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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

After criticizing Lanier on his arguments about the problems with “digital collectivism” I am finding some of his other arguments more compelling. He gets closer to hitting the mark, for example, when he talks about the detrimental impact of the “free culture” movement on knowledge producers who increasingly rely on indirect methods like advertising to [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve not had an opportunity to read Jaron Lanier’s new book, You’re Not A Gadget, but it’s virtually impossible to avoid the debate raging (see here and here, for example) around its core premises. Let me say upfront, Lanier raises some very poignant issues that will shape the way our knowledge economy evolves in the [...]

[Read more →]

Not sure if you caught Obama’s speech today as he signed the new stimulus bill, but he talked at length about the emphasis his administration is placing on modernizing the country’s electrical grid, which he pointed out is simply too antiquated to handle needs of an economy based on renewable energy.  ”[It's like] using 19th century [...]

[Read more →]

After posting on Galaxy Zoo last week and then catching up with one of the project leaders today I learned that the next generation of this phenomenal citizen science project was just launched last night.

In the original Galaxy Zoo nearly 150,000 citizen scientists helped astronomers at Oxford and Yale classify roughly 1 million galaxies [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been working on our follow-up to Wikinomics and came across this nice quote in the transcript from my recent interview with Larry Smarr:
“Having a wiki world, and having an ability to instantaneously set up mass collaboration, you can solve problems on a time scale that’s going to matter. So if we start having [...]

[Read more →]

Edge.org recently posted a collection of 151 thoughts from leading thinkers on the “game-changing scientific ideas or developments” they think will “change everything” within their lifetimes. Having co-authored a book about how mass collaboration will change everything I was particularly intrigued by their answers.
There are many good entries, but artist, composer and producer Brian Eno’s [...]

[Read more →]

The City of Toronto’s web 2.0 summit kicks off tomorrow at City Hall. If you’re in the area, you may want to join other citizens, community leaders, city staffers, and local councilors as we discuss how web 2.0 technologies can help improve municipal services and give citizens a greater voice in local decision-making.

For a [...]

[Read more →]

When Estonians regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991 they not only acquired new political freedoms, they inherited a mass of rubbish–thousands and thousands of tonnes of it scattered across illegal dumping sites around the country. When concerned citizens decided that the time had come to clean it up, they turned not [...]

[Read more →]