October « 2009 « 29th Day

29thday.org

exponential problems require exponential solutions

October 22, 2009

Did Brinkmannship Fell Berlin’s Wall? Brinkmann Says It Did -WSJ

Filed under: Activism,Media,Political — glberry @ 11:55 am

An article from the WSJ on what really brought down the Berlin wall. This is a fascinating story. Essentially, East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski wasn’t up to speed on a recent travel policy and blew his answer at an international press conference. This led the media to conclude the border was open. The effect was immediate.

Here was the consequence…

The result, once East Berliners had seen that night’s news on West German television, was chaos at border crossings across the city…At Bornholmer Strasse, one of the main checkpoints in central Berlin, confused border guards couldn’t get clear orders on how to deal with the crush, and debated whether to open fire. Instead, they opened the barrier, and the Berlin Wall was history.

CIC principle # 2 comes to mind – The Message must be an exact match to the self-interests of the target audience(s). That was certainly the case here with regard to the East German population.

Believable news reports (the Messenger) that the border was open motivated thousands of East Germans to flood the border crossings with the expectation that they could cross. It is hard to think of another circumstance that could motivate thousands of oppressed people to approach border crossings where many people had been killed.

CIC principles #3 and #4. The Message must be communicated to the target audience(s) and the Messenger must be trusted, with crystal clear core values.

I am sure others apply as well.

Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands

Filed under: Business,Media,Tech — glberry @ 10:33 am

A post from Jeremiah Owyang on his Web Strategy blog here.

I am not going to excerpt much since the whole piece is excellent. He is discussing how search engines will be incorporating real time Twitter data and how companies need to have the ability to leverage that data in real time.

He has several take aways. Here is one that is particularly CICcy.

# Develop a Listening Strategy That Starts With Roles and Process. Every business and market is now moving faster and faster as information spreads around the globe in minutes –if not seconds. Companies must be ready to quickly identify flare ups, be ready to respond, and correct incorrect information. Develop a listening strategy that has internal roles set in place, a process to respond and the right tools like Radian 6, Visible Technologies, BuzzMetrics, or Cymfony.

Another CICcy thing is that he wrote this article in a real time wiki with Charlene Li.

Cool.

October 19, 2009

The Shifting Political Sand Pile

Filed under: Activism,Political — glberry @ 1:46 pm

From the American Thinker.

Publius Valerius asks…

Why did the Tea Party / Town Hall protests surprise so many in the political establishment?  Why did they make Democrats recoil in horror and send Republicans running for cover when confronted by them?  Why did the White House claim to be unaware of the protests and the media feel compelled to ignore and diminish them even when they mobilized hundreds of thousands in demonstrations around the country?

Why did the NY Times find “unnamed ‘Republican officials’… fret over a backlash” to the Tea Parties and downplay their significance?  Why are Republicans “wary of the anger directed at all politicians”?  After all, the politicians that this strong, passionate grass-roots movement are mostly angry with are Democrats.

His short answer is this.

The answer may be found in something called “Complexity Theory”.

Whenever you see the term “Complexity Theory”, think CIC.

He continues…

To better understand the relation of Complexity Theory to politics, let’s examine a deceptively simple system: a pile of sand.

Imagine grains of sand, all exactly the same size and weight and all being dropped at the same rate onto a flat metal dish one grain at a time. At first there appears to be no organized symmetry to the placement of the grains which spread all over the dish.  Eventually however, the grains “self-organize”; that is, they tend to pile up in the center of the plate.  As more of the grains are dropped, the pile eventually grows into a small cone in the center of the dish.  Of course, the surface of the cone is the most easily visible part of it, but it represents a minority of the entire pile which exists inside the cone.

He then does an excellent job of discussing the political grains of sand that have been piling up. 

He ends with this.

This de-centralized, interconnected, uncontrollable movement is 21st Century politics.  It has made the top-down mentality increasingly irrelevant or obsolete. To survive and prosper, one must understand that the only certainty is that the very nature of modern society precludes political certainty.

To succeed one must understand decentralized, organic power is NOT subject to the sclerotic thinking associated with the centralized control mentality of the 20th Century.
This is pure CIC vs CI.   CI is represented here by the established political parties while the grassroots have self organized via distributed power networks.  There is perfect alignment of motivation and means and the result is an exponential growth in the tea party movement.  So much so that the DC protests grew from 3,000 on April 15th to over 100,000 (more?) on September 12. 

Politicians, old media and the park police didn’t see it coming.  For them, it was the 29th day.

October 18, 2009

Tsunami and Technology: Powers at Be at Sea

Filed under: Media,Tech — glberry @ 6:38 pm

Wayne Hodgins was on his boat in Pago Pago harbor on September 29th, 2009 when the tsunami hit American Samoa.  He documents his experience, which is absolutely amazing, on his  Learnativity Blog. On his other blog, Off Course – On Target, he discusses what he calls the network effect after he begins to tweet to the world what has happened through his satellite phone .

He writes:

What started to happen next was that news networks, reporters, bloggers, and others started to find my feeds as they were searching for information and were contacting John and me. Within less than an hour after this all started, I was receiving calls, texts, and emails and was able to help these sources get the word out to the rest of the world. Amazing!

He goes on to discuss how real time, real people reporting using digital technologies like satellite and cell phones and personal computers using email and twitter and facebook and text messaging allow us to experience news in real time in a way that is impossible for traditional media.

Wayne says:

Of course the problem with traditional news media such as TV, radio and print is that they are on a schedule and need put all this input together, edit it, and then wait for the next available time slot. In the much more immediate interim though, these new means of communication and “reporting” are happening in real time.

Of course, you hear the traditional media talk about quality, verification and journalistic standards in an effort to ward off the onslaught of new media that is decentralized and incredibly rapid.  Not only that, it is changing exponentially.  When you have experiences like someone tweeting live from Pago Pago harbor , the arguments made by those media traditionalists seem reasonable but may end up being irrelevant as events on the ground take over.

It is not just that Wayne could tweet from the scene but also,  as he describes above, it is the real time interaction between him and the other news sources who went on to report to their customers  exponentially faster than traditional outlets.

Save a Slave

Filed under: Activism,Political — glberry @ 9:07 am

The Girl Revolution blog posted a story discussing the many ways people in the West can help women who are suffering in the third world. From that post…

I, a middle-class American housewife, can literally support a war rape survivor The Congo for $27 a month. I’m most excited about doing this one with Ainsley, due to the letter exchange. We can save a woman and make her economically independent for $27, and she’ll be our pen pal. Ainsley and I already signed up for this one. We can’t wait to find out who our sister is, where she lives and what her life is like.

This is powerful stuff. How is this CIC? CIC solutions will remove the barriers and improve the connections between the end points in the system in question. Here, the various websites mentioned connect a middle class American housewife with a third world woman who needs her help. Think about that.

There are other principles as well. The focus on cause rather than symptoms. Cooperation rather than confrontation. The leveraging of the relative value of $27 in America versus the value of $27 in the third world.

She ends the piece with this and she clearly gets it.

This is, honestly, the most powerful thing I’ve heard in a long time. We can DO something to change the situation for women and girls around the world. Something effective. Something meaningful. Something important. Something that doesn’t just change a woman, but a family, a lineage, a country, a world. It’s exponential change. Exponential change for $27.

It is really encouraging to see these principles at work solving problems in the real world.

October 17, 2009

Exponential Money in a Finite World

Filed under: Ecomonic — glberry @ 5:16 pm

Chris Martenson reposted his article “Exponential Money in a Finite World” today here. If you haven’t read it, it is worth your time. I will let it stand on its own but I will include a few things here.

First, this part.

The US/world monetary system was designed and implemented at a time when the earth’s resources seemed limitless, so few gave much critical thought to the implications that every single dollar in circulation was to be loaned into existence by a bank with interest. In fact, most thought it a terribly “modern” concept, and most probably still do.

But anything that is continually expanding by some percentage amount, no matter how minuscule, is said to be growing geometrically, or exponentially.

Next, this graph. This is just one. He has lots of good graphs.


The piece is a little technical when compared to laymen’s terms but worth the effort.

Here is how it ends (but you should still read all of it)

In summary, because our economic model and our entire system of money enforce a doctrine of limitless growth, they have become anachronisms incompatible with the well-being of the planet on which we live and depend. Our global money system might be complicated, and it might be sophisticated, but it is soon to be a vestige of the past.

Your job, your savings, your investments, and your future prospects and standard of living depend on the continuation of an unsustainable system now drawing to a close. You owe it to yourself to get ahead of the immense changes that are coming like water roiling up the steps towards the bleacher seat to which you are chained.

October 16, 2009

Gary Hamel: Slacker’s Paradise

Filed under: Business,Theoretical — glberry @ 12:55 pm

From Steve Todd’s Information Playground blog here:

At the World Business Forum today Gary Hamel presented new, innovative ways to manage an organization. This model is designed to specifically keep pace with exponential change in our industries and world. Here are some of the qualities of this new management style:

* employees do public performance reviews of their manager, and their manager’s manager
* employees each year are required to rank 20 of their peers in order of “value to the company”
* there are no travel restrictions. Employees can travel anywhere they want, on any airline, eat what they want, and stay at any hotel they want. Their trip expense report is posted internally.
* employees with innovative ideas have access to instant funding on the order of several thousand dollars
* employees have the right to say “no” to any meeting request
* leadership is bestowed by calling a meeting where people actually attend because they want to

How many CIC principles from Chapter 2 can you identify in that list?

* Distribution of power.
* Distributes information.
* Use creativity to overcome restraints.
* clear mission

Others? All of them?

October 15, 2009

Books of the Future

Filed under: Tech,Theoretical — glberry @ 11:02 am

Very interesting and helpful with regards to what we are trying to do at 29thday.org.

Consider this. Here he discusses books of the future (or, in the case of 29thday.org, the present) :

First, is mixing media, including text, graphics, animation, video, and audio in whatever context is most appropriate. Second is ever-present access to the knowledge base of the infinite mind of the Internet Cloud. Third, is interactivity thereby permitting audience contribution to the narrative.

A man after our own heart. This appears near then end of the piece.

For example, consider a pond with a single Lilly pad. Introduce a growth function whereby the number of pads doubles everyday such that at the end of 30 days the entire pond is covered with pads. On the 27th day fully 85% of the pond remains open water, but in the final three day the exponential (doubling) growth function results in a completely pad-choked pond. Changes in “authoring in the teens” will be similar.

Read the whole thing

Steve Poizner gets it

Filed under: Ecomonic,Political,Theoretical — glberry @ 10:18 am

Steve Poizner is running for governor of California. On September 28, 2009 he gave a speech at the state convention of the CA Republican party. Here is one of the things he said:

Let’s just look at those three countries for a moment. These three countries did not matter much to us at all, economically speaking, as little as 15 years ago. Well, that’s changed rapidly. If you add up all the people that live in just those three countries, 3 billion people, and if you assume that 90% of the people that live in those three countries are uneducated peasants, which is basically the case, you’re still left with 300 million people.

Highly educated, aggressive business people, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs that for the first time in the history of the planet, these people can compete with us just fine by staying put and just simply plugging in. So what happens?

He goes on tell us what happens.

What happens when you unleash 300 million new entrepreneurs into the global economy in a very short period of time? You get rapid change. Exponential change. So, ladies and gentleman, what we need to do is completely overhaul the jobs- creating environment in California or we’re going to get steam-rolled in this 21st century global economy.

He the proposes a plan with four components.

1. Cut taxes
2. Tort reform
3. Realign labor laws
4. Streamline regulations using innovative technologies

He doesn’t call it CIC but he is sure using it.

The whole speech can be found here

Don’t Buy Green

Filed under: Environment,Political,Theoretical — glberry @ 10:02 am

From Marcelo Rinesi at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He starts with this.

Consumption, goes the tale, is the great driver of ecological disruption. Hence, green consumers will save the planet (a safe planet being one with sustainable ecological and energy systems). Right? Wrong.

Allow me to set aside the underlying ecological assumptions in the piece to address some CIC aspects I think are interesting. Rinesi proposes that individual actions (buying a hybrid, paper instead of plastic,etc ) may make you feel good but don’t effect meaningful change. That needs to take place on a larger scale.

Here are two of his points I want to draw out.

First, he says individuals need to engage politically rather than focus on their own actions since governments primarily can effect change on a necessary scale. In CIC terms, he is essentially saying that changing individual behaviors is a linear response with linear effect but engaging politically is an exponential response with exponential effect.

Second, and this is the one I really wanted to get to, we need to understand how things work. He puts it this way:

Health, prosperity, and safety are unsustainable without functioning energy and ecological infrastructures, but that fact has limited political impact until politicians have come to the conclusion that, irregardless of other issues, counterproductive or even ineffective actions in those fronts will be career enders. It’s clear that in most countries we are still far away from this situation.

The point I am trying to make is not environmental but practical. We need to be careful that we don’t think our linear actions have exponential results and if we want to influence CI politicians, we need to understand what motivates them.

Here is the whole post.

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