@panklam twittered she had a dream:
[from Twitter / panklam]dreamed I was back at college, taking a class from Stowe Boyd, who had a shape shifting animal. class definitely in the flow
I guess the flow meme is getting rooted in people's deepest consciousness.
With the bad weather yesterday, I became a 'video snacker' -- I was searching for short updates on the weather in video format. I fell right into the middle of a trend, even though I have functionally no recent history of TV watching. Still, I am intrigued with bite-sized video snacks, and after watching one or two about the weather, later in the day I sampled more on the Iowa Caucuses.
A runner-up to Word Of The Moment: monumentous, referring to the Obama phenomenon.
James Governor inspired Hugh McLeod to coin Random Acts of Traction as a description of breakthroughs in engagement with others.
Thomas Friedman turned me on to a new term today:
[from The People We Have Been Waiting For - New York Times.[...] sweet-sounding “global warming” doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term “global weirding,” coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.
Yes, exactly.
And why the hell aren't people up in arms about the ecosphere going sideways? Why isn't there rioting in the streets, demanding that our governments actually step up and do something? Why are people so complacent?
Tom Peters, back in May of 2005, said that global warming was being badly marketed:
[from Issue Most Poorly Marketed?]Why is an issue that is so grave and so real so poorly understood? Why has the issue of global warming been so poorly marketed? Why is the brand called "The Global Warming Catastrophe" such a weak brand?
Well, I think Global Weirding is a better brand.
Thomas Freidman -- in the same article today -- goes on to suggest that some people have stopped waiting for large centralized and powerful entities -- multi-national corporations, the governments, and other powerful agents -- and have decided to be the change we need in the world:
I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:
“We are the people we have been waiting for.”
This is exactly the sort of thing I have been talking about when I say that what is happening on the web -- web culture -- will have to be the path toward saving the world. We, the edglings, the denizens of the Web, we have to do it. Open source design for hyper efficient vehicles is just one such path, one instance of what we have got to do.
If we wait for the crowned heads to take action, the whole world might become an ecological cesspool. The US government can't even rebuild the levees in New Orleans (leaving aside for the moment whether we should or not), so we shouldn't look to them to save us when we are confronted with a situation a millions times more devastating.
I actually don't know how I stumbled on the BusinessClass.net site, but I did, earlier this week. BCN (as it is also known) started in Berlin, and I could have meet with Manu Kumar, the founder, if I had discovered it a few weeks ago while I was there.
BCN is a network of short-term workspaces. Currently, there are only two: HQ, in Berlin, and another just outside LA. There is a sort-of-fledgling social network in the site -- the various nomads that use the offices and retreats -- but aside from a general listing of profiles, there doesn't seem to be much you can do there, yet. (Maybe I can help, there, Manu.) Should be interfacing with Dopplr, I guess, too.
I hope to explore the LA facility in a few weeks, and will write more about that. Today, I am just blogging about the 'fairchise' concept that underlies the business model of BCN:
[from NuNomad: Planning the Trip, where Manu was interviewed]Our basic concept of 'fairchise' is based on:
- no license fees (which we believe amounts to financing the franchise offerer)
- no expensive 'management courses'
- no inventory or equipment that must be bought from the franchise offerer
- no fixed monthly fees (for royalties, marketing, etc.)
- short franchise contracts (3 years)
- instant start-up (open a BCN-port within four weeks)
Manu hopes to have seven or more 'Ports' in the network by 2008. His organization provides the online presence (in various languages), some marketing, and the basic financial services (accounting, credit card processing, reservations, etc.).
Anyone want to help me start the BCN-Port for San Francisco?
Social casting is the term that is coming to be used for media companies sending their content through social networks.
A diverse group of companies are going to be bucketed by this term, like Intercasting and other mobile social tools, and video chat tools like Paltalk:
[from (iverson's) currentbuzz: The Future of Media, con't. "Social-casting comes to Sports Talk Radio".[a broken link to a Chicago Tribune piece on sports talk radio]
The new technology was created by Paltalk, which calls itself the "premier real-time, video-based community pioneering the social-casting movement."
[pointer Deb Schultz]
Clay Shirky reports on a new term by Kio Stark to (please, please, please) fill the slot in the media's so-called mind where "User Generated Content" is lodged:
Indigenous Content (which is to say “Created by the natives for themselves.”)
Clay says that Kio has the best tagset ever, but I couldn't find indigenous content there...
[from Analyzing Failure Beforehand]“A pre-mortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so the project can be improved rather than autopsied,” Mr. Klein explains in The Harvard Business Review.
In the pre-mortem, company officials assume they have just learned that a product or a service they are about to introduce has “failed spectacularly.” They then write down every plausible reason they can think of to explain the failure. The list is then used to eliminate potential flaws before the new idea is actually introduced into the marketplace.
I really like this technique, and I plan to use it more explictly in future client engagements.
I stumbled onto upcycling last Sunday:
[from Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed by Penelope Green][...] "upcycling,” a process whose name was coined by William McDonough, an architect, and Michael Braungart, a chemist, in their 2002 book, “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.” They used the term to describe the process of taking something that’s essentially waste and moving it up the consumer-goods chain.
Now I need to buy the book:
[from the authors' website]
William McDonough's book, written with his colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart, is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design. Through historical sketches on the roots of the industrial revolution; commentary on science, nature and society; descriptions of key design principles; and compelling examples of innovative products and business strategies already reshaping the marketplace, McDonough and Braungart make the case that an industrial system that "takes, makes and wastes" can become a creator of goods and services that generate ecological, social and economic value.
In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart argue that the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design. The design of products and manufacturing systems growing out of the Industrial Revolution reflected the spirit of the day-and yielded a host of unintended yet tragic consequences.
Today, with our growing knowledge of the living earth, design can reflect a new spirit. In fact, the authors write, when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems—the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, the abundance of the sun's energy—they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist.
Cradle to Cradle maps the lineaments of McDonough and Braungart's new design paradigm, offering practical steps on how to innovate within today's economic environment. Part social history, part green business primer, part design manual, the book makes plain that the re-invention of human industry is not only within our grasp, it is our best hope for a future of sustaining prosperity.
In addition to describing the hopeful, nature-inspired design principles that are making industry both prosperous and sustainable, the book itself is a physical symbol of the changes to come. It is printed on a synthetic 'paper,' made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, designed to look and feel like top quality paper while also being waterproof and rugged. And the book can be easily recycled in localities with systems to collect polypropylene, like that in yogurt containers. This 'treeless' book points the way toward the day when synthetic books, like many other products, can be used, recycled, and used again without losing any material quality—in cradle to cradle cycles.