An Adventure into the Great Bear Rainforest (Part 2)

This trip into the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) was rich in learning. It would be impossible to describe all the knowledge and experiences gained through it. Two experiences stand out in my mind and may help me illustrate.The first experience was the opportunity to observe wild life in the GBR environment. I had mentioned the many encounters with whales in my previous post. But this time we were on land in a stand overlooking a creek. We were fortunate enough to see a number of black bears hunting fish in preparation of their hibernation.[All photos courtesy of Mike Robbins].

One of the three black bears that we were able to observe was an older one, getting slow and less successful in catching fish. It fed on the leftovers of the other bears. It was not certain to survive the coming winter. Watching it was sad but reminded me of the immutable realities of life.

The ultimate experience was to be able to see the very rare Spirit Bear and to observe it for over half an hour relatively close. The Spirit bear was the most successful in catching fish. Apparently he has an advantage because of its white fur; fish don't get alarmed as much as with black bears. Another amazing fact I learned from our guide is that bears artificially constipate themselves ahead of hibernation by eating sand with the fish. In spring they then consume a specific plant that gets them normalized again. In the first photo below you can see the Spirit Bear looking for the fish hiding under a tree fallen into the creek .

In the second photo you can see the Spirit Bear finishing a large fish it caught a minute earlier.

Until very recently Gitga'at people were forbidden to speak about any sightings of Spirit Bears in order to protect them from hunters. But with support from Tides Canada the Gitga'at people have set up a watch program that has significantly reduced hunting and poaching in their territory, though not completely eliminated them.

The second experience that marked my memory of this trip was the visit to Whale Point. We landed on the southern tip of Gil island at a rugged rocky coast (no docks of any kind) and climbed a steep hillside of slippery black rocks. There we found two wooden buildings. A house in a small clearing and at the cliff overlooking the sea, a barrack. It turns out these are the home and workplace for Janie Wray and Hermann Meuter for the last 11 years! The house was built without cutting a single tree, using mostly drift wood, we were told. Power is generated through 2 banks of solar cells, one tree-top wind generator, and a run-of-the-river generator all charging a bank of 12 volt batteries. The batteries in turn feed a DC/AC inverter that provides 110V AC for the house and the barrack.

The barrack houses a lab (part of what Janie and Hermann call their Cetacea Lab) with electronic gear to listen and record whale signals from hydrophone (underwater microphones) placed at strategic points around Whale Point. Over the years Janie and Hermann have not only accumulated an extraordinary collection of recorded whales vocalizations but gained amazing insights into the whale songs construction. Janie told us about their observation of a whale adding a "sonnet" or segment to the pod's song, which then gets picked up by the rest of the pod. They also developed a number of catalogs for the different whales observed in the region.

 You can learn more about this amazing story of commitment at forwahles.org where you can read about Janie and Hermann work and even try to listen live to whale signals.

Nurturing the Next Generation of IT Workers

In an age where technology seems to drive everything and where information & communication technologies (ICT) are at the heart of most if not all of technological advances, both female and male enrollment in ICT disciplines in Canada, believe it or not, is declining!

One reason behind this complex phenomena is the perception of high-school students of what an ICT career looks like. Mostly, students envisage a geeky type writing code on a computer. These perceptions are amplified by the challenges faced by many high-school teachers in understanding and teaching ICT. It is also supported by the outdated occupational titles used in the federal government's National Occupation Classification (last updated in 2006), which do not reflect the radical changes that ICT professions have undergone in the last few years.

The changes happened gradually. Initially ICT was one of the lines of business and the repository of ICT in the organization. But as ICT became more and more integral part of other business functions such as accounting, sales, operations, marketing, human resources, customer relations etc., they transformed into a horizontal business function spanning all vertical lines of business. As a consequence ICT managers had visibility to all enterprise systems and processes and became therefore the prime candidate for innovating to improve the performance of the enterprise. This in turn required a different type of manager, one that along a sound understanding of technology can also bring deep understanding of the business and the ability to efficiently communicate with the various lines of business in their own jargon.

Another aspect of the same problem can be observed in a number of industries that have recently become heavy users if ICT. Although workers in pharmaceuticals, genomics, or bioinformatics use primarily ICT, when asked about their occupation, they would rarely classify themselves as ICT workers.

Many changes need to happen to address this situation. One is obviously to update the occupational classifications. More importantly there is a need to change the perception of high-school students about the  professions available in an ICT career. A number of CIOs (Chief Information Officers) from a variety of industries are volunteering their time to visit schools and tell students about their profession and their career path. Another activity is to sponsor ICT students and recognize excellence in their work.

As part of the latter, the CIO Association of Canada in collaboration with Ryerson University participates yearly in the Awards Program of the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management through offering the Dr. Catherine Aczel Boivie Scholarship awarded to a student achieving a high standing in the Business Process Design course at the end of the third year. This year I had the privilege of representing the CIO Association in presenting the scholarship to the  2011 recipient, Mehran Vahedi.

I was also thrilled to discover the Dave Codack Academic Achievement Award offered to two students. Dave is a member of the CIO Association and holds the advocacy portfolio on its National Board.

It was a real pleasure to meet many of the brilliant recipients of this year's Award Program during the reception preceding the ceremony. It gives one hope that change is slowly happening but it also highlights how much more work needs to be done. Many more people from all walks of life should get involved to sponsor this and similar activities for the benefit of their children, their organizations and their country.

Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects

Last week I attended the Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI. Called BIF-6 in reference to it's organizer, the Business Innovation Factory and it's sixth occurrence, the two-day event exposes participants to thirty exceptional storytellers in a intimate theater setting. I had attended last year's BIF-5 and found it inspiring and energizing, so I went for more.

An even greater value in attending BIF-6 is really in the networking that takes place before, after and between the stories. BIF founder Saul Kaplan calls it "random collisions of unusual suspects" because he and his team use diversity and diversification as a core principle to enrich these collisions. Storytellers as well as participants are from every walk of life imaginable: from serial entrepreneurs, to educators, technologists, business executives, high-school students to a twelve-year old girl that set up a domestic grease collection and reprocessing into bio fuel that helped heat the house of needy families in her town.

Daring to be Great

The last presentation of Day 2 of BIF-6 was by Keith Yamashita, titled originally "Change, to the Power of Ten". Inspired and moved by previous storytellers and encounters with participants, he changed his title to "Is it worth daring to be great?" As he was reflecting on the role of trust between two people in the larger context of teams and organizations, he recounted an incident, when a business partner and mentor (Alan Webber) vested his full trust in him. For 10 seconds he became very emotional and a tear ran down his cheek. He quickly recovered and continued his presentation, but in those 10 seconds I learned about trust and its importance in personal relations and in social networks small and large more than any books or courses could teach.

Random Collision

Later the next day, in the coach taking us to Providence Airport I happened to sit next to another participant, Monika Hardy (@monk51295). With a long wait for our flights, we settled in one of the airport's seating areas, opened our laptops, intended to get some work done. But the conversation started in the coach did not want to go away. I was still reflecting on my learning experience from Keith's presentation, and found myself in an amazing deep-dive conversation with Monika, who turned out to be an innovator herself in the field of children education. I was fascinated and encouraged that in a public school system, a space has been allowed to experiment with new methods and ways. Monika described how children choose what they want to learn and are then guided by a different kind of teacher, a facilitator of learning that connects the dots of the child's interests without imposing an unnatural regiment of learning. In fact, the children go through a "detox" to unlearn some of the old behaviors learned in school.

Emotional Learning

As I was listening to her passionately describe her work , it occurred to me that the "detox" approach might well be applicable to business. We need to unlearn behaviors drilled into us by the existing system, before we can innovate new ways and structures to do business. I am planning on following up on this conversation.

So, what else did I learn? We seem to be wired for absorbing a significantly higher volume of knowledge, when we are emotionally engaged. Traditional learning, however, focuses primarily on information supply, without much of an emotional component. The result is that we learn the information without the full context that gives the information so much richer meanings in multiple dimensions. We do the same in business. As Keith said: "The biggest fallacy of business is that it's only rational. All business is personal and all business is human". That's why one random encounter with an unusual suspect can teach you more than volumes of HBR.

So as I am soaking up all the learning from these two random BIF-6 collisions, the question swirling in my head is: Could we design emotional components to our learning processes at every level? That's a very intriguing idea particularly as we witness the emergence of a new system of learning based on modules of knowledge that learners can pick and choose from. Imagine if each of these modules was designed to enlist an emotional component of learning.

I'll be trying to write about the many other encounters that sparked my brain at BIF-6, so stay tuned!

Policy Innovation - What's the Urgency?

A few months back I had written a blog about the ups and downs of policy innovation. Since then may things have happened.

First, Change Camp 2010 has taken place and I was there as one of the on-line scribes that facilitated the 30 break-out groups of this remarkable event. It was an interesting experience that taught our team a lot about facilitating engagements at this scale (240 people).

Then I organized XCAMP, the unconference discussing the XCLINIC project. With the support of several peers from the Design with Dialog (DwD) practitioner group that meets monthly at OCAD's Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) this smaller event was a great crowd-sourced co-design experience pushing the project a big step forward.

The most important time investment over the past few months (the one that took me away from blogging all this time) was put into developing a brand new graduate course "Business Model & Policy Innovation" and teaching the course to the first class of the MDes program in Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) at OCAD. This has been an exhilarating and learning-rich experience, which we're about to wrap up with project presentations and critiques over the next 2 weeks.

Emerging Trends

During the course I hosted a number of guest lecturers including Toronto City Councilor Gordon Perks and Change Camp co-founder Mark Kuznicki. From the lively discussions throughout the course and the guest lectures, I came out with a renewed sense of urgency for policy innovation. Everywhere we looked (enterprises, government, academic institutions, NGOs) the trend swelling from the grass roots up was towards more collaborative and participatory mode of working. And in most instances that trend was clashing with the vertical decision-making hierarchies and structures that characterize the 20th century.

Towards a Solution

I had highlighted the inherent risks of not addressing this gap in my previous blog about policy innovation. What has emerged through these various events is the beginning of a discourse about how to do so. In a conversation with Dr. David Wolf, Royal Bank Chair in Public and Economic Policy at the Munk Centre for International Studies, about how to address this gap, he envisaged governments shifting implementation efforts significantly towards grass-roots organizations and NGOs. Karl Schroeder, a Sci-Fi author, future scenarios writer, and graduate student at the SFI program suggested exploring a sequencing of these two different modes of organizing: horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies. Each of these modes excels at certain aspects and could be used at specific times in the process of policy making for example.

Mark Kuznicki provided real examples of how tremendous engagement and creativity by grass-roots initiatives in Toronto got stifled due to infighting between vertical hierarchies in Ontario. Everybody agreed with Mark, that how we address this fundamental issue is the conversation all who seek positive change must engage in. This could easily become a cornerstone of research in strategic foresight and innovation.

The Ups and Downs of Policy Innovation

One of the defining characteristics of change of the past decade has been without doubt the growing trend towards collaboration. Assumed by many to be driven by technological advances in information and communications technologies (ICT) this trend has reflected itself in many aspects: from an abundance of collaboration tools using voice, video, white-boarding tools, desktop sharing etc. to the more interesting appearance of collaborative production models such as open source software, open source hardware, co-creation, crowd sourcing and the many other names assigned to various aspects of this phenomenon.

Policy - The grass roots road

The policy development area has not escaped this trend. We witnessed the proliferation of grass root movements aiming at reclaiming control of at least certain elements of the policy articulation and development processes. This was the decade of Orange Revolutions and of the Obama campaign that redefined citizen engagement in the United States. One example much closer to home of such movements is Change Camp, an "unconference" organized in Toronto (Canada) in 2009 with the stated goal: "Re-imagine Government & Citizenship in the Age of Participation".

The ideas and methods of Change Camp Toronto quickly spread to other geographies and became a full-fledged movement advocating radical improvement in citizens engagement, change in how policies are developed, and building tools that enable better organization and mobilization of citizens. These grass root movements constitute a new and innovative bottom-up approach to collaboratively articulating needs, developing solutions and defining policies.

Policy - The Hierarchy Road

Meanwhile government institutions at every level continued their traditional century-old top-down planning approach to policies development, and while some efforts were made to increase consultations with constituents (the traditional town-hall meetings or the occasional costly public hearings), it can be argued that no significant systemic improvements in the participatory nature of these processes were achieved.

A Dangerous Gap

There is an inherent problem in that no one has figured out yet how to link the bottom-up approach with the top-down one. These two processes are currently not sufficiently communicating and have definitely no designs for convergence or integration. In his recent Unfinished Business lecture at the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) of the Ontario College for Arts and Design (OCAD), David Eaves summed up this problem as "digital citizenry trying to work with analog government". He warned that this gap is dangerous and cannot continue. The question is whether it will be closed peacefully or violently.

Changing Government from the Inside

Not everything is bleak. In July 2009 the Canadian federal government published a report titled "Canada@150: Towards a New Era of Collaboration & Innovation in Government". In it are the findings of a year-long internal initiative "to help build cross-cutting, horizontal networks that could unite people, issues, expertise, and departments in new and innovative ways". While this initiative provides some hope for the evolution of government, it is clearly limited to internal multi-disciplinary government collaboration.

Making Ends Meet

Still, Eaves gap analysis resonated well with me. In the context of developing a syllabus for a graduate course on Business Model & Policy Innovation, I have been discussing with Mark Kuznicki (one of the founders of Change Camp) and others how to connect these two fundamental approaches to policy development and innovation. We will have an excellent opportunity to advance our thinking on this issue in the upcoming Change Camp 2010 which is being designed in the context of the Ontario municipal elections scheduled for late October of this year.

I am looking forward to Change Camp 2010 and to participating in finding solutions and designing processes to close this gap, at least in the City of Toronto.

Web 2.0 - Beyond the Hype

On December 3 the Ontario Chapter of the CIO Association of Canada hosted an event and social under the title "Web 2.0, Collaboration, and Social Media: Beyond the Hype". The event was aimed to be an intimate gathering of peers (attendance was limited to 25) listening to practitioners and discussing the subject among themselves away from vendor and media hype.

I was invited by Samantha Liscio, CIO of Government of Ontario's CAC to participate in a speaker panel she organized and tasked with framing the subject and providing the basis for the conversation. My colleagues on the panel were: Kyle Reid, CEO of Deep Caliber; Bobby Singh, Director of Information Security at eHealth Ontario and John Sutherland, President of Ennova Inc. The panel was facilitated by Craig Ballance, Director of the IT Leadership Program at Ryerson University.

Discussion topics included:

• How Web 2.0 and social media tools have successfully delivered on business goals
• Key lessons learned from real implementations (the reality behind the hype)
• What some unanticipated outcomes of the implementation of Web 2.0 and social media have been (pitfalls to avoid)
• Why it's important to CIO success (moving from 'hype' to 'value')
• What constitutes success in the practical application of Web 2.0, Collaboration and Social Media
• What to watch for in the next waves of implementation

For me the main insight is that web 2.0 is much more about organizational change than about marketing and sales. The social aspect of new media and more importantly the increasingly social production of content and knowledge, all imply engagement of participants and active conversations. True conversations require not only active listening but also a readiness to change your position based on the conversation. Not many organizations are ready for such commitment, and of those who would like to be many don't know how to adapt their policies, protocols and culture accordingly. Preparing an organization for the collaborative modes of operation needed to thrive in the new economy will require therefore significant changes to the organizational structure and culture before such engagements can yield any significant result.

There was a discussion about how to introduce web 2.0 technology and applications to the C-level executives to win their buy-in. colleagues pointed out that it is perhaps not different from winning support for any major project. In my experience spending an hour of quality time with the CEO on a well prepared demo of such applications could work wonders.

The discussion also touched on the risks of web 2.0 deployments as well as on risks to organizations that are ill prepared to engage in the conversations about them taking place with or without their approval. Many examples were discussed.

All in all it was a great way to spend a pleasant evening with peers, network, and learn about our profession and business in thoughtful conversation.

TU Dresden Regional Ambassador

It's official: I am now a Regional Ambassador of the Technical University Dresden (TUD). Many years ago, I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in information technology from TUD. Throughout my career I found the education provided to me at TUD to be very valid and valuable in a variety of settings and thought that could be of interest to many North Americans unaware of the excellence in education provided by this university. So when the opportunity presented itself to become a regional ambassador of my university, I applied.

The city itself, Dresden, is a well kept secret. It is a vibrant city with several universities and colleges attracting a large population of young people. It has a long cultural heritage with some of the world best museums and galleries as well as a long track record in arts and culture. It's location on the Elbe river and proximity of the beautiful nature of Saxon Switzerland provides many opportunities for outdoors activities, nature exploration and entertainment.

Study in Dresden is a multilingual web site with rich information about the opportunities offered to Canadians by TUD. It can answer most of your questions. For additional information you can always contact me or the TUD directly.

Social Media & Revolutionary Change - Reflections

Another popular uprising by people wanting their voice heard. This time in Iran and draped in green but also in black, mourning those like young Neda, who died pursuing her dream of freedom and human rights.

Once again social media are hailed as the tool for the revolutionary masses revolting, challenging the established powers of government and its police apparatus, helping people organize and communicate, and informing the world about their struggle. The stream of information coming from Iran through Youtube and Twitter is defining this particular struggle much more than the traditional media, who have been "subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran" as Reuters' editors disclose at the begin of each news item from Iran.

What's new this time around

This time around we have seen some new developments: The social networks carrying these social media have taken proactive action.

Twitter rescheduled maintenance down-time of its systems after the U.S. State Department intervened to keep the service up and running for the Iranians protesters using it (and the Americans and many others monitoring).

Facebook released an early version of its platform in Farsi (the official language of Iran) in direct response to the Iranian crisis. This allows Iranians to navigate Facebook in their national language instead of English. Google hastily introduced Farsi support for Google Translate quoting "ongoing events in Iran". You can read more details about these actions in several places including on Rahaf Harfoush's blog "The Foush".

As Rahaf wrote, these unprecedented actions raised many questions. Is the neutrality of the networks waning? Were these actions driven by ideological, philosophical, political factors or simply by opportunistic self interest of these corporations (for PR or rapid alpha testing of a product in development for example)? Were these actions triggered by internal corporate thinking or through pressures from powerful external parties? or all of the above?

These are reasonable and complex questions. I will leave it to others to come up with answers to them. The aspect I would like to explore further is the following:

Social Media as Revolutionary Weapon

The Iran uprising like the preceding ones (The Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, etc.) is an attempt to change the existing balance of power. Whenever such an attempt is made a struggle between the incumbent power and those trying to change it ensues. External parties join rapidly the fray (if they weren't already involved or behind the attempt). In the course of this struggle all sides will use the full range of tools/weapons at their disposal to achieve advantage and victory. Technology is but one, albeit an important one, of these tools/weapons. It is therefore interesting to observe how this battle unfolds on the social media front and draw further conclusions.

On the revolt side the main advantage of social media is its distributed nature both from a content creation and distribution points of view. Individuals with cellular phones or small video cams are able to generate multimedia content and broadcast it through social networks like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. These social networks are also used for communications and organizing based on the perception that they are outside the traditional telecommunications networks usually controlled by the incumbent powers.

The distributed nature of social media is very appealing to the external parties interested in the conflict but wishing to intervene only covertly. In the case of Iran it became obvious that the State Department is monitoring closely all Iran related social media transmissions when it intervened with Twitter to postpone the planned upgrade that could have brought the systems down during the "active" hours in Iran. There have been reports about Israeli involvement in an infowar operation in support of the Iranian protesters. This could well be part of Israel's already existing covert operations in Iran and other countries in the region (a number of spy cells were uncovered in Iran and more recently in Lebanon). Iran has accused the BBC Farsi service of interfering actively in internal affairs and expelled its correspondent Jon Leyne from Iran.

The Empire Strikes Back

Given all of the above, it would be naive to believe that social media tools or counter-measures won't be used by the incumbent power. Case in point: The Iranian government shut down cellular service, blocked social network sites, and used power outages to disable uploading through proxies. It also engaged in its own social media counter- offensive. This battle is still raging at the time of this writing with list of "infiltrator" accounts being posted and updated by supporters of the protesters, misinformation is being planted by multiple parties, and even a guideline for cyberwarfare in this crisis has been published.

Social media undoutebly democratizes content creation and distribution. But distribution can only happen where and when social networks are available. So the fundamental question becomes: who actually owns or enables the infrastructure required by social networks (SN) to function, i.e. the SN servers or "cloud", the storage, and the pipes connecting users to them. The answer is sobering: in almost all cases these are owned by governments or large corporations, who have the capabilities to monitor all content and to stop the service if deemed necessary for their interests.

So we have a wide spread ownership of content production means on one side but a tightly controlled ownership of or influence on distribution channels on the other. This means that social media can be severely impeded through disablement of its distribution networks if the changes demanded by people are too radical or undesirable for the entities controlling the infrastructure.
A good example for this is the global battle for open proxies in the Iranian context brilliantly shown in this visualization, and the people unfortunately don't seem to be winning it. Preparing safe proxies (as the renesys blog suggests) may help, but I don't think it is the answer.

What Is Missing

For social media then to fulfill it's promise of change reflecting people's needs and desires, it would seem that we need a distributed technology and ownership for SN. Conceptually, this is what the peer-to-peer technologies provide: a decentralized network of independent nodes connecting as and when needed in constantly changing topographies that no one can shut down easily.

Michael Lewkowitz (a.k.a @igniter) of the ChangeMedium initiative has been writing about Public Micro-messaging Medium (PMM) like Twitter "as the most participatory public medium in history." He is proposing coordinated research to accelerate the evolution of this tranformative medium. I tend to agree with him on the potential of this emerging "real-time internet", but am convinced that for such potential to be reached, we must have fully distributed technology which would enable distributed ownership of the SN, that are so crucial to social media in general. Substantial R&D has been done on so-called ad-hoc networks (initially for the military, first responders, conference organizers etc.). I am interested in learning about any technologies that could enable such decentralized messaging systems for the crowds.

Incumbent powers are resisting anything peer-to-peer or trying to "incorporate it" into their institutional structures. The next great battles are going to be around these issues. Stay tuned for interesting times.

Of Permaculture and the Second Renaissance

Through a tweet by my friend Mat Milan (@mmilan) I got to read Robert Paterson's interesting post "Is this the time for a New Renaissance and Reformation", in which he discusses Permaculture vs. industrial food production and extrapolates to other areas of human civilization.

While I agree with Paterson's analysis on how we got ourselves into this mess and was thrilled to learn about Permaculture as an alternative, his post triggered a number of questions in my mind, mostly about why we developed industrial production methods and if the transition to a Permaculture society is reasonably possible.

Root Causes

Let's consider the first question. Yes, human ego is still at the center of the universe and we still largely subscribe to the notion that we are masters of nature and we can form it to our will with our technology. But the continuous drive of labor division and specialization had started long before medieval times and is still going strong. One of it's roots is the consumerist culture that has become the expression of this iteration of human civilization. Another is the unchecked growth of population, which demands ever higher productivity in goods and services, and particularly in food production. This in turn leads to industrial-type agricultural and animal production with high-yield single-crop/animal multiple harvests requiring high levels of energy input (fertilizers, machinery etc.). This need for continuous productivity improvements drives the necessity for specialization in knowledge and skills.

As the population and consumerism pressures continued unabated, further productivity gains could only be achieved by expanding the level of specialization from local to national, to regional, and ultimately to global scale; hence what we refer to as Globalization. The structures that developed for this labor division and specialization were mostly hierarchical in nature with the unavoidable centers of wealth and power that are integral to hierarchies. As Ronald Wright describes in his book "A short History of Progress" these civilization structures emerged in a particular location of Earth, grew rapidly until their natural resources were exhausted and then faltered or moved to a different location.

As long as these structures operated at the local level they had a possibility to move to a different location. As the structures became global in scope they had less and less options to relocate. hence the current global crisis. The central hierarchical system is reaching its limits because it cannot consolidate to less than one center!

The Emerging New Structures

As the old system reaches it limits a new system with a fundamentally different structure must emerge, which most probably will not be hierarchical. Recent events seem to confirm this trend: traditional global systems are failing while decentralized, peer-to-peer, and local systems seem to succeed overnight: Skype, Twitter, Craig's List, micro financing, eat local, open source concepts, creative commons, community initiatives etc.

The catalyst in this transformation seems to be the Internet. At the recent Toronto Planners Unite 2009 event Mark Earls author of "Herd" spoke about the crucial role of copying in human behavior. Copying requires seeing what's to be copied; and if nothing else, the Internet is making all sorts of new ideas and initiatives visible to a global audience. The flock behavior can only accelerate and the importance of communities will explode.

Values Convergence

Interestingly, the values embodied in these emerging new structures seem to be converging. In a recent Twitter conversation with Alexander Osterwalder, Peter Jones and others about how a sustainable business model can be defined, we converged that it is the sustainable value that an organization provides to its "stakeholders, the community at large, and the environment". I was pleasantly surprised while reading about Permaculture to find out that its core values are "Earthcare, Peoplecare, and Fairshare". Do you recognize a pattern?

We could be at the cusp of a major transformational step in our evolution, which we usually call a revolution. The changes coming are going to be radical and difficult, possibly violent. I hope they will lead to a New Renaissance and Reformation!

In conversation about Gaza

In response to my blog about what's behind Israel's attack on Gaza, I received comments from "Civax", an Israeli whose parents live in Ashkalon on the southern borders of Israel. What started as statements of "enemy" camps developed into a conversation. The lengthy exchanges were being relegated to the comments page of the archived blog. I decided in the interest of the dialog to publish my latest reply to Civax as a new posting, so it can be found and followed easier. Here goes:

Dear Civax

Yes I agree with you, that some Arab regimes want Israel to rid them of the Palestinian problem, the problem being a model of how people despite dire circumstances can self-organize and resist oppressor regimes. This tacit cooperation merely demonstrates that the conflict is not an Arab/Jewish conflict but rather a conflict between tolerance and fanaticism, opression and resistance, people who value all human beings regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or political beliefs and people who are homophobic and racist.

In many cities of the world Arab and Jewish people (both from Israel and outside) demonstrated side by side against the Gaza massacres, while both Arab and Israeli politicians played their diplomatic games while civilians were slaughtered. The Jewish women who occupied the Israeli consulate in Toronto in support of the Palestinians (not necessarily Hamas) are closer to me than Arab fanatics blowing themselves amongst Israeli civilians.

Regardless of the details of any peace agreement, the first step is to acknowledge the injustice done to the wronged party. Such acknowledgment opens the way to reconciliation and to resolving not just differences but the wounds of the past. This was the way in Germany and Japan after WW II. This was the way in South Africa, where the Truth & Reconciliation Committee hearings were arduous and painful, but way better than killing each other. This is also the way in Canada as we start addressing the injustice and suffering caused to First Nations by colonists and immigrants.

Until we acknowledge the injustice done explicitly, we can't start seeing each other as human beings and we will continue to deal with each other in the context of "enemies".

As for the need of a strong Palestinian leadership, I agree that such leadership would make negotiations and implementing agreements easier. I personally don't believe, however, that Israel is genuinely interested in fostering and supporting such strong leadership. Supporting those leader that are willing to accept unfair conditions against the will of their people, destroying every emerging infrastructure of an independent Palestinian state, driving a spike between elected Hamas and the PA, etc. are all acts that weaken the Palestinian leadership.

There is no need for alarm though. If the surrounding Arab states are any indication, then a Palestinian state (assuming it is allowed to be reasonably sovereign and independent) would just produce another "strong man" regime, which if friendly to western interest would be called "democratic" and otherwise would join the "axis of evil". Such states never were a real threat to Israel as documented by the historic results on the ground for the past 60 years not by the propaganda's rhetoric.

But back to the fndamentals: An Israeli baby was wounded by one of the rockets launched against Israel. This is traumatic for both the child and the parents. In the last few weeks over TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY THREE CHILDREN DIED in Gaza. Can you really justify such a crime with any political rhetoric? Can you really look the other way?

Well, I can't. It is past 3:00 A.M. and the pictures are haunting me and the emotions are robbing me of sleep. And I sincerely hope you can't too, because if we could, we would have lost a great deal if not all of our humanity.

A New Celebration of Christmas

Around the same time two years ago, I found myself completely overwhelmed with demands of business, social obligations, and the holidays season. It was so bad that it started me thinking about what kind of life style I wanted and how much control I really had over mine. I observed at the same time that everyone in my family, and in fact in my circle of friends and colleagues, was whining about the stress of the holidays season.

Something in my brain reached a critical threshold and I suddenly had the strong desire to change my situation. Before my resolve could falter, I gathered my wife and three daughters and submitted to them an idea: what if we all agreed that we did not want nor need presents for Christmas; and what if instead we (individually or collectively) estimated the amount of money we usually spend on such presents and donated such amount to the charities of our choice?

I was expecting some resistance or a discussion. To my surprise everyone approved of the idea. And although we weren't sure how this would impact the whole holidays experience, we decided to go with it. We made one exception: Children under 12 years still get presents.

Christmas morning in our household is usually for opening presents. That year we just spent joyful time together. The girls decided to prepare rolled grapevine leaves, a middle eastern specialty. Everyone had to chip in. The hours spent together around the kitchen table made for the best Christmas memories we ever had. One by one I started hearing comments on how wonderful it was to escape the shopping frenzy and shed the season's stress. We all also felt that giving more to charities was much more in line with the spirit of Christmas.

This year is our third celebrating Christmas in this new way, and we're still loving it.

Season's greetings!

Barriers to New Media Success in Canadian Politics

Since the breathtaking success of President-elect Obama's campaign, new media is being touted as the future of political campaigns and citizens engagement. Interest in applying the new media lessons learned in that campaign to the (marketing) campaigns of the corporate world is exploding. My daughter and colleague Rahaf, who put her life on hold for 3 months and worked for the new media group at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago, can witness to that. A recent invitation to speak about her experience in an intimate setting at Toronto University's Rotman School of Business attracted 300 people and forced the relocation of the event to a larger auditorium.

In her presentation Rahaf listed six lessons learned from the Obama new media campaign. She also pointed out to the vision driving the campaign as being a fundamental element of its success. Through further conversations with her I came to think that this may be indeed the most profound lesson learned. The recent political developments in Ottawa have raised public interest and brought increased engagement and activism in online venues like Twitter and Facebook. There are several calls for mobilizing online against the Harper government, so I am trying to apply Rahaf's six lessons plus my current understanding of new media success factors to the present Canadian context.

What amplified the success of Obama's new media campaign is a vision that was people not candidate centric; its core elements of hope, change, inclusiveness and mutual respect resonated with a broad spectrum of people. It was that vision that attracted like-minded top organizers and staffers, established a strategy of two-way communications with the people around a consistent message, engaged young and old people in a respectful way, and admitted the new media group as an equal at the planning and operational levels. It didn't hurt either that the candidate is charismatic and inspiring.

What Canadians politicians can learn

So how do we compare? Although many people converge towards core Canadian values of collaboration, tolerance, etc. no party has a well articulated vision that resonates with what people really want from their politicians:

• Putting people's interests and the country first, ahead of narrow minded party tactics;
• Engage in intelligent, civil, and constructive conversation in parliament across party lines;
• Lead instead of being kicked in the but every step of the way;
• Restore hope and pride in Canada's role as a global leader.
  

Instead, the various parties are aligned along the traditional combative lines of last century: "small government", "middle of the road for middle class" and "workers unite". Never mind the absence of a charismatic and inspiring leader!

Continuing along the traditional model, all significant discussions and decisions are made in backrooms by an exclusive club of elitists and their staffers, who excel at delivering quick short-term results through tricks and mean tactics, even at the cost of the country or at the detriment of their own party's members. Consequently, no party has a clear need or desire to engage the masses and really listen. As a result engagement is seen as a PR exercise and communications is a one-way delivery function receiving it's instructions from the closed club.

What can we do about it

So, here are my recommendations for any party wanting to use new media:

1. Start by articulating a vision rooted in the people's needs and wants
2. Commit publicly to the values of transparency, inclusiveness, and willingness to change in order to align with your constituents
3. Recruit your inner circle from people who have demonstrated their commitment to these values
4. Devise a comprehensive two-way communications strategy around a clear and consistent message
5. Attract young engaged leaders to implement the new media component of your strategy and treat them with the respect they deserve
   

Without a vision around which people can rally, without a core that is committed to transparency, inclusiveness and change, and without truly listening to people and engaging in meaningful conversations, no media (never mind new media) can deliver the strategic advantage everyone is looking for.

Where do we start

How we can jump-start this process is a question that should be opened to the people to contribute their mass creativity to. Here is my personal contribution: How about if a group of politicians from one or more parties establishes a list of the core principles of such vision and a code of conduct (sort of a manifesto if you prefer big words) and starts practicing it openly?

The Future of Twitter

I had lunch earlier today with my friends Dave Gray of Xplane and Bob Logan of sLAB (previously the Beal Institure for Strategic Creativity). The food at "Le Pain Quotidien" was great, the ambiance cozy and surroundings not too noisy. The conversation drifted to Twitter, its future and what its potential could be. Dave encouraged me to blog about this conversation (hopefully not out of concern that at my age I'd forget the content soon if I didn't! Lol). So here are some highlights of that conversation.

I am not sure why, but we did not talk about the traditional advertisement business model. Perhaps it was our aversion to ads interrupting our experience, whether on TV (if you're still watching any!) or online, and we just couldn't imagine our current Twitter experience poisoned by pop-up adds driven by parsing the last tweet we received. Perhaps it's an obvious model that many are practicing and we felt we were in a more "innovative" conversation.

The most obvious value of Twitter to us is in the communities it helps creating and enabling. One of the hypothesis about the business models of the web 2.0 world is that accumulating substantial numbers of "customers" or users of your service even at a loss could have value for others by reducing their cost of access to such group. That was the favorite hypothesis when eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion in order to gain access to Skype's 54 million users.

With the gradual realization that modern brand management hinges on the involvement and active engagement of brand related communities, the business value of such communities as well as of its venues and communications platforms continues to increase beyond the traditional value of a company's customers database.

Another aspect is Twitter's value to individuals as a convenience tool. It can act as a filter between the ever noisier outside world and the individual's interests and preferences. Dave refers to Twitter as his personal "info shield". By developing more sophisticated and slick applications to manage your "shield" Twitter's tools would become more desirable by its users... and consumer desires can always be monetized!

I recently blogged about how micro-blogging, the type pioneered by Twitter, is supporting a new type of learning, which I called micro-learning. After some more thought I prefer to call it now agile learning, a way to learn in small incremental steps driven by your own needs and preferences instead of a rigid curriculum formulated for a broad population. My Twitter friends are really a growing network of scouts hunting for information and knowledge and tweeting about their findings, out of which I can then select the gems most interesting and useful to my learning. By the same token the drive (or at least the peer pressure) to have followers encourages me to be a good scout for my followers. This makes Twitter a prime platform for the new agile micro-learning that is emerging.

The ultimate value of Twitter, however, is in the data it collects and aggregates from all the tweets of its users and in its ability to mine such data for useful practical purposes. Technology, even the coolest one, is just a tool. The data is the ultimate treasure. Google, arguably one of the most innovative technology companies around, demonstrated in November 2008 what you can do with such data through their Flu Trends tool. Flu Trends was not only able to deliver estimates of flu levels in each state that were consistent with CDC's results based on field data, it was also able to do so in near real time (i.e. faster than CDC!).

There are many visualization attempts and experiments of the Twitterverse. For example: 17 ways to visualize the Twitter Universe. Visualization is but one way to uncover inherent structures within the data that are otherwise not visible. The key for a successful business model, however, is to extract knowledge that is usable for a number of applications and industries. There are a number of companies starting to explore these avenues, but to my knowledge Twitter is not strategically pursuing any of them. One such company that I personally find exciting is Canadian. Unfortunately I am bound by an NDA and must defer more details to a future blog once I get the approvals to share their information.

If you know of companies doing something in this direction please let me know.

Wind beneath your wings...

City News reported today on the battle between the pro and against camps for the planned test wind turbine in Lake Ontario near the shores of Scarborough. This was not the first time I hear about such controversy. A few months back a friend of mine, who is a councilor in a municipality near Wasaga Beach, was telling me about similar lines of battle drawn in his community regarding a wind mill farm being considered in his area.

Watching footage from the Scarborough meeting I felt like being in a sinking boat with people in it arguing whether they should use sails or oars to change direction. A lot of the arguments were driven by emotion, fear of the unknown, and also ideology. Many local residents were concerned with the impact on their property values, hazard to birds, possible noise pollution etc. Proponents argued about the planet, CO2 emissions, footprint etc. Supporters were bussed from afar. What a mess!

If there is anything we should learn from the emerging World 2.0 it is that we cannot solve any issues of significance without collaboration. What would have been a much better approach for conducting such meetings would have been to do the following:

• Listen carefully to the concerns of the local community. Allowing people to air their concerns easily makes them more willing to listen in return to other points of view.
  

• Make sure the facts being used for the various arguments are correct and non-ambiguous. In the case of Scarborough reports were initially talking of wind towers of over 100 feet height. That was later explained to be the total tower height; the wind mills would be much lower over the water surface.
  

• Prepare replies to the concerns that are based on facts (data) not opinions and ideology. The questions asked are legitimate and the concerns seem to be very similar in all communities where significant structures are planned to be constructed. Investing in well researched answers would provide an efficient, respectful, and constructive response to the concerns.

• Consider the impact from alternative solutions when discussing wind mill or solar panel farms. Would residents prefer a gas power generation plant instead? A nuclear reactor? A modern coal fired plant? Without considering the alternatives we would be deciding between the environmental solution and doing nothing, which is not really an option.
  

• Admit that massive renewable energy generation is still a new field, particularly in Canada. No one has all the answers. Remember the euphoria about nuclear and hydro energy few decades back, and the reckoning of their environmental long-term impact later. We all have to learn in this new process and we can't do it in confrontational battle lines. Only good constructive conversations can help us learn how best to proceed.

Openness and the Agile Learning

I recently blogged about moving from "micro-blogging to micro-learning". Since then I have come to think about this process as Agile Learning. Through a tweet on Twitter today I found new contributions to the analysis of deep changes that are going to hit the education sector.

It is a slide deck by David Wiley of the Department for Instructional Psychology and Technology at the Brigham Young University. In his presentation titled "Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Education" Wiley presents a comparison between the current educational system characteristics and those of the open connected world of today.

Measuring against six core descriptors:

• Digital
• Mobile
• Connected
• Personal
• Creating
• Open
  

Wiley highlights the shortcomings of the current education system including those of e-learning!

It became clear to me that any method that allows agile learning will be quickly embraced by many people, particularly the millennial or Net generation whether they consciously understand the deficiencies of the current educational model or not. They just intuitively sense that it is a more efficient way for them to learn what they are most interested in learning.

Highly recommended reading if you wish to understand why the Agile Learning is emerging. Click here to see the full slide deck.