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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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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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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My sister-in-law Sandra Amerie, who runs a popular laptop confidential series on YouTube, pointed me to this sweet piece developed by a group of journalism students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. Sure, it’s not going win them many kudos on the source or BET, but I was nevertheless impressed [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Here are some examples of participatory regulation where workers, employers, NGOs, and citizens collaborate to help monitor and enforce workplace health and safety rules. The initiatives I’ve documented below focus on worker’s rights in the furthest reaches of corporate supply chains for consumer items ranging from chocolate and confectionery to running shoes and other apparel.

Worker’s [...]

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Following a theme here, I also like the distinction made between crowdsourcing and citizen science by Yale-based astrophysicist and Galaxy Zoo founder Kevin Schawinski:
“We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because it’s a better description of what you’re doing; you’re a regular citizen but you’re doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, [...]

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