For the past couple of months I have been working with the wonderful folks at the Lisbon Council in Brussels to prepare a report that examines the economic challenges facing Europe — and the innovative solutions that many entrepreneurs, businesses, governments and citizens are devising to succeed in networked world. The report was launched last [...]

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Change.org has a little write up of my conversation with Dave Witzel and Jerry Michalski earlier today. The post on Change.org does a decent job of capturing the main thesis, but the conversation itself covered more ground, including some reflections on the changing roles of business, government and individual citizens in addressing environmental problems and [...]

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Are our institutions for global problem-solving broken? The recent failure to secure a meaningful climate change deal in Copenhagen and the global financial crisis suggest that existing global institutions require extensive rewiring. Decades of economic development, integration of product and service markets, cross-border travel and new technologies enabling virtual interaction have created a world that [...]

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French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, gave the opening address to Davos yesterday. His message: this is not just a global financial crisis; it is a crisis of globalization. My overall assessment of his talk: A good job diagnosing the problems with today’s economy, but Sarkozy offers little in the way of novel or innovative solutions.
Not surprisingly, he [...]

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As part of a multi-year research effort to understand how wikinomics and web 2.0 was changing the nature of government and democracy, my research associates and I argued that governments–perhaps more than any other institution–could benefit enormously from broad-based shift to cloud computing. That idea is gathering steam and in some leading jurisdictions it’s becoming a reality.
Where [...]

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Google’s clash with China raises some more fundamental questions. It’s now been 20 years since the June 4th incident in Tiananmen and political change has been, as Mao predicted, “like crossing a river, feeling for the pebbles one at a time.” The question, over the long term, is whether the ghosts of Tiananmen will come back [...]

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I was delighted to hear that Google has finally thrown down the gauntlet in China. No longer will it be complicit in denying freedom of information and expression to Chinese citizens. Google is now on the right side of the moral equation. But will it change anything?
Like Iran and Burma, China has modernized and adapted [...]

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I was on the Agenda with Steve Paikin last Friday discussing transparency in government along with Maryantonett Flumian,  a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Globe and Mail columnist Mathew Ingram (Ingram 2.0).  You can view the replay below.

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The right to make freedom of information requests is in enshrined in most democratic countries (Wikipedia says 70 countries have such legislation). But how often is that right actually invoked? My guess is that it’s vastly underutilized and that most members of the public would be surprised to know what they could find out  if [...]

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I love this example of participatory regulation. Marc Bohlen, an “artist-engineer” at the University of Zurich, has designed a floating public robot that makes assessing recreational water quality a transparent and participatory experience. The Glass Bottom Float, as he calls it, cruises along a beach shore, and offers itself as a resting spot in places it deems clean [...]

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