Conches

Reimagining "Value" For A Post-Crisis Economy

(Social) Value: Love
"Money can't buy me love" is both cheesy and true

The reason why money can't buy love is because, ultimately, love is the value that money represents. Money is a proxy for value and value is that which holds us together and makes us relevant, love. This feels cheesy or even embarrassing because we have broken our social contract with value. Specifically, we have inappropriately imbued money with a value of its own, disassociating money from its role as an intermediary, as a temporary representation of value in a chain of transactions. Money has become the object as opposed to the expedient. It is my thesis that value creation must be the frame within which wealth creation fits; that our humanity can no longer be subjugated to our economy due to a false primacy of our intermediary for value, cash. I believe that our economy should serve our humanity.

Please read the rest at Change.org...

My First Ever Guest Blog: Pop!Tech Blog

Titled "Our First Nerd President", I wrote about accountability through transparency, Democracy:  Participation and Collaboration, and Insight

http://www.poptech.org/blog/index.php/archives/2178

Throw some comments on it so they think I somebody.  :)

Rick Warren and the Inauguration in Twitterese

I have just had a wonderful conversation with 3 people (@dschach, @peterscampbell, @tracy1314) on Twitter about Rick Warren and the Obama inauguration. I hope to write a post about my opinion on this topic later.  However, I am quite smitten with this dialog. This is the second time that I have had a great online conversation that has challenged me and helped me to grow. It is possible.

You have to read from the bottom up for it to make any sense.  Even then, it's very disjointed, but then that is how all this social networking stuff works, right, disjointed?

A dialog with a friend

I am in the process of reading Anathem by NeaI Stephenson recently so I have been itchin' for a socratic dialog. I got one in a long conversation the other day with a friend on my facebook profile.  The topic was radical transparency.  I really enjoy thinking things through this way and I wish there were more opportunities.

 Steve Wright I do not believe that there are situations where information should be withheld. "Should" is the critical word. via Twitter - 11:45am

 Jeannie Pettigrew Whelan at 2:49pm December 30

Hmm. I don't think I believe you.

 Steve Wright at 5:12pm December 30

Really? Why?

 Jeannie Pettigrew Whelan at 9:34pm December 30

Well, I can think of several scenarios when information should be withheld...in order to preserve peace and balance. Maybe it's best to withold, but not make a big deal out of it.

Are you saying you are in favor of transparency?

 Steve Wright at 8:28am December 31

I am definitely in favor of transparency. We have earned the world we are in today by assuming the privilege of withholding information. The assumption that I can create peace and balance by choose what information to withhold is mostly hubris. We can't have balance with transparency. Additionally, the conceit that allows us to withhold information actually stunts our development. We can advance as a world only if we provide the information that will catalyze new insight.

 Jeannie Pettigrew Whelan at 10:04am December 31

Can you/do you apply this in your personal life as well? I have some specific examples in mind that are too personal to post here..If I were to divulge information that I know that others have been "shielded" from, it would cause pain, disappointment, sorrow. And it would all be for "transparency." So what?

Radical Transparency

I used to be a high school teacher.  Nine years in the classroom and in the front office working with disenfranchised youth. There was only one thing nearly universally abhorred by every young person I have ever met, censorship. I spent a lot of my time as an educator making the case for nuance, that there are occasions where censoring or withholding information is necessary. 

In the way of the world, I have come full circle. I am a nearly unyielding advocate for radical transparency. With radical transparency we would not be at war in Iraq.  With radical transparency our economy would not have been floated by imaginary value where investment is more like gambling. 

In 2005 Harold Pinter was given the Nobel Prize for Literature. He just died on Christmas eve, 2008. There are two quotations from that speech that add the nuance that is necessary to this discussion.

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

A misunderstanding that I struggle to overcome is that transparency does not equal truth telling. The assumption that I, or anyone, hold the truth and the hubris to assume that I can calculate with any certainty the conditions under which that truth is to be withheld is absurd.  As Pinter says above, there is no truth, no reality.  I believe the best we can do is to aggregate our collective experience and understanding.  Only with radical transparency can this aggregation divine what may be real or true.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us, the dignity of man.

    - Harold Pinter Dec 7th, 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech

Only with radical transparency can we hope to respond to this challenge.

Change.org Idea: Limit Media Consolidation

At the urging of Arthur Codington, via a post on Facebook, I recently commented on a Change.org idea.

Limit Media Consolidation

We need more voices in the media. Establish policies that limit the number of radio/tv stations one company can own. Create incentives that give voice to perspectives we're not currently hearing in the mainstream media.

My comment is attached here (and on change.org), please go over to the change.org idea to post yours

Social Impact Metrics

I just wrote a post over at the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Blog on Social Impact Metrics.

http://blogs.salesforce.com/nonprofit/2008/12/social-impact-a.html

What I think Twitter's Business Model Should Be

I Twitter. A lot. I read a recent blog post by Nick Bilton at O'Reilly on Twitter's potential business model. Essentially Nick recommends highly personalized "smart" advertising via Twitter. 

"@nickbilton, 45 other Twitters in Brooklyn love the MINI Cooper, they say it is easy to park in your area and great on gas. Check it out here."

While this is probably inevitable at some level, It would be really unfortunate and, I think, it misses the value of Twitter all together.  I have been writing about how I think Web 3.0 should be defined, characterizing web3 as uniquely user centric. I believe Twitter could be an interesting example of this if some new development happens.  That new dev is what I want to write about.

So, Twitter needs a business model.  Instead of creating another advertising delivery platform I would like them to figure out how to leverage their product by providing deeper services through new development.

Some ideas:

Compete with Yammer and provide powerful organization focused functionality.

"White label" Twitter to provide features for specific communities that are rooted in fee for service websites.  This is very powerful if these communities stay very porous where they can be discovered by Twitter users at large.  The driver to join is more about access to content than it is introductions to new Twitters.  Some examples are:

• last.fm
• ancestry.com
  
• salesforce.com
  
• Amazon.com (product and web service communities)
• GlobalGiving.org, Kiva.org, Ashoka, etc.
  
• Software or other product user communities independent from but sponsored by the the corp
  
• other...

Buy / Compete with MrTweet.net helping users find convergence with like minds, or even more interestingly, discover shades of grey or promote difference to fight agains the preaching to the choir or tribes mentality.

The User Centric Web

In my last post I blathered on about what I thought should characterize Web 3.0.  This time I want to quickly look at a handful of sites that I think are great examples of what the web should be.

PAAS

Providing a "roll your own" web platform is defintely a hallmark of the user centric web.  Some notables here are Amazon (S3, EC2, etc), Google Apps, Salesforce.com, etc.  These platforms for solutions.  They require an "initiative" with something resembling a business model.  These platforms can be molded to create interactive environments for other users to interact with.  These new tools are definitely a democratizing force in web development analogous to what the handheld video camera and iMovie did for video production.

The User Centric Web

Web 2.0 focuses on interactivity it tended to be about creating environments for Ttribes or consumption cults.  Web 2.0 is primarily a way for consumers to design their consumption.  The next iteration of the web will do better than Crowd Sourcing, it will facilitate individuals in creating value and it will provide tools for that value to be discovered.  Some great examples are:

Web 3.0: WE can't let THEM decide it for US

Here is how Wikipedia defines it:

Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:...

This stuff makes great sense and it is a logical extension of web 2.0; actually, I would suggest that it IS web 2.0.  We will see the rise the semantic web and various sense making tools will emerge to help us filter and discover.  However, what I see in the definitions above is really, really, really interactive television where the USER has great control of the information that they can digest.  What is massively wrong about this definition is that it's nothing new.  It's a feature set. 

It is unreasonable to version the Internet in terms of features.  If features were the only variable then we are surely well past web 3.0.  So what do I think web 3.0 is...