Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Politics 2.0
Politics 2.0 works if it is manageable, digestable, and segmentable. Check out www.changecongress.org and Larry Lessig’s latest presentation (basically you can skip to minute 45.30).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J3B_P5IJqs&hl=en]
Strategy 2.0
Strategy as we know it is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Strategy (based on Clausewitz’ian thinking) was about positioning products, companies, and portfolios of products/companies in competitive landscapes or the search for white spaces, where you could escape the competitive pressure of existing industries, by recombining the value propositions.
Strategy 2.0 is about creating communities and figuring out how to monetarize them without negatively impacting the growth/sustainability of the community. We have outlined this in our ACM SIGMIS paper (2003).
This means we need to move from:
– the analysis of strategic interactions (situations with at least two actors with given preferences in a context moderate scarcity).
to
– the analysis of communicative interactions (situations with at least two actors that have evolving preferences in context of emerging worlds).
Government 2.0
Last week I started teaching government 2.0. We want to understand the impact of web 2.0 technologies on the transformation of public value creation in today’s world.
Super-simple group forming (think facebook, wikipedia, meetup, xing, linkedin, plaxo, twitter, dodgeball, flickr, blogging, ning, etc.) accelerates the process of the de-coupling of the state from being the primary provider of public value.
Super-simple groups will impact the state in three ways:
a. by expanding the social universe.
b. by competing with existing forms of creating public value.
c. by transforming existing forms of creating public value.
If you are interested, join us at: http://www.philippmueller.de/government.html. We are posting the sessions as videos and podcasts. You can participate in the discussion.
Sheep 2.0
This morning, I arrived at the airport only to find out that my flight to Atlanta was canceled and that I was at the end of the line of unhappy stranded passengers, waiting for their flights to be re-booked. I asked the people in front of me, what the procedure was, but nobody knew. So I cellphone-surfed my way to the hotline and a very friendly call center employee changed my flight to the next day. However, when I offered the phone number to the people around me, they stared at their feet and said nothing. I felt embarrassed and left.
…a lot needs to change for us to move from a process-and-structure based to a peer produced, self-organizing world.
Wiki-Politics From an Analyst’s Perspective
Anyone who has been famous for the famous fifteen minutes knows that the biographical battles on Wikipedia can get very nasty. However, in an interesting twist Eve Fairbanks reflects in the New Republic on what a political analyst can deduce from the word-fights:
The bitterness of the fights on Obama’s page could be taken as a bad sign for the candidate. But it may actually be Hillary’s page that contains the more troubling omens. Few, if any, Hillary defenders are standing watch besides Schilling. In recent days, the vaguely deserted air of a de-gentrifying neighborhood has settled over her page, with some editors losing interest and the main excitement provided by the “slut” and “cuntbag” graffiti artists. While Obama’s political past and future provoke intense argument, when I look at Hillary’s relatively static page I am reminded of Schilling’s description of the Rudy page at the beginning of his decline.
To test the air, I undertook my own little, highly unscientific experiment. I made a professional-looking but somewhat negative edit on each of the candidate’s pages. For Hillary, I wrote a line on the hopelessness of her chances even when you count superdelegates; for Obama, I added a phrase about his loss of some white support. My Obama edit was fully scrubbed within three minutes, by an editor I’d never even seen before. My Hillary edit languished untouched for four hours until Schilling finally got around to deleting it. But, even then, he carefully preserved my skeptical text and pasted it onto the separate history-ofHillary’s-campaign page, a gesture of acceptance. It has remained there, a little wart on Hillary’s Wikipedia face, untouched, ever since.
A Potemkin-esque Notebook Market
Maybe you have tasted Linux and liked it. Maybe you are looking forward to the next iteration of Ubuntu/Fedora/Whatever and hope that finally, it will actually work. Maybe you have been thinking about buying a dedicated Linux machine? – If you are, it won’t be easy. In theory you now have a choice:
a. Read the forum posts and pray that whatever notebook you will buy will actually run the flavor of linux you are planning to use.
b. Buy linux pre-installed. Theoretically, Lenovo offers the T and R series with SUSE, Dell the beautiful XPS with ubuntu.
However, Lenovo does not sell them in the European Union, or at least I have not found them, the Dell-Linux-page is down very often, the prices are often higher than of comparable Windows machines, you cannot get the newest processors, and most specials do not apply to the linux machines.
So what should you do? Have an apple or enjoy the scenerey from the window(s)!
Understanding Internet-Mediated Organizations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard Law School just hosted Clay Shirky to present his newest book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008). In the video Clay Shirky discussed his new book, watch it while you are waiting for your copy.
A More Perfect Union… For A Networked World
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo&hl=en]
in case you have not yet seen it, watch it and reflect on what it means not for the U.S., but for our worlds.
Education for/in Network Society
When asking how to bring technology into the classroom, one needs to ask what are the options, before choosing. Options are not value-neutral, but carry with them very specific ideological connotations. At the Public Policy for Network Society Conference, we will discuss the Mexican Enciclomedia and U.S. based OLPC.
The first question is, who should interface, when, with what technology? every student? every teacher/classroom? only in a dedicated computer lab?
The second question is, should the learning interface be connected to a dedicated source/server/hard drive or should it be connected to the multi-purpose internet?
The third question is, should the learning platform offer authorized content, the accepted curriculum, stamped with approval by the academy or any other authority or should it be open to corrections and the addition of content generated by users, i.e. teachers and students?
The fourth question is, that if a learning platform is a public good, should the software be proprietory and safe-guarded by the few or should it open its source code and create a community of developers interested in improving on it.
The fifth question is, what are the opportunity costs of choosing one program over others and of a centralized approach vs. letting many flowers bloom?
The answers will not only be based on cost, but mainly on what type of learning experience we want and what type of conception of authority we have.
For more information on enciclomedia:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-TKfP-cbc&hl=en]
Public Policy for Network Society: The Politics of Technology Policy
On April 11/12 we are organizing a conference in Monterrey, Mexico that aims to put technology policy square in the middle of the public policy debate in Mexico (Harvard Kennedy School, EGAP, CIAPEM). http://www.ppfornetworksociety.org/
Here is my argument that is valid not only for Mexico, but for any country today:
Technology policy is one of the most important issues for government. However even today, decisions about technology policy that shape our economies and societies are made by non-political civil servants, often influenced by vendors that want to sell a service or product.
By openly putting strategic (almost philosophical) questions onto the table, the conference aims to establish technology policy making in the core of the Mexican public policy debate. We aim to either achieve consensus on the questions or at least sharpen the respective arguments and put that down in a document that will be accessible to the interested public on our website.
Our focus lies on technology education, the makeup of the institutional ecology of the network political economy, public value creation in government 2.0, and the networked public sphere.
The guiding questions of the conference are:
Education
How do we prepare Mexican students for a networked world? Do we follow the closed enciclomedia route? Do we go OLPC? One (networked) computer per student, classroom, school? Do we allow user-generated content?
Open Source
What is the role of the state in fostering open source ecosystems? What is the link between government and open source? Open source and open content?
Government 2.0
How is government changing through XML, user generated content, peer interactions, social software? How is the public sphere changing?
Transparency and Privacy
Do technologies like SISI enhance access to information? Can we assure privacy and data protection? What are the tradeoffs? How does it impact corruption?
Part of the conference will be peer produced, there is a wiki on the website and we plan to write up our findings/disagreements. So do join us, if you want an invitation, send an email to Nestor (nestorgr@gmail.com), you need a code for the registration on the website.
