. Mimi Ito and Steve Anderson, the conference organizers, have worked for several years to develop a curatorial process which would respect the different norms and practices of these diverse DIY cultures while providing a context for them to compare notes about how the introduction of new digital production and distribution tools have impacted their communities. The conference featured screenings focused on 8 different traditions of production – Political Remix, Activist Media, Independent Arts Video, Youth Media, Machinima, Fan Vids, Videoblogging, Anime Music Video.
www.henryjenkins.org
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... One of the things that has excited me about YouTube is the ways that it represents a shared portal where all of these different groups circulate their videos, thus opening up possibilities for cross-polination. Yet, as many at the conference suggests, the mechanisms of YouTube as a platform work to discourage the real exchange of work. YouTube is a participatory channel but it lacks mechanisms which might encourage real diversity or the exchange of ideas. The Forums on YouTube are superficial at best and filled with hate speech at worst, meaning that anyone who tries to do work beyond the mainstream (however narrowly this is defined) is apt to face ridicule and harrasment. The user-moderation system on YouTube, designed to insure the ”best content“ rises to the top, follow majoritarian assumptions which can often hide minority works from view. Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the way YouTube strips individual works from their larger contexts – this was an issue even here where ”Closer“, a fanvid considered to be emotionally serious within slash fandom, drew laughter from a crowd which hadn’t anticipated this construction of same sex desire between Kirk and Spock. This conference, from its preplanning sessions which encouraged people from different communities to work together towards a common end, through the main conference screening which finally juxtaposed videos around shared themes rather than respecting the borders between different traditions, and through conference panels and hallway conversation and hands-on workshops, created a space where different DIY communities could learn from each other (and perhaps as importantly, learn to respect each other’s work). Throughout the conference, there was some healthy questioning of the concept of DIY (Do It Yourself) Media from several angles. One group, perhaps best represented by Alexandra Juhasz, was questioning the expansion of the term from its origins in countercultural politics and its connections with an ongoing critique of mainstream media to incorporate some of the more mundane and everyday practices of video production and distribution in the era of YouTube. I find myself taking a different perspective, drawing on the old feminist claim that ”the personal is political“ and thus that many of the films about ”everyday“ matters might still speak within a larger political framework. A case in point might be a disturbing video shown during the youth media session (which was curated by young people from Open Youth Networks and Mindy Farber): a young man had been filming in a school cafeteria when a teacher demands that he stops; when he refuses, she leads him to the principal’s office, berating him every step along the way, and then the two of them threaten to confiscate his camera, all the time unaware that it is continuing to film what they are saying. The young man distributed the video via YouTube, thus exposing what took place behind closed doors to greater scrutiny by a larger public. Read on one level, this is a trivial matter – a misbehaving youth gets punished, rightly or wrongly. But on another level, the video speaks powerfully about what it is like to be a student subjected to manditory education and the strategies by which adult authorites seek to isolate the boy from any base of support he might have in the larger community of students and feels free to say and do what they want behind closed doors. Even where videos remain on the level of sophmoric ”jackass“ humor, there’s no way of predicting when and how these filmmakers may apply skills learned in these trivial pursuits towards larger purposes. We may never know how many of the activists involved in the indie media movement learned their skills recording skateboard stunts or capturing their grafitti exploits. And that’s why there’s something powerful about a world where all kinds of everyday people can take media in their own hands. As we saw at the screenings of Fan Vids or Machinima, the line between the political/aesthetic avant garde and more popular forms of production is blurry. Works in these programs might engage in quite sophisticated formal experiments or may deal with political issues at unexpected moments. A second critique of the phrase, DIY, had to do with the focus on the individual rather than on collective forms of expression. Some called for us to talk about DWO (Doing It With Others) or DIT (Doing It Together). I argued that there was a fundamental ambiguity in the ”You“ in Youtube since in English, You is both singular and collective. When we talked about YouTube, then, we often end up dealing with videos and their producers in isolation, while many of them come from much larger traditions of the kind represented on the currated programs. I ended up one set of remarks with the suggestion that we might think about what it would mean to have a WeTube, rather than a YouTube.
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We have not yet learned to work together. Sugata Mitra
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Sugata Mitra Sugata Mitra has taught and researched computer applications for over years. He was until recently Chief Scientist with NIIT Limited in New Delhi. His contributions include a number of inventions and first-time applications. The database publishing industry in India and Bangladesh, as well as the first applications of digital multimedia and Internet based education in India, are attributed to him. His experiments with unsupervised access to public computers by children in remote areas, often called the ”hole in the wall“ experiments are known througout the world. His current interests include Children’s Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.
www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/sugata.mitra
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We are Hiring Indians The we of working together Author: Sugata Mitra
It is generally understood that low skilled jobs are migrating to low wage economies as a result of advances in information and communication technology. While this is happening in India, such growth will be limited to a workforce that is trained in cities, and therefore, relatively small in numbers. Such jobs are located in affluent suburbs of large cities, where the standard of living, the cost of living and wages are already beginning to reach, and sometimes exceed, those in the developed economies. As a result, industries are moving to smaller towns and will, eventually reach the rural communities. This is where % ( million in the case of India) of the population live. However, the standards of education in such remote areas are not suitable for the low skilled job market. Unless this problem is immediately addressed, outsourcing of low skilled jobs to India will reach its limits. We are not one, we are two worlds.
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It is also assumed that high skilled jobs will remain in the developed economies and high skilled workers will migrate to such economies. In the Indian IT sector, this has traditionally been so. However, in recent times, there is an increasing tendency for high skilled workers to return, or indeed, not leave to start with. This is the result of higher wages and the resultant standards of living within the Indian IT industry. As a result, the research and development laboratories of some of the largest technology companies in the world have moved to India. As economic growth drives standards of living higher, there will be a major slowing down of the migration of high skilled people from urban India. WE have not yet learned to work together.
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ring Indians, since this is likely to continue unabated in the immediate future. Corporations in the USA usually consider Indians as citizens of a single country and, therefore, homogenous. While this is true in principle, it is very different in practice. India is an extremely diverse country and differences in the personality of Indians in different parts of the country can be as different as the differences between, say, Russians and the Chinese. This can result in unpleasant surprises once Indian employees are hired. I am an Indian. I have been hiring Indians for all sorts of purposes for the last years and this article is an attempt to summarize some of the key rules that I have discovered to
If India is to continue exporting high skilled people to the developed economies, such workers will have to be produced from the non-urban and less affluent areas of the country. The quality of education in such areas is, once again, entirely inadequate for the production of such workers. Indeed, the demand for low and high skilled workers within the Indian domestic industry is also facing a shortage. In order to address the issue of education in remote (non-urban) locations, it is necessary to first understand the effects of remoteness and culture on the quality of education. It is then necessary to examine alternatives to traditional educational practice. Teacher migration is a root cause for the poor quality of education in remote areas. Teacher training to improve the quality of teachers, the traditional “solution” on which enormous resources are used, only aggravates the problem. In the next five years, if growth is to be maintained, the focus will have to shift away from administrative “solutions” to the fundamentals of educational theory, technology and a search for alternative educational systems. Self organising systems, synchronous distance education, teacher independent learning and remote presence technologies will form the basis of such alternatives.
avoid mistakes in selection. I write this in the hope that some of this experiential and historical experience may help Americans select Indians that will fit the roles designated for them. A little about India may be useful to start with. It is a relatively large country, about half the size of the United States. India is a peninsula attached to the Asian mainland between Afghanistan to the west, China to the north and the south-east Asian nations of Thailand and Myanmar to the east. In many ways, India is the bridge between Europe and the far-east. Protected by the mighty Himalayan mountains in the North and the Arabian sea, the Indian ocean and the Bay of Bengal in the west, south and east respectively, India remained undisturbed for thousands of years. The land was extremely fertile, fed by the mighty rivers that were formed from the melting snows of the Himalayas. Great civilizations developed on the banks of the Indus, the mythical Saraswati, the Ganges, the Godavari and other rivers of the region. In the period between (at least) BC and AD, trade flourished between
However, this article is not about education, it is about we – the Indians. American companies dealing with Information and communication technology are often required to hire persons who are residents of India or of Indian origin. This is usually a consequence of the software development and the “business process outsourcing” (BPO) industries. In recent times, such appointments have been the subject of much debate, since they represent the migration of jobs from the USA to India. Advances in telecom technology make it possible for American corporations to carry out large parts of their operations remotely, in India, thereby saving orders of magnitude in cost. While the social consequences of such job migration may be of concern, in this article we will merely examine the process of hi-
Egypt, Greece, Rome, China and all other countries of the then civilized world. Taxila and Nalanda, among the greatest universities of the ancient world, produced the earliest works of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, economics and technology. The textual works of the period were studied and carried back to the west by the greatest scholars and students of the time – from Al Baruni and Herodotus, to Huen Tsang and eventually Voltaire and Mark Twain, all documented the incredible achievements of the time. India has been invaded and occupied by smaller countries and kingdoms in Europe, Arabia and central Asia for the last thousand years or so. Every invader, while they looted and
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destroyed large parts of the country, were deeply affected by the cultures and knowledge they encountered. Millennia of Indian philosophical thought had emphasized non-violence, nonmaterialism and holistic thinking. This resulted in a country that was perhaps the easiest in the world to conquer. However, what the conquerors did not realize was the Indian conquest of minds and cultures that would follow their physical act of conquest. From Alexander the great to Lord Curzon, from Chengiz Khan to Akbar, all carried back along with the gold and jewels, the decimal number system, the Sanskrit grammar, algebra, geometry, astronomy, music, medicine, textiles and metallurgy. Only to return after converting the knowledge into newer and more powerful weapons of war! India accepted them all. Integrated them into the social fabric, tweaked their relatively primitive cultures and sent them back, changed for ever. Languages changed all over the ancient world, influenced by Sanskrit. In the modern world, the “tandoori chicken tikka masala” became Britain’s national dish!
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highly ambitious and materialistic and are capable of waiving all moral or ethical values to achieve their goals. They are practical and very hard working but lack imagination and creativity. They have little appreciation for the arts and have poor esthetics. They are mostly vegetarian and eat only chicken, if they do eat meat. Women have few rights in this region and are considered as good only for child rearing. Female infanticide is common and the ratio of males to females in the population can be a frightening : in some areas. They would be good at sales, engineering, telling lies, weaseling out of difficult situations, working long hours, and partying. They tend to get along well with the average American. The East of the country is extremely fertile, the Ganges river delta being the most fertile region on earth. This part of the country has not been attacked as often as the north, however, Kolkata (earlier called Calcutta) was the city from where the British ruled their empire. It is also the region from where Gandhi’s principles of “passive resistance” and “civil disobedience” destroyed the Bri-
If survival of the fittest is nature’s measure of success, India with one sixth of the world’s population became humanity’s greatest survivor. When Intel and Microsoft came to “conquer” India with their microprocessors and operating systems in the s, little did they realize the flood of Indians that would invade the world of software development. It is in this context that Indian IT and BPO industry personnel should be viewed. People in India are a mixed and varied lot. They speak different languages, dialects and represent every genetic and socio-economic variation existing in the world. An Indian’s personality and attitudes are shaped by several factors. Geographic location, education and the erstwhile caste system being some of the key factors.
tish Empire without bloodshed. The region is dominated by the Bengali people. The eastern people are similar to, and often look like, the people of the Far East. They are lazy and have low ambition. However, they are usually highly educated, talented in the arts and are sensitive. They can be very emotional and tend to run away from difficult situations. They eat everything and enjoy eating
In the figure aside, I have divided India into four major geographies, North, East, West and South. The blank area to the east can, in general be considered as part of the east. In India they are many different “We’s“ ... People of the four geographies are quite different from each other. In India, communities of people are often identified with specific states or languages of the country. For example, people from the state of Punjab, who speak the Punjabi language are called Punjabi’s, while those from the state of West Bengal, who speak the Bengali language are called Bengali’s. The North of the country has been attacked by other countries for millennia and the people from there, predominantly Punjabis, are characterized by short term goals, corruption, cultural immaturity, and low education. They can be
and drinking very much. Football and cricket are regional obsessions, although most prefer to watch and comment rather than participate. Women in this region are powerful, very intelligent and frequently more active than the men. Indeed, it was a Bengali woman that lowered the Union Jack in Bombay to end the British rule in India. This region has produced most of the Nobel Laureates, Oscar winners and Grammy awardees of India. They would be good at jobs involving creativity, communication, media and science. They make excellent teachers and get along easily with American intellectuals.
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Eastern India also consists of the North East. This is a beautiful and neglected region with people who are indistguishable from the people of the Far East. English is spoken everywhere, although with a strong accent. Beef and pork are staple foods of the region along with fish from the magnificent Bhrahmaputra river.
Academic excellence, mathematics, algorithmic thinking, idiosyncrasies and an all but indestructible set of cultural values characterize the people of the south. Add to this an almost incomprehensible English pronunciation, a dark complexion and a natural perm and you would have a reasonable picture of the south Indian.
The people of north-eastern India make excellent employees for those jobs that involve low intellectual levels. They will follow instructions and make few mistakes as long as the circumstances are described clearly during their induction. They are unlikely to be original thinkers and problem solvers. In this respect, they will be very similar to, but cheaper than their American counterparts.
While they are, almost invariably, brilliant, south Indians can be deceptive, intolerant, dishonest and cruel. They will quietly perform technological and scientific miracles, as long as it serves their purpose to do so. They will dump you when they choose to, without a backward glance.
The people of western India fall into two categories. The upper west consisting of Gujaratis, Sindhis and Marwaris are very different from the Maharashtrians of the rest of the region. The former are astute business people and control most of India’s economy and the stock markets. They are excellent entrepreneurs, have few values other than those connected with money and are mostly streetwise. Many consider education and professions a waste of time. They make excellent con-men and scamsters and can talk their way into most jobs. They are strictly vegetarian and eat all manner of deep fried food. Many are obese. The women of this region are encouraged to stay at home, from where they control the family wealth. As employees, Gujaratis, Sindhis and Marwaris can be very hard working and diligent as long as it serves their interest to do so. They will walk out of a job into a better paying one without a second thought. People of the rest of the western region are mostly from the state of Maharashtra. They are among the brightest and most educated of all Indians. Maharashtrians value education and patriotism above most things. They are practical and often very creative. However, their love of the intellect can sometimes be obsessive leading to people who have excellent intentions but are not too good at getting things done. They are mostly vegetarian, although they eat fish and chicken irregularly. Women of this region are efficient, educated, liberal and extremely capable. The Indian film industry, the largest in the world, is located in Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay), in this region. They have also produced the world’s best cricketers. Maharashtrians make excellent employees – loyal, intelligent and hard working. They would make good communicators, programmers, engineers, scientists and could be good at most professions if motivated by altruistic values. If you draw a horizontal line through the city of Mumbai, the region below that line would be called South India. It is a diverse region consisting of the states of Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamilnadu. Understanding or describing South India in a few paragraphs is not easy; however, it is from here that that the Indian IT revolution originated and one cannot understand India, particularly Hindu India without reference to this region.
South Indian food habits can be difficult. The people of Andhra and Kerala will eat meat or fish, provided it is cooked in their own spices. The region has an abundance of spice and has, in the past, given the world – pepper, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and many other aromatic herbs. It is said that spices were traded between south India and the west from king Solomon’s time. The people of Tamilnadu, the Tamils, are strict vegetarians. They will eat mostly rice and sauces made from yoghurt and tamarind, spiced with peppers. Only one form of cooking, the Chettinad cuisine, consists of very hot meat preparations and this is relatively rare. The women of the south are diminutive, subservient and very polite. These characteristics are mostly put on and these, extremely accomplished, women have made and destroyed empires without as much as moving a muscle. The people of southern India form the backbone of the software industry all over the world, and particularly, the United States. It can be argued that any large piece of software today would have significant parts of it written by south Indians.
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What does all this mean to you as a potential employer of Indians? I think the following questions are important while evaluating an Indian for employment: . Where were you born? – This question will enable you to find out what community the candidate belongs to. If he or she is not born in India, you will have to probe the origins of parents and the languages spoken at home. Indians brought up in other countries tend to be very different in their mannerisms from their native cousins; however, the basic community traits tend to remain the same.
. What languages do you speak? – Most Indians speak three or more languages. Hindi is the national language of the country, English the common “bridging” language, and a mother tongue that will give you an indication of community. . What school did you go to? – In India, there are three kinds of schools, private schools that are expensive, government schools that are nearly free and “missionary” schools that are generally run by Christian or other religious missions. The three kinds of schools produce very different kinds of people. Private schools produce smart, selfish and communicative students. Government schools produce highly educated and often, creative, students with poor communication and social skills. Missionary school students tend to have good values and behavior, although they may lack academic excellence and creativity. . What caste do you belong to? – This is a tricky question. The best answer would be where the candidate is unaware of his or her caste. If a candidate does name a caste, it would probably indicate a mind that is affected by the caste system. There are many castes in India, the highest being the Brahmin (intellectual). Brahmins consider themselves superior to most other people, although they may not say so. Brahmins from south India, in particular, are unlikely to consider anyone, other than their own kind, to be their intellectual equals or superiors. The next caste is the Kshtriya, who are warriors. Kshtriyas tend to be honest, loyal and hard working, once you gain their trust. Below the Kshtriyas are a host of “lower” castes, all of whom, if they are still affected by this ancient system, will tend to be subservient in one way or the other. Finally, there are the lowest castes, the Untouchables, who are unlikely to reveal their caste. Incidentally, anyone who is not a Hindu is an Untouchable!
In conclusion, Indians can make wonderful, inexpensive employees provided you put them to the job they will do best in. And what they will do best in is often deeply dependent on the socio-cultural history of this ancient land.
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Tuck-tuck-driver in Trissur – Kerala / India
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Village near Trissur – Kerala / India
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”…humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily through interaction and experimentation, through answering the question: what if?“ Jeff Cobb
”Collective action requires that problems be thought of as group problems and that the goals of all actions and practices are to move the group forward.“ Jeff Cobb
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Jeff Cobb Jeff Cobb has been involved in education and technology for the better part of two decades and has spent much of that time as an entrepreneur working on the leading edge of Web technology and online learning. He now applies the experience he has gained to help organizations: • • • •
Integrate Internet marketing, social media, online learning and customer education approaches into business strategy. Take advantage of new educational and business models. Develop and implement clear, measurable sales, marketing, and stakeholder engagement strategies. Maximize adoption, revenue, and return on investment from web-based product-and-service offerings.
www.jeffthomascobb.com
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A Western chemical company is offering farmers in the region a special deal. They will pay you money for the leasing of a few acres, where they can store some of their harmless barrels. They will pay you $. Do you accept the deal?
Playing for Change Author: Jeff Cobb
This was the offer I received after seasons on the farm. I really had no choice. Iniko, the head of the family, was at death’s door and needed medicine badly. Mother Gina was not far behind. The crops failed last year, and we had faced any number of difficulties in the seasons before. We had already sold off what little of value we had. So, I took the money. It made little difference. Iniko and Gina died anyway. Within a few more seasons the sister had left, I had resorted to dancing in a show for tourists to earn money, and then, in a final act of despair, I began growing opium to try to pull myself back up out of extreme poverty. All to no avail. After seasons, I too perished from hunger and disease. The family was gone. The farm was gone. Game over.
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Game over.
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The story above is not real. Or, at least, I did not experience it in the real world. Where I did experience it was in an online game called rd World Farmer which is designed to simulate many of the conditions and choices that millions living at or near poverty in developing countries face on a daily basis. rd World Farmer is what is typically referred to as a ”serious game“ – a game intended for purposes other than pure entertainment. How deeply this intention is woven into a game can vary widely. In some cases, the actual substance of a game may have relatively little to do with the more serious matters to which it is connected. At the highly addictive vocabulary game site, freerice.com, for instance, grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program every time a player correctly guesses a word. While vocabulary has relatively little to do with understanding or fighting hunger, the site has resulted in donations of billions of grains of rice and has no doubt raised awareness of hunger as a global issue along the way. Games like rd World Farmer strive for an even higher level of awareness coupled with actual engagement in the problem or challenge at hand. They place you in an environment where you are faced with making choices and decisions that simulate what you or others may face in a real life situation. Not all serious games are geared towards social issues – most are aimed at business or governmental training needs – but a growing number like rd World Farmer and Free Rice recognize that games can actually be powerful tools for supporting social change. As these games tap into the social capabilities that the Web now offers, their ability to attract and engage new stakeholders could easily surpass that of traditional media. Getting attention, cultivating engagement As I was playing rd World Farmer, I thought about Heifer International, an organization that is dedicated to fighting hunger and supporting sustainable development internationally. Heifer’s approach is to provide families with livestock that can be bred for food. Recipients agree to share the offspring of gift animals with others in need. I am an enthusiastic supporter of Heifer, and my wife and I contribute to the organization annually. But as I was playing rd World Farmer, it occurred to me that my level of actual engagement with Heifer and its cause is quite low. This is not because the organization is not trying. It maintains a well-designed, content-rich website that takes advantage of leading technologies for online giving and outreach. It uses e-mail for reaching constituents in the inbox. And it sends out one of the better newsletters I’ve seen from a nonprofit. I even read it. Occasionally. But Heifer faces the same problem every other organization in the world faces right now when it comes to drawing attention to its products or services: a crisis of attention.
Traditional broadcast media, which include not only television, print, and radio, but also mass e-mail, and most websites, have a harder and harder time cutting through the vast array of choices now available and capturing the attention of – much less engaging – a target audience. At this point, games may have a better chance of capturing attention than traditional broadcast media simply because they are trendy. But their edge over broadcast media also lies in a promise of value that most other media cannot readily emulate: games are a two-way exchange, and for their part, they give back in a way that is imminently satisfying to the average human psyche. Make a choice. See immediate and clear results. If successful, move on to greater heights. If unsuccessful, well, the next try is sure to be the one. It was this sort of cycle I went through in rd World Farmer. I have played the game many times now, but what struck me early in my very first try at it was just how difficult it is to break the cycle of poverty when you have no safety net and there are myriad factors beyond your control. One wrong decision can seal your fate, though that fate may take many seasons to play out. Intellectually, this is a point I grasped long ago. It is something I have been told and shown via an array of broadcast media from Heifer and other organizations dedicated to fighting poverty and hunger. But having to place myself into a different reality, engage in those decisions, and “live” with the result led to an understanding of the point much deeper than any I have achieved before. And I found this to be true even in the context of a game like rd World Farmer which, when compared to commercial blockbusters like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto, is quite rudimentary. It is difficult to quantify, of course, how this deeper understanding ultimately benefits an organization that makes use of serious games, but it is hardly a stretch to suggest that it might lead to more and larger donations or to an increase in ”real life“ engagement through volunteering. Perhaps more of stretch, but certainly well within the realm of possibility, is the idea that creating this level of engagement across a broad spectrum of stakeholders – potentially anyone with an Internet connection and browser – might actually lead to new, better approaches to solving complex social problems.
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From content to context to community A recent article about games in Prospect Magazine notes that, ”…humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily through interaction and experimentation, through answering the question ’what if?‘“ This, of course, is an area where games excel and where a significant part of their potential for problem solving and change lies. The best games – whether serious or not – are excellent learning tools. Traditional media tend to focus on the delivery of content. Similarly, traditional approaches to education emphasize mastery of a body of content or factual knowledge. Games, by their nature, combine content and experience, providing a context in which content is put into action. In more sophisticated games, the line between content and context disappears completely. The content of the game, the story it ultimately produces, is the sum of the player’s actions and it unfolds differently each time the player plays. The narrative at the beginning of this article summing up my experience in rd World Farmer reflected only my experience in that particular round of the game. It could have turned out otherwise, and indeed, different choices resulted in different outcomes the other times I have played. Just as they might in real life, if the same type of repetition were possible. The fact that the player can play a game repeatedly, or attempt different aspects of a game repeatedly, is one of the core reasons that games can be so effective for learning. James Paul Gee, Professor of Literacy at Arizona State University and a leading expert on games, argues that ... good games create what’s been called a ”cycle of expertise“ by giving players well-designed problems on the basis of which they can form good strategies, letting them practice these enough to routinize them, then throwing a new problem at them that forces them to undo their now routinized skills and think again before achieving, though more practice, a new and higher routinized set of skills. Good games repeat this cycle again and again – it’s the process by which experts are produced in any domain. Of course, this process, when undertaken in isolation, may be of limited value in the context of large-scale social issues like poverty and hunger in the developing world. What good does it do that I, sitting comfortably in my office in the United States, have developed a level of expertise regarding how best to manage a fictional rd world farm? Where the possibilities really become intriguing, as Gee and other researchers in the field have recognized, is when the experiential nature of games is blended with the social capabilities of the web. Consider, for instance, World Without Oil, an online alternate reality game designed to simulate a global oil crisis. World Without Oil ran for days in , and during that time, collected more than blog entries, voicemails, videos, and images from some participants worldwide who collectively imagined and documented their lives in the midst of a serious global oil shortage. All of these are now preserved as an archive that can be viewed and listened to by anyone. World Without Oil is suggestive of what John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas have called a network of imagination. ”The idea of a network of imagination,“ write Seely Brown and Thomas,
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ties together notions of community, technologically mediated collective action, and imagination, when players begin to act through joint investment in the pursuit of common ground. This kind of collective action is more than networked work of distributed problem solving. It requires that problems be thought of as group problems and that the goals of all actions and practices are to move the group forward. Anyone who has paid attention to recent news knows that World Without Oil did not solve the problem of the world’s dependency on oil or the myriad related issues this dependency creates. But this is largely beside the point. There is any number of relatively straightforward answers to the question ”How do we survive in a world without oil?“ just as there is to ”How do we stop hunger?“ but placed within the context of a diverse global society, these questions become deeply complex and seemingly intractable. The very best game environments help us think critically about these issues as individuals, contribute this thinking to the broader, collective imagination where it can shape and be shaped, and ultimately, as Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas put it, ”move the group forward.“ Consciousness required Of course, forward progress is only one of the possibilities. For all the potential that games represent, many people do see them as having a darker side. The level of engagement they encourage, for one, can be very powerful, even addictive. Even seemingly serious games leverage the pleasurable aspects of gaming environments to draw players in, and critics contend that the attractions of life in virtual environments may negatively alter our abilities to interface with the real world. Susan Greenfield, a well-known British neuroscientist, has been particularly vocal on this topic, arguing that games and other forms of modern technology have the potential to fundamentally alter our brains. There is a price to be paid for continually seeking pleasure via electronic stimulation. ”We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment,“ says Greenfield, “and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.” ”Hedonistic“ may not seem like a term that applies particularly well to the average serious gamer, but it is nonetheless worth considering whether infusing social problems into environments more typically associated with pleasure trivializes serious issues, perhaps diminishing our sympathy for them in the real world. In other words, do serious games face the danger of becoming only a game? It is hard to imagine this happening in socially-situated games like World Without Oil. For one, the alternate reality of such a game is just barely removed from our ”real“ reality – a convention that I suspect will hold as other, similar sorts of alternate reality serious games emerge. And the continual interaction with other players, even in a situation of collective imagination, would seem likely to pull even the most solipsistic of players back from the verge of leaving the real world entirely. There is perhaps more danger of trivialization in singleplayer games like rd World Farmer when played in isolation.
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I am enough of an optimist when it comes to the human mind to believe the danger is very small, but even so, as games become more and more a part of culture, it will be important to help players become conscious of how game impact us. James Paul Gee, in addressing the worries that adults may have about
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kids playing games, argues that ”Games make kids smarter when they play them proactively, that is, when they think about game design, how their own styles of play interact with that design, how different strategies work, and how games relate to other things like books, movies, and the world.“
This ability to step back occasionally and think about games as games, even as we are playing them – a skill as important for adults as for kids – augments the overall potential that games have in helping us think through complex issues and see the path to change. If you can’t beat ‘em … It is still relatively easy at this point to be dismissive of games in general, and games aimed at social change in particular. As fast as the gaming phenomenon has grown in recent years, games are still not as ubiquitous as old media forms like television or print. But that is changing fast. As Rob Fahey, former editor of GamesIndustry.biz argues in a recent TimesOnline piece, ”It’s inevitable: soon we will all be gamers.“ One of the keys to social change, of course, is to engage with society in the places where its members live and interact. Increasingly, games are one of the places, and as new generations come of age, they will be one of the most important ones. There are dangers to be averted and no doubt many other challenges to be overcome as more organizations embrace games as tools for change, but the ability they have to engage individual and collective imaginations, engender learning, and ”move the group forward“ is simply too compelling to ignore. Let the games begin.
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http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=
http://www.gamezone.com/news/____PM.htm
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/needvirtualworlds.pdf
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-/Modern-technology-changing-way-brains-work-says-neuroscientist.html
http://pc.gamezone.com/news/ PM.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article.ece
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We at CoreMedia are very democratic but CoreMedia is not a democracy. Soeren Stamer
I see two groups who really can drive the change: digital natives and top management! Willms Buhse
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Willms Buhse Since , Willms Buhse is responsible for CoreMedia’s marketing and communications. He is strongly involved in CoreMedia’s transformation to an Enterprise .. Previously, Buhse was working over five years for Bertelsmann in the field of technology strategy and is co-founder of Digital World Services in New York. In and , Buhse was voted one of the ”Top Most Influential People In Mobile Entertainment Worldwide“. Buhse is an author and editor of several books. Just recently, he co-published the book ”Enterprise . – The art of letting go“ with articles by renowned international authors and case studies from Nokia, SAP, Vodafone and many more. Sören Stamer Sören Stamer is an Entrepreneur in the field of Internet software platforms and Enterprise .. Born in Hamburg and grown up on a farm in northern Germany he founded his first company CoreMedia with while he was a student as a spin-off of Hamburg University. Sören has led CoreMedia as a CEO for years and turned it into a fast-learning organzation and a global software company with customers in nearly every part of the world. He became an Enterprise . evangelist when he embraced the web . paradigm and applied the same thinking with great success inside of CoreMedia. He strives to learn and believes in openness, self-organization and fairness as the basic principles of future organizations.
www.coremedia.com
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The Fast Learning Organization Enterprise . Interview with Willms Buhse and Soeren Stamer
we: Soeren, you started to transform CoreMedia into a fast learning organization a few years ago. A fast learning organization is your interpretation of Enterprise 2.0. How has your standing/function/work in the company changed with this process? Soeren Stamer: My function has changed. I still have the same title and same responsibility. As CoreMedia’s CEO I have to make CoreMedia successful – shareholders and the advisory board expect me to be responsible. But compared to the past, I am now more focused on setting the framework for the whole company. Take our product strategy – it’s not top-down anymore. Everyone is invited to participate, to bring in ideas, to blog about it, to share and discuss it. Those who participate make proposals for the CEO and CFO who are the ones who decide at the end of the day. And these proposals are made with consensus among participants. So by acting and performing like this CoreMedia has got rid of departments, and broken down barriers between development, marketing and sales. Everyone is invited to contribute to the decisions. So it’s very democratic but it’s not a democracy.
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we: What about you Willms? Willms Buhse: My role has changed quite a bit. I see myself more as a coach than as head of marketing. I gave marketing a new definition. Our slogan or motto today is: beauty comes from inside. In other words, it’s not the marketing department that creates the messages and takes the product to the customers. It’s truly all about the people we have at CoreMedia, helping them get on stage and be passionate communicators for their work and their products, with full enthusiasm for what they do. They themselves should transport this enthusiasm to the outside world rather than having a professional communication department to take care of it for them. It’s much more authentic. Statistics show that - % of company value is in communication. So – it’s important to make every employee aware of the tremendous importance of communication for the company’s success. we: Is the transformation process about giving up old structures or building up new ones? Soeren: This structure question is interesting. Why do we all have this clear idea that we have to have a huge static structure for companies? I believe it’s an idea of the past – this static structure, this one hierarchy. What I do is create an atmosphere, a value system, emphasize collaboration. This is the reverse of hierarchy. So the question now is why do we use the term ‘hierarchy’ to describe ourselves? I guess it’s more a convention, a social convention. I am deeply convinced that we don’t need these structures. It’s more about valuing the experts within your own company, valuing competencies and building up reputation! Willms: I think reputation is really important. Reputation is multi-dimensional. You can’t just say my reputation is only in terms of marketing, it has probably also to do with software, it has probably also to do with motivating people and so on. Only if you have something that is more than one dimensional, it’s very hard to organize. David Weinberger once gave an excellent speech about how to organize or categorize things. I still see a picture with a washing machine with a whole load of dirty clothes lying in front of it. Do you know how to sort them? Do you sort them by socks and shirts, do you sort them by colors, do you sort them by male and female? You have a similar problem when you structure an organization. It’s just as difficult. You might organize by projects you might also try to organize by teams, or by competencies, according to business lines or according to customers. So it’s a multi-dimensional thing. How do you structure this? I think the best way is to have a very flexible structure instead of fixed hierarchies. This way we can create teams and build projects precisely tailored to attractive market niches. And that’s what we’re trying to do at CoreMedia. Soeren: Structure has to be negotiated, defined, redefined – changes whenever we need them. So every team can change its structure. There might be some rules like, for example, transparency or bringing in an external coach since an outside view can see things the team is not able to see.So what we do at CoreMedia is, we introduce a dynamic structure where you
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have the ability to create projects that motivate people to be part of them and where they can decide who plays a role in the project. Where they can decide – do we need someone to represent us, do we need a project leader, and where they make the decision who that person should be. So we have a dynamic structure that is always evolving. I really believe we don’t need static hierarchies. We don’t need titles. You have a feeling for the magnificent things Willms can do. Willms can do much more than be the head of marketing. He can inspire people, he can coach people, he knows a lot about trends and the future, but these are all qualities that were never well used in the past because he always had the structure dictating to him. we: How do employees respond? Soeren: In the beginning it’s frightening for some people to loose structure, to change and act without certainty. Others really love it. They see the potential. We had to make people believe that change is possible. We introduced open spaces as a first step, to let them feel – we can work without hierarchy, this is much more fun. In the second phase, you find out that people have many more abilities, and many more competencies, and are much more creative. You start to explore their full potential and you empower them to bring their potential to the surface. we: How do you pay people without having any hierarchies or job descriptions? How do you fix the level for the right salary for the right person, does it change every three months? Soeren: What is a fair payment model for a dynamic structure? – This is a project we still have to implement. If I take the responsibility for a team to deliver something, is this more important than if I don’t do so? I believe the answer is yes! What happens if I don’t do it again next year? I believe that we will find a solution since we have developed a feeling for different inputs. For instance, we held a workshop last week on our product strategy and asked people in the room, who should be the decision-maker based on his or her competencies? And which competencies are important for decision-making about product strategy? And actually it was pretty easy. People wrote down their opinions and posted them on a wall. This way we got a clear picture of what is important. The people in sales, in marketing, strategy people – they all contributed and gave the developers a broader view. Developers realize that it’s not good if they decide all on their own about product strategy. I guess the same could be done in terms of the salary mechanism. Willms: People have the chance to expand their reputation, where they can use their strengths. Literally it is a question of supply and demand. And if people feel they don’t get paid well enough in the company they will go elsewhere. Just like freelancers, who can make a decision about whether they want to work with us or not. Whether they think that the prestige value of a project is so high they are prepared to work for less. And this will balance out.
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Soeren: I really believe that in future we will see less contracts. It will be more like: a company has a project, would you like to contribute? So it will be an open and more dynamic model. Willms: And also the other way round: If people are willing to contribute to a project, projects will happen. Otherwise we at CoreMedia will have to look to budgets to let it happen outside of CoreMedia. we: And now comes the big question: when will we see the results of all this in CoreMedia’s products? Or let me put it another way – do you already see a bottom line of significant financial results because of the changes? Willms: Not enough yet. Two years ago CoreMedia was in a difficult situation. % of our revenues were based on a product called Digital Rights Management (DRM). As global market leader for mobile DRM, our revenue numbers for this product declined % within two quarters when the world suddenly realized DRM wasn’t the right thing. Faced with this, CoreMedia realized a paradigm shift from control to cooperation. DRM is a very control-oriented tool. I don’t trust you as my customer so I will treat you in such a way that you can’t do bad things. The more you mistrust people the more they will push back. We realized we have to change our own behavior. It wasn’t a near death experience but it was tough enough to drive change. Secondly, we realized the dynamics in the market. We needed to be faster in adapting to these trends. And that we could hardly do with the ”software to own“ business model – with strategic platforms that run for years, and mammoth projects that don’t allow for agility. So we started to work on our product range. We implemented a corporate Twitter – we call it Trillr – micro blogging for enterprises. Within a few weeks, we now have to % of CoreMedia employees using this communication platform. And we also have our first partners and customers using it too. Soeren: The change is visible in the numbers. We were able to really turn around development with DRM. It’s not just about technology anymore – we provide the technology and the know-how to improve the collective intelligence of a company. This is our future business model. With the tools and the new thinking we have implemented at CoreMedia we are now more capable than ever before to face the fast changing environment and make profit from our capacity to adapt to change. Willms: That’s actually a big chance for us. Especially in larger companies we see two groups that really can drive change – digital natives and top management. Digital Natives grew up with Internet technology, and they want to use similar concepts and similar software when they take up work with a company. And top management should be interested in the development of the company and thus in bringing more transparency to it. So these two groups really drive the adaption of a fast learning company – we call it Enterprise ..
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we: How easy is it for your partners and customers to adapt to CoreMedia’s new structure? Soeren: We invite them to share our experience. So the really convincing part is that they come to our open spaces and listen to the people and how openly they talk about all the mistakes we make, all the issues and all the ideas we have. And then they go back and start to do the same. You have to experience a culture to adopt it. And when people experience it they just love it! we: So maybe this question will be kind of indiscreet. Soeren just said his job won’t become available due to legal restrictions. Probably yours Willms will be available if management structures are changing. How do you feel? How do you handle this? Willms: Trust me, over the past years we’ve been through several assessment centers and election processes. At the beginning it was really hard for me. But being elected by your team and confirmed by the executive board offers you much more acceptance. Frankly, it almost comes as a relief as I now find that I can do many more things which I’m really interested in. And I feel really fine with dropping things that I don’t enjoy doing because I hope somebody will pick them up. So that’s actually a positive development for me. Soeren: I am really happy that Willms pointed out that it’s kind of a relief since my impression of hierarchies is that nobody in the hierarchy is really happy about it. The people are kind of not happy to have somebody up there and they feel dependent. However, the managers are in a pretty unfair situation as well. They won’t ever feel and get the reputation and the positive feedback that is out there in the system since there is this fear of the ones who can decide upon their fate.
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CoreMedia – OpenSpace
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The real drivers of mass customization are consumers not any longer willing to compromise, and new tools allowing them to design their own offerings. Frank Piller
E-Democracy and web-based-toolkits at the ballot may be just ahead. Frank Piller
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Dennis Hilgers Dennis Hilgers is a senior researcher at the Technology & Innovation Management Group at RWTH Aachen. He received his Ph.D. in Management at Hamburg University and is now working as a project leader and lecturer at RWTH. His research is in the area of controlling and leadership practices for innovation management.
Frank Piller Frank Piller is a professor of management at RWTH Aachen and a co-director of the MIT Smart Customization Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frequently quoted in The New York Times, The Economist, and Business Week, amongst others, Frank is regarded as one of the leading experts on mass customization, personalization, and open innovation.
Web & Blog: www.mass-customization.blogs.com
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Co-Creating Value with Customers and Users: Mass Customization and Beyond Authors: Dennis Hilgers and Frank T. Piller
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When TIME Magazine announced their person of the year in , recognizing the person who matters most now, a wide audience noticed that a larger change was going on. In previous years, the person of the years has been a personality like George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, or Mohandas Gandhi, but also Charles Lindbergh or Bill Gates. In , this person were WE. We, the creative consumers. We, broadcasting our own media on YouTube. We, the engaged tinkerer hacking our TiVi to overcome their limits. We, configuring our sneakers to our preferred running style. We, the co-designers of our personal products. And Time Magazine was not alone. With the advent of Web . and social commerce applications all over the internet, we recently experience an exploding interest of companies and consumers alike for co-creation, mass customization, and user driven innovation.
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Mass customization: The mother of customer-centric value creation In line of business strategies focusing on the creative consumer, mass customization can be regarded as the first elaborated concept, with a history of more than two decades (the term was coined in by Stan Davis). Mass customization now seems to become the standard of the st century. The term denotes to an offering that meets the demands of each individual customer, but that still can be produced with mass production efficiency. To reach this efficiency requirement, a mass customization system is defined by a fixed solution space, characterized by stable but still flexible and responsive processes. As a result, the costs associated with mass customization should allow for a price level that does not imply a switch into an upper market segment. The solution space is utilized by customers who are integrated in the value creation process of the manufacturer by defining, configuring, or modifying their individual solution within a given set of choice options. Without the customers’ deep involvement, the manufacturer
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While mass customization originated industrial markets, many initiatives of consumer mass customization have been developed recently. Indeed, not a month has gone by without a major mass customization initiative by an established company or a new start-up. Some good examples of mass customization in consumer goods that were launched recently are Germany’s MyMuesli (customized cereal), Blends For Friends (create your own tea blend), Conde Nast’s TasteBook (customized cookbook with your favorite recipes), or John Maeda’s innovative configurator for Reebok that turns the favorite song of a user into a custom sneaker style. A segment of mass customization that has been exploding recently is the market of user-created photo books, including providers such as Picaboo, LuLu, CeWe, Blurb, Moo, and many others. Zazzle and Cafepress take a similar approach of selling custom printed T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads, and more. There are also mass customizing companies producing children books (flattenme), customized jewellery (Paragon Lake), dolls (My Twinn) and even bras (Zyrra). All these companies reported high double-digit sales and growth in the last year.
Mass customization has been seen as the result of new flexible manufacturing systems like rapid manufacturing. But the real drivers of mass customization are consumers not any longer willing to compromise, and new tools allowing them to design their own offerings. would be unable to adequately fill each individualized product demand. Dedicated toolkits should enable the customers to perform this configuration tasks on their own. A great industrial example of mass customization is American Power Conversion (APC). APC sells, designs, produces, delivers, and installs large complex infrastructure systems for data centers, and components for these systems. At the heart of its mass customization strategy of this company are a module-based product range and the use of product configuration systems for sales and order processing. In addition, the company has implemented a manufacturing concept, which involves the mass production of standard components in the Far East, and customer order-based final assembly at various production sites around the world within close customer proximity. The results of applying mass customization principles included a reduction of the overall delivery time for a complete system from around to days. Also, production costs were significantly reduced. At the same time, the company’s capability for introducing new products has increased dramatically. Due to the modular system architecture, new component technologies can be integrated within a matter of days, and not months as before.
Another very interesting approach has Zapfab or Fabidoo, two user manufacturing start-ups which offer a new way of delivering individualized, customized products. They are combining the creativity of user-generated content with the power of D Printing (fabbing). D Printing is rapidly gaining ground as a way of creating real, physical objects from D design data. Zapfab provides an easy way to access this technology: Once you have generated a D design you can choose to have it D printed: Zapfab will D print the design and deliver the finished object to you. Or consider the great custom USB sticks at Fabidoo, turning a ubiquitous commodity into a real piece of personality. Mass customization offers companies the flexibility to minimize new product development risk, but this flexibility does not come without costs. This strategy requires a redesign of the products and processes. This includes the creation of modular product family structures and often heavy investments in new flexible machinery equipment. For mass customization, also an elicitation system has to be in place to access the preferences of each individual customer and to transfer them into a precise product definition. Thus, while mass customization has plenty of opportunities, it will not become the dominating strategy of user co-creation.
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An alternative strategy to mass customization: Crowdsourcing co-design For an alternative strategy consider Threadless, recently names the ”America’s most innovative small company“ by Inc. magazine. Threadless also includes customers deeply in the value creation process, but still sells mass products. Founded in , this Chicago-based company sells a very simple product with great success: printed t-shirts. Together with just employees, the company’s founders sell more than fifty thousand t-shirts and earn profits amounting to over one hundred thousand dollars per month. This is achieved by transferring all essential productive tasks to their customers who, in turn, fulfill their part with great enthusiasm. Customers design their own t-shirts and help improve the ideas of their peers. They screen and evaluate potential designs, selecting only those that should go into production. Since customers (morally) commit themselves to purchase a favored design before it goes into production, they take over market risk as well. Customers assume responsibility for advertising, supply models and photographers for catalogues, and solicit new customers. Astonishingly, customers do not feel as though they are being exploited. In fact, they show great enthusiasm for the company that has made collaboration possible. They protect Threadless from imitators, (whose websites they tend to hack) and send innumerable ideas on how the company can become more productive and even better at what it does already. In return, the company Threadless focuses its attention on the ope-
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Comparing the strategy of Threadless with a company offering mass customized t-shirts reveals the difference between both business models: Take Spreadshirt, the market leader in custom t-shirts. Here, users can design their individual t-shirt that is produced just for them with a digital printing machine. At Threadless the production of t-shirts is going on in the classical way of good old mass production. But Threadless is following the bright idea of turning market research expenditures into quick sales. This method, which is called collective customer commitment, exploits the commitment of users to screen, evaluate and score new designs as a powerful mechanism to reduce flops of new products. The method breaks with the known practices of new product development. It utilizes the capabilities of customers and users for the innovation process. Open Innovation: Integrating the periphery of your firm into R&D But Threadless is just another step on the continuum of customer-driven value creation. On top of contributing to the design and customization of products, some customers even contribute to research and technical development of completely new products. Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough introduced the term ’open innovation‘ in to describe the systematic integration of external inputs in some (or even all) stages of the innovation process. One of his principles is that companies that adopt an open innovative approach have to recognize that ”not all the smart people work for my company.“
While mass customization has been successfully implemented in many industrial markets and, for example, the sports good industry, we see large opportunities for health related products and services. People are becoming more health conscious and companies will find techniques to design for the individual, based on age, weight, diet, family history, lifestyle and behaviors. ration and further development of their communication platform, over which interaction with and among customers takes place. Additionally, the company defines the rules of the game, honors those customer-designers whose designs were selected for production, and manages processes involved with the material delivery of goods (production and distribution). By doing so this small company was able to generate thousands of new designs with almost without any paid stuff.
A great example of a company making a business out of this statement’s power is InnoCentive. InnoCentive was launched in June by Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, as a research venture. Today InnoCentive is an independent enterprise that describes itself as the result of a new model of distributed research. It provides a way to search for solutions to technological problems outside of the conventional internal research and development structures of a firm. InnoCen-
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tive posts its clients’ (called ”seekers“) problems on its web site together with a financial reward for the best solution delivered within a given timeframe. Seeker companies are mostly large R&D operations like Procter&Gamble, BASF etc. They use InnoCentive when they are looking for brand new approaches and new ideas, especially when they are stumped in a particular research area. InnoCentive provides access to a global network of more than , scientists who offer solutions in the hope of winning the offered reward. The company facilitates problem formulation and posting, solution screening, confidentiality, intellectual property agreements, and award payment. Using this approach of distributed or open innovation, seeker companies get access to the specialized talents of tens of thousands of scientists without adding to their fixed costs. A recent research by Harvard Business School’s Karim Lakhani of analysing problems that had been posted on InnoCentive.com by large corporations from the chemical and pharmaceutical industry shows that the InnoCentive model is
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previous task he or she had solved in a different context. In most cases, the solution was outside of the seeker’s field of expertise, which means that the seekers would have been very unlikely to find the solutions on their own. The companies using InnoCentive are pioneering an important new approach to the innovation process. It is based on a Broadcast of Search by posting problems on that platform – not solution seeking. The new model suggests that companies can benefit from making a severe break from the expectation that R&D should be closed and private. Useful sources for innovative ideas and solutions lie beyond their external borders and a problem-broadcasting model may be much more efficient than trial-and-error. One may suspect that the efficiency of problem broadcasting is only realized for the toughest problems, but the efficiencies of open innovation apply to a much broader class of products and processes, and concern not only inputs from specialists, but solutions from innovative (lead) users, and even ordinary customers.
Rapid manufacturing (fabbing) is enabling mass customization in a new dimension. Industry and end consumers will increasingly request individually manufactured products beyond just picking options from modular predefined architectures. We expect that industries like furniture, lamps, chairs or functional parts for components to benefit most from this trend. not just different, but also highly efficient. The seekers previously had spent between six months to two years trying to solve the problems internally, without success. Offering on average $, for a successful problem solution, these problems were posted on InnoCentive. In general, solutions had to be submitted within six months of initial posting. Of the problems studied, (.%) were solved by the InnoCentive community. This is an impressive success, given that individual solvers were competing with organized corporate research labs. But even more impressive is the finding that on average a winning solver spent just hours to solve the problem – compared to six to unsuccessful months by the big corporations. The reason for this almost unbelievable result is rather simple: winning solvers already knew the solution! InnoCentive helps seekers by leveraging pre-existing knowledge distributed in their broad community of , scientists. In .% of all cases, the winner just reused an existing solution from a
The open call to a community to solve a given problem also results in higher quality of the input (compared to solving the problem internally). The economic benefits of allocating tasks to those contributors come from two things: Either they have lower costs in solving the task (for example, they already know the solution or have specific knowledge required to solve the task) or they have higher motivation (involvement, challenge, joy) to work on the task. In consequence this method of open innovation is based on self selection of a problem by potential contributors. For the organization, self selection demands no cost for screening, identifying and allocating tasks to actors. Self selecting actors are either motivated by their knowledge (solving the problem demands little effort from their side) or intrinsically by regarding the task as challenging or worth-while to solve. Furthermore the open call for participation in a not restricted network of participants allows the firm to tap into new knowledge sources not known to the task’s originator.
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Companies always have been craving for people’s needs, opinions, and attitudes. The rise of information technology opens the door to the customers mind. How about transferring these principles to the political and social sphere? Where is crowdsourced politics? E-Democracy and web-based-toolkits at the ballot may be just ahead. In all three cases we have seen above, mass customization, crowdsourcing co-design, and open innovation, companies could benefit from opening a closed value creation process and integrating actors in their periphery. This process could yield some impressive benefits and effects. At the end, however, we do not expect that open innovation and mass customization will become the only dominating strategies in our society, replacing
today’s development and production systems. For most items, we still just want to shop for a mass-produced item, just consume and not to create, just being surprised by a designer’s ideas and not to co-design. But for some items, for which we really care and where our involvement is high, we want more and to become involved.
Most of the smartest people always will work for someone else. By crowdsourcing internal development tasks, external experts supplement the skills of the firm. InnoCentive may be one way to also meet the demographic crisis of a lack of talents and qualified engineers/developers in many countries.
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We start competing for the exciting jobs and projects as early as possible. We are used to acquiring information independently and we therefore view the provision of permanent access to knowledge as selfevident. We digital natives expect to receive information and know-how at near-Google speeds in the workplace, both from our co-workers and from the company’s own information systems. Jonathan Imme
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Jonathan Imme Having grown up as a ”digital native“ and a child of the internet, Jonathan Imme, years old, has concerned himself with the challenges of the digitalization of our culture for many years now. No matter where – at the major record label Universal Music, as a bandmanager of MBWTEYP, as a social worker for the GTZ in El Salvador or as a founder of the mobile education plattform freedu – Jonathan always tries to descale old-established structures, to think out of the box and to set the customer, fan and user in the real focus. Jonathan has studied music business in Mannheim and currently lives and works in Berlin.
http://twitter.com/derjonathan
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we DIGITAL_NATIVES Author: Jonathan Imme
There used to be a time when we would be called ’nerds‘ or ’techies‘. Strange people with a near-obsessive compulsion to embrace new technology, and who’d rather communicate with their friends online than offline. People for whom the Internet itself was the ultimate source of information for solving any kind of problem whatsoever. However, society is now slowly coming to terms with the fact that a whole generation is growing up that has only ever known the ’digital age‘, and has therefore entirely accepted the digital way of doing things. We call ourselves the Digital Native generation. I was given my first PC aged . Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the WWW, had his moment of inspiration just at the right time for me, meaning that even during my school years I was able to access and return my homework via the Internet. I got my first cell phone in , when I was . This earned me strange looks from pretty much everyone to start with: ”Aren’t they just for managers?“ I received my second wave of strange looks when I started going from party to party with my PC, with the aim of establishing the digital MP DJ as a successor to the vinyl spinners. As one of the oldest of my Digital Native generation, I can probably be called an ’early adopter‘ as regards technological innovations. Nowadays, however, schoolchildren keep cell phones in their jean pockets and MP DJs are part of the night clubs’ standard setup.
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Then again, we Digital Natives are not only characterized by our self-sufficient attitude to new technologies. We also have a different concept of the culture of information, communication and entertainment. We listen to music and watch films online. The fact that we also use file-swapping sites comes from the simple fact that we’re not about to pay for content on principle – no matter how exciting it may be.
Give us an entertainment flatrate with no strings attached, free of device dependencies and with all of our favorite artists, and the cash is certain to start pouring in.
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networks not as a burden, but as something that’s enjoyable. And unlike the data protection activists, we view it as more advantageous to be open in the communication of our personal data and activities. In fact, let’s take a closer look at how we use the network.
We are used to acquiring information independently and we therefore view the provision of permanent access to knowledge as self-evident. We don’t read any newspaLooking to the long-term, and in the light of our con- pers, since they are neither temporary grasp of copyright law and our extensive recommendation and exchange activities among our friends, sufficiently up-to-date nor industry moguls would be better off sending us not to personalized to our tastes. prison but to the business development units of the enterWe generally only visit libratainment companies. ries because our professors After all, sooner or later truly want us to – and bewe’re all going to end up cause they view Wikipedia on the openjob market. and other sources that de(Even though our Google AdSense and Amazon Affi- pend on the ‘wisdom of the liate subscriptions give us a nice little earner from our crowds’ as frivolous and unblogs, we’re not going to be able to provide for our future families with this kind of money.) And so we start compe- reliable. And we sometimes ting for those exciting jobs and projects as early as possihave to laugh when we ble. see companies introducing To jump-start our careers, we buzzwords like Web . and spend a lot of time mapping crowdsourcing in their and managing the individual marketing campaigns just elements of our personal to pander (very obviously) to characters and interests onto our interests. It’s often the the various social networks, case that they are not only choosing them according to ignorant of the concepts but market segment. Luckily, in would also be unable to comparison with older gene- actually implement them rations, we view the setup within their businesses anyand maintenance of these way. diverse and career-oriented
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The last point is an important one, since the future will see many companies facing up to the challenge of adapting their corporate culture to suit the different ways of thinking embodied by the digital natives in terms of their attitude to communication and the mutual transfer of information. My generation is used to communicating both rapidly and highly dynamically, via the permanent and continual use of social communities, SMS, MMS and instant messaging tools. Even in our business projects, we also communicate largely independently of any considerations as to time or place. On the other hand, this naturally leads us to expect rapid reaction times from our partners in communication and at work. And there are many other areas where sizeable gaps between the generations are opening up. Wikipedia, Google Books, document portals, iTunes and many other online sources have taught us Digital Natives that knowledge and data are generally available free, on-demand and without any limitations as to their use. However, in the major companies in which I have worked so far, the hoarding of knowledge and information is still one of the most decisive factors for success, securing both your workplace in the business and your place in the company hierarchy.
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cism – via comments, rating mechanisms and other interactive tools as produced by the Web . movement This set of basic expectations forms part of our everyday lives: beginning at school or university, it persists as a value system whether we act as citizens, as members of our local church group or a political party, or, ultimately, as employees. It is of course true that people did have their own opinions and produce their own user-generated content before – the point in time at which Tim O’Reilly popularized the term Web ., making the participative and interactive online culture that the term describes into a newsworthy subject. However, the development of new technologies, web services and platforms has now given us a well-designed set of tools for formulating and communicating our opinions, our ideas and our content.
We Digital Natives thus expect to be given the opportunity Managers and project mana- and a platform to express our gers will need to come to opinions and recommendaterms with the fact that – to tions, not just by our teachers stay motivated and work in and professors, but also by the ways that suit us best – our city councilors, by our we Digital Natives expect to religious communities, by receive information and our politicians, by our bosses know-how at near-Google and our team leaders. And, speeds in the workplace, at the same time, we need to both from our co-workers be assured that this dialog is and from the company’s own being taken seriously. Then information systems. While again, if these platforms and we don’t operate entirely feedback channels are not as an anarchy and without granted us by the respective hierarchies, even online persons or institutions them(even Wikipedia has develo- selves, then we will make ped its own system of admi- use of third-party platforms – nistrators and moderators), or, where necessary, we will we are used to people both set up our own. accepting and acknowledging our feedback, our ideas and our constructive criti-
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In our private lives, our general behavior and ways of interacting with other people also seem at odds with the conduct of older generations. Those ”Will you go out with me? _Yes | _No | _Maybe“ letters where you ticked a box – remembered fondly by our parents during communal evenings by the fireplace – cause our digitally-driven brains to conjure up an analog frown of amused puzzlement. Yet the wedding bands on our parents’ fingers – which we notice in the same instant – do cause us to experience a twinge of the conscience as regards our own attitude to relationships. All those people that we ”poke“ on facebook every day, so many offers of friendship made and received on MySpace every hours, so many modifications to make to our Top Friends lists in the course of a lifetime: how on earth are we supposed to confine ourselves lifelong to just one partner in a world that exhibits such a high degree of flux? And what criteria we will use to choose such a partner? Will our generation manage to create a wiki profile for everyone on the planet? Will ex-partners rate the relationship skills of the person we select in their wiki profile? Will all of their hobbies, virtues and bad habits be tagged there as well, and filed into neat semantic categories? In fact, how long will it be before online services track all of the contacts we make and our entire consumer behavior across each and every network and then send us their recommendations for our future partner in life?
Experience certainly tells us that if something is technically possible, then it’s highly likely to be implemented. And, while I’m truly very happy to have grown up in the digital age with its wealth of technical innovations that make communication faster and more dynamic, even we Digital Natives do occasionally have ”analog“ pauses for thought from time totime that enable us to critically (and necessarily) reflect on our own lives and help us make the right choices for life’s truly important decisions.
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In fact, I had a moving revelation of this kind only a matter of weeks ago. I was on the train, just coming back from a conference as it happened. As we stopped in a small town, I got off, intending to catch a connecting train, which didn’t turn up. And so there was I, stranded in utter solitude at the station. For hours. No supermarket, no McDonalds and not a soul to keep me company. Just me – and the railway. I quickly pulled out my MacBook – battery empty. My iPhone switched itself off just as soon as I started using it to find an alternative connection. ”What on earth am I supposed to do until the next train comes?“ I wondered aloud. No Twitter, no emails, no SMS, no RSS feeds, no phone calls and no music. I was simply and effectively cut off from the outside world – and without even wanting to be. An asteroid could have annihilated the USA – and I wouldn’t have heard the news for hours. Perhaps the greatest shame of all was that I couldn’t even tell anybody else about my desperate situation by sending them a message via Twitter. While the first half an hour seemed to drag on for an eternity, I then, slowly but surely, started to enjoy my little enforced analog time out. I considered myself and my situation in life. I tried to imagine how someone would have acted if they had been in my situation, but years earlier. I thought about my family, and about my late grandma, who – thanks to the lack of a facebook profile – had not been in my thoughts quite as much as she should have been recently. I thought about my plans for my life and about the next years. At the end, I had even got as far as considering whether I should forbid my children to use Twitter, so that they could get to concentrate on what are probably the more important things in life. However, just as I had realized that in years my son would probably counter that tactic with: ”Dad, Twitter is for grandpas!“… the train pulled into the station.
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We distribute, shape and share information, knowledge and cultures Platoniq
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Régine Debatty Régine Debatty (BE/DE) studied Classics in Belgium and England, worked as a teacher of Latin and ancient Greek, then moved to media, working as a documentary director for the Belgian national TV, as a reporter for the radio Onda Cero in Spain then as a consultant for the MEDIA programme of the European Commission in Italy. She writes about the intersection between art, design and technology on her blog we-makemoney-not-art.com as well as on design and art magazines such as Art Review (UK). She also curates art shows and speaks at conferences and festivals about the way artists, hackers and interaction designers (mis)use technology.
www.we-make-money-not-art.com
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The Bank of Common Knowledge We Distribute, Shape and Share Information, Knowledge and Cultures Régine Debatty interviewing Platoniq
The Barcelona-based group Platoniq (aka Susana Noguero, Oliver Schulbaum, Ignacio García and Joan Villa Puig) gained world fame a few years ago when they launched Burn Station, a mobile selfservice system for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge. Legally and under a Copyleft Licence. With the motto ”taking the Internet to the streets“ and inspired by the way the web works, Platoniq is dynamically exploring new models to distribute, shape and share information, knowledge and cultures. Platoniq’s latest endeavour is Banco común de Conocimientos (Bank of Common Knowledge, BCK), a kind of lab platform that engages with new ways of enhancing the distribution channels for practical and informal knowledge.
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we: You set up a BCK-2008: Free Knowledge Market last March in Barcelona. How did the whole experience go? Platoniq: Actually, we’ve already set up free knowledge markets (this was the second one in Barcelona) during the last two years of the Bank of Common Knowledge development. Previously we also had built BCK’s active nodes in Cambridge UK (Wysing Arts Centre) and in Lisbon, both ending up with the open organisation of a market. The last Bank of Common Knowledge happened in Barcelona in April. Exchanges of knowledge took place in spaces with the help of volunteers. The BCK Markets are made possible through the offers and requests that BCK receives from citizens: How does a consumer cooperative function? How can I share wifi with my neighbours? Is it possible to earn money through collaboration instead of competition?, Is it possible to unfreeze patent-protected scientific knowledge? What can we learn from traditional cultures in the economic context? How can we regularize immigration documents in Spain? How can we set up a wiki without computer? The Market of the Bank of Common Knowledge attempts to cover a wide range of topics and materialize them through free workshops and manuals for urban survival. A gathering of transgressive and generous experiences by individuals and communities who put into practice various forms of autonomy in daily life. Those exchanges are recorded and published online under a copyleft license in order to guarantee that knowledge keeps on circulating. Besides, experimenting with new forms of participation and organization is fundamental for BCK. The BCK organization is always open and follows dynamics made of cooperation, documentation of the whole process and a responsibility distributed among all the persons involved. Anyone interested can participate to BCK, either by joining the internal organization, or by offering or requesting knowledge or even by helping us produce contents to be distributed online.
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The main topics we focus on are: EDUCATION (PPedagogy) Experiments in the transmission of knowledge. Generating educational methodologies and systems which augment the possibility to turn each moment of one’s life into an opportunity to learn. ECONOMY Models of auto-management of cultural projects. Exploration of economic systems sustainable for free culture. ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE Going beyond the creation of free contents to engage also in strategies of exchange and recycling of knowledge in danger of disappearing. PUBLIC SPACE Investigating the various use of public space related to the transmission of knowledge. Exploring the existing possibilities to use public space for collective activities of exchange (guide of places and actions required to be able to use them). CITIZEN RIGHTS What are our rights, what can we do in case of abuse, experiences of communities who work to improve life in common. we: How receptive is the general public to the concept and opportunities offered by BCK? Or is it mostly the ”creative commons“ crowd who is enthusiastic about the project? Platoniq: The copyleft and the free culture crowd is naturally more receptive to the BCK project and to horizontal dynamics of knowledge sharing. Nevertheless, in order to make the free culture not only free, but public, the main objective of BCK is to apply the positive effects and strategies of the free software movement and pp systems to the areas of education and citizen participation, setting free the full potential of individuals and collectives through self-determination, autonomy and infinite networking. BCK is organized as an open source model of knowledge transfer, a laboratory for inventing and trying out new forms of production, education, organization and distribution, involving new roles for producers and receivers, experts and amateurs, teachers and students... Right now we are working on several strategies to lay the foundations of this mutual education network, offering every individual the chance to share their current interests with others, similarly motivated peers in the fields of ecology, technology and communication, alternative economies, civil and human rights, public space use or any knowledge to make life easier and more autonomous. We are currently testing various knowledge transmission and communication formats, such as games, demos, workshops, first person experiences, challenges, first aid kits or take away theory. These activities are documented in a set of video manuals or knowledge capsules currently being produced for inclusion in the Bank of Common Knowledge. However, the main goal of the project is not to
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build an online video archive, even if that would end up being one of the consequences. The real challenge for the Bank of Common Knowledge is to build a model of transmission and free exchange whose social organization and self-training strategies can be easily replicated.
we: Does atomization kill community? How can we formally translate Ubuntu’s like project governance in social and public space? How can we explain notions such as decentralized budget, decentralized trust etc and other human protocols that sharing and peer production involves?
we: What makes you think that you are on the right path and that the quest for a free exchange of knowledge is more than an utopia (that’s my pessimistic and cynical side speaking here)?
Platoniq: Among the first public actions that BCK undertook over the years and , the Platoniq group launched a research project that looked for new perspectives which would enable, on the one hand, broaden the network of BCK collaborators and, on the other hand, improve and stimulate the development of its structure, content, strategies of dynamization or the economical sustainability of the initiative, the same way one would do during the beta testing process of a software project.
Platoniq: BCK is one of the many projects that has emerged of a society where peer production and peer governance present new opportunities for individuals and groups to create value together. We try to place these new developments in both a historical context and a future oriented context. This is no utopia anymore, copyleft and the sharing of knowledge is a functional revolution. Regarding feedback, after a long year of development, traveling, meeting people, giving workshops about BCK in different countries during the last year (lastly in Shanghai, México City and Casablanca where a node is under construction) made us realize it would be more than useful to produce a BCK manual focusing on how to build/organize/sustain local Banks of Common Knowledge, or any collective production/trading community on the basis of our experience and the experience of others. This is actually the most frequent demand to the Bank of Common Knowledge. we: How do I start a BCK? Platoniq: To fulfill that demand, we’re actually developing a set of exercises/manuals which explain and apply methodologies and ethics of social and free software to social community building, looking at ”atomization“ of knowledge and civic participation on the basis of PP networks and protocols. So this is clearly about PPedagogy. All these games/exercises are performed offline, although they are inspired in social software and social open networks functionalities, their aim is clearly to help people to understand, practice, decide, find their own protocols of networking and encourage civic engagement and community building/sustaining. An example of it is the social tagging game we presented at LABoral, which is about applying folksonomy to offline social networks using post it notes. The main questions the games and BCK itself try to resolve are: Suggestion or main questions to resolve: What do we really mean by peer education? Atomization on a large scale (such as in the Debian APT package manager or the CVS version control system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree of decentralized, collaborative and incremental development. But what other kinds of knowledge apart from software can be atomized, and how?
To achieve this objective we entrusted several experts with a series of exercises/games that allowed the simplification of ideas, strategies and concepts related with the various technological protocols and philosophies that form the basis of the Bank of Common Knowledge, in an attempt to communicate it to a non-initiated public. Among this group of experts are the researcher Ismael Peña Lopez, Juan Freire (biologist and hyper-active blogger who explores the interaction between urban space, social networks and digital spaces), Michael Linton (creator of the mythical LETSystem in the ‘s), Gregor Gimme, one of the initiators of the online community for video learning Sclipo, Enric Senabre (technological coordinator of the Observatorio para la CiberSociedad), Dmytri Kleiner (polemical leader of Dialstation, a project of ”venture Communism“), or the sociologist, biologist, economist and expert in barter networks in Latin America Heloísa Primavera. we: Now a question about a project which was not exhibited at LABoral but which I nevertheless find intriguing. The S.O.S. project is a kit to communicate and exchange knowledge in public and private space inspired by the Speaker’s Corner. How did you use this kit and how did people react to it? Which kind of situation did it give rise to? Platoniq: Actually The S.O.S (stands for Science of Sharing) project is still under heavy development. It hasn’t been tested on the streets yet. We plan to release both a software and a mobile unit which are the core of the project during a set of actions due to be held next autumn in various middle sized cities of Catalunya. The kit contains a battery-powered sound system with microphones, a computer and an FM radio transmitter, mounted on a scooter that will serve as a ’knowledge delivery /recovery service‘ to facilitate temporary knowledge-exchange actions. In a few words, and to maintain suspense till the autumn, the S.O.S project seeks to adapt the techniques of peer-to-peer media sharing to collaborative, peer-to-peer education, allowing discrete chunks of information to be broken down and passed on via a network of volunteers, this is about atomisation of knowledge and atomisation of the city. S.O.S is an analog tracker, connecting peers and seeds, reclaiming public space . of the knowledge city.
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S.O.S will be the result of the lessons learnt with the BCK project, as well as four years of public domain research and development, working on the burn station project, a free software-based open source project, that seeks to generate an alternative model of production and distribution of copyleft music in the public space. In the case of Burn Station, the objective was to put in practice a % collaborative system based on three interacting communities: net labels and artists that feed the database, software developers and groups administrating local Burn Stations. An attempt to strategically combine the experience of peer-to-peer networks with the Jamaican sound system culture. (PP on a Face--Face basis). An important lesson learnt from the BURN STATION software development: test, share and further develop software in the streets before publishing it on the net. It is the best and the most rigorous software testing model imaginable. Definitely inspiring ... Nevertheless, the most interesting thing about Burn Station for us is that it has been autonomously reproduced in schools, social centers, libraries and universities in Europe and South America, demonstrating its value as an educational tool. That’s exactly what we expect to happen with the S.O.S project although the challenge is more complicated this time because there is no consumerism involved here (free distribution is not enough!), no music involved, just raw production of collective knowledge from scratch. We need to build and drive our own networks! Back to the future of commons!
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we_magazine – on lulu.com
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Why lulu.com? We think that lulu.com meets our needs best and it also is an excellent example of a new ”WE“. To be clear, Lulu is not our publisher. It’s a digital marketplace guided by a vision of empowerment and accessibility. It is built on its proven ability to grab hold of the long tail of user-generated content and provides an empowering outlet for creators of all types. we_magazine will be available under a creative commons licence on lulu.com. We are offering two services: downloadable PDF-file (including weblinks and links within the PDF) price: € get your PDF version simply by typing in we_magazine on lulu.com paperback print version € plus shipping get your printed version simply by typing in we_magazine on lulu.com
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II got my first idea about ’we_magazine‘ in February at the DIY (do it yourself) Video Summit in Los Angeles which Henry Jenkins was also attending. He called his blog post on the Summit ”From youtube to wetube“ (see page ). During those two eventful days it gradually dawned on me what enormous power the Internet has for shaping our understanding of ”we“ and of just what ”we“ are capable of moving and shaking in the age of the World Wide Web – a range of huge opportunities comes into sight only matched in scale by the challenges they bring with them! Turning them into a quarterly magazine became my fixed goal. And now you have it before you – the very first issue of we_magazine! Special thanks go to Markus Beckedahl, Steffen Bueffel and Bea Gschwend without whose bright ideas and active help the magazine would never have got off the ground. And thanks too to all our authors for the trust they have shown in us and for their articles and interviews which offer such insights into their own personal ”we“. we_magazine is international. Even if the authors in this issue are mainly from Europe and America, this obviously doesn’t mean that Asia and Africa will be out of our focus. As you’ll see in the next issues. We’re very much moving on the ”cutting edge“ with the topics we deal with and we warmly welcome the highly controversial viewpoints put forward by our authors which are first and foremost intended to stimulate discussion and debate. All this territory is so new and unexplored that we’ve very little experience to fall back on. As Stuart Kauffman puts it so well in the opening sentence of his article (page ), ”We are at a hinge of global history and need all we can muster to manage safe passage.“ Cross-media from the very outset, we_magazine is also an experiment. We post all the texts online at www.we-magazine.net and sell a PDF and print version via lulu.com – a marketplace for online publishing and selling. We think that this kind of approach comes closest to the we-idea and the spirit of the Internet. Ulrike Reinhard
Issue will be launched on February at HomeBase in Berlin!
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