In the forthcoming Macrowikinomics, Don Tapscott and I will be arguing that we’ve gone beyond wikinomics to a more encompassing societal shift as businesses and communities bypass crumbling institutions and old ways of doing business. A lot of things are set to change: the way we produce and consume energy; how governments and financial institutions operate; how [...]

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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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I realize this sounds like a strange hypothesis for explaining the delays in delivering relief in Haiti, particularly coming from the guy who co-authored Wikinomics. But could it be that there are just too many players and too little centralized leadership to carry out an operation that has been described by people on the ground as [...]

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I came across a fascinating article published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine about a British doctor’s first encounter with Wikinomics. The doctor, Karim Khan, recounts the story of having seen a patient who had been concussed after hitting his head while falling off the back of a treadmill. It turns out he’d been reading wikinomics at [...]

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Less than four weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, Iceland became one of the first and most dramatic national casualties of the global financial crisis. Its three largest banks had all been nationalized. Its government was driven from office. The national debt skyrocketed and the value of its currency plummeted as mass unemployment [...]

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My quote of the day comes straight out of a political science textbook, but it rings so true today:
“The lesson that capitalist countries needed to combine the efficiency of markets with the broader values of community … did not come to them easily. It took the calamitous collapse of the Victorian era of globalization — [...]

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Open Forum Europe 2009 is another highlight in a lengthing list of engagements this spring. I will giving a keynote, along with Vint Cerf,  at what promises to be a lively dialogue between the open source community and European policy-makers.
Open standards and open source software already enjoy widespread support in Europe, particularly among governments who fear [...]

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I’ve been invited to give a talk at Georgetown University on April 16th as part of its public policy dialogue series. The talk is open to the public, but space is limited so RRSP soon if you’d like to attend. Here’s a summary:
From its first few weeks in office, the new administration has emphasized the [...]

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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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