The Guardian: Why nations need intelligent, differentiated strategies for investing in broadband

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Last week The Guardian asked me to write an article from a futurist’s perspective commenting on the debate on Britain’s internet priorities. They published it under the title For better internet connectivity, we must invest in bandwidth.

Below is the full text of the article. I will write more on this topic later, as it is so critical for nations to take intelligent, differentiated, relevant strategies to broadband investment in order to create prosperous economies and societies.

For better internet connectivity, we must invest in bandwidth

In a digital world, high download speeds are less important than capacity – those who remain offline risk further isolation

Our future will be connected. Humanity is in the process of transitioning into a world in which we can be better understood as a richly connected collective than a set of individuals. Connectivity will drive our prosperity, both economic and social.
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Social Media and the Future: Keynote slides at CIO Summit

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This afternoon I am giving a keynote on Social Media and the Future at the Australian CIO Summit in the Gold Coast.

Here are the slides from my presentation. As always, my keynote slides are shared with the proviso that they are designed to accompany my presentation and are NOT intended to be useful on their own. However you might find them of interest.

To provide just a little context on the flow of my keynote:
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The rise of micro mavens: Building business empires around personal brands

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Trevor Young, aka PR Warrior, is launching a new site Micro Domination which covers the “Global Microbrand Revolution”.

The site already includes an excellent free e-book The Micro Maven Revolution. You can download it from here or by clicking on the cover below.

Trevor opens the book by practising what he preaches, highlighting his capabilities and brand in a low-key way in front of excellent content. He then describes the core idea:
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Don Tapscott: The arc of history is a positive one, towards openness

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This week’s TEDGlobal2012 event is themed Radical Innovation. The opening presentation, very fittingly, was by Don Tapscott, who spoke about Four principles for the open world. Do take the 18 minutes to see his exceptional presentation.

The four principles for openness that Don offers are:
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What will we do with the extraordinary potential of crowd business models?

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I was just interviewed by Martin Metzmacher as part of his Netrepreneurs series. The 30 minute video interview is below.

While the broad topic of the conversation was about how to use crowds effectively, Martin focused through the interview on my motivations for what I do. At the end of the interview he asked me to summarize what I felt was most important in what we’d covered.
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Will offices still exist in the future?

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I’m currently doing a five-city speaking tour for Canon, speaking about the future of workspace. In my keynote I talk about the driving forces of change in work and organizations, the changing nature of the workspace, and the leadership required to create the next phase of work.

Until recently there were two major workspaces for knowledge work: offices and field work. Communication technologies, economic shifts, and changing corporate attitudes have enabled the rapid rise of home workers. In addition, co-working facilities or what I call the cloud workplace are becoming prominent in providing many of advantages to workers of office work without requiring commuting into a central office.

When we think about the future of workspace, given the massive shift to distributed work, the question arises of whether centralized office will still have a reason to exist in the future.
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MIT global study on social business: Executives increasingly understand the value and success drivers

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MIT Sloan Management Review together with Deloitte have just launched 2012 Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project, drawing out some very interesting insights from a survey of almost 3,500 executives from 115 countries.

Below the slides of the report I have selected several of the interesting slides with brief commentary.

Social Business: What Are Companies Really Doing? – Survey Questions and Answers

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Creating emergent, adaptive systems in organizations

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In my keynotes and executive sessions I often use the analogy of ant colonies, in which the collective intelligence of the colony is far greater than that of its individuals.

Since the collective intelligence of many – or even most – human organizations is significantly less than the intelligence of many of its participants, there are no doubt lessons we can learn.

In my book Living Networks I included a small section on Creating adaptive systems in Chapter 6 on Network Presence. The company I mention, CompanyWay, was subsequently acquired by AskMe and in turn by HiveMine, by name at least keeping to the spirit of the initial concept.

The underlying concepts described in the passage below are now being implemented into some of the most interesting crowdsourcing platforms of today, building the mechanisms whereby we can create value – and hopefully intelligence – from many.
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Why crowds are an extension of our capabilities

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Marshall McLuhan very often provides an instructive reference point for how we understand our changing world. As I wrote in my Chapter 1 of Living Networks:

The brilliant visionary Marshall McLuhan accurately described the media as an extension of our senses. Your eyes can see what’s happening in your immediate vicinity, your ears can hear what people are saying in the same room as you, but with television and radio as an adjunct to your senses, you can see and hear anywhere around the world. All of the cameras and microphones of the world’s media are an extension of your eyes and ears, and journalists are your personal emissaries to report on their findings and impressions.

In my keynote on The Future of Crowds at TheNextWeb conference shown below I built on this perspective to suggest that:

“Crowds are an extension of our capabilities”

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Open Meeting Protocol and the structure of emergent collaboration

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Last week I had an early evening meeting set up with Indy Johar, the inspiring co-founder of Hub Westminster. When I arrived I found that Indy had invoked an ‘Open Meeting Protocol’, offering £10 to Matt Sevenoaks of KPMG to join the meeting, who in turn invited Shelley Kuipers, the CEO of Chaordix, who as it happens I had conversed with on email as reecently as a few days before but had never met in real-life. Another Hub Westminster member Pamela joined us.

To be frank I don’t completely understand the protocol, even after viewing the very interesting Prezi explanation below from David Pinto. In essence it is a structure for inviting people to join a meeting by paying them (nominally) £10, and thus participating in a value-creating structure.

eco^external on Prezi

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