b l a s t u l a reblog++

First and most importantly, the room was full. Not long ago, a seminar on climate change adaptation here would have been a lower-profile event. It might have drawn a few dozen people, most of them academics, activists and development workers. Even the topic would have been seen as controversial, even taboo: “Don’t talk about adaptation,” went the argument, “because that will signal that we’ve given up on stopping global warming.” But as the evidence mounts that climate change is here, and that adaptation is imperative, that taboo has finally begun to crumble away.

And today, there was a room full of officials, business execs, and consultants like me crammed into a rather small auditorium to hear about “Climate Change Adaptation — Finding the Business Opportunities.” (The seminar was sponsored by Sweden’s agency for international development aid, SIDA, and the networking group Globe Forum.) There was not a whiff of taboo in the room. In its place was the whiff of entrepreneurship — driven in part, I sensed, by a healthy dose of genuine fear.

Why haven’t the opportunities in adaptation been “found” already? After all, the world is plainly going to need new ways to do everything from watering crops in newly drought-prone areas, to keeping buildings cool in extreme heat waves, to responding quickly to floods and other extreme weather events. Somebody is going to make money finding — and selling — the answers to those problems. What’s stopping them?

Actually, some people are already making money helping the world adapt to climate change. Australia, for example, has new desalination plants under construction in every major city, a friend there just related. Someone is surely making money on those. But the overall level of global progress on private sector investment to address adaptation to climate change is still just as frustratingly slow as progress on climate change generally.

The reasons have principally to do with the current rules of the game in financing, and — said speakers at this symposium — a simple lack of good communication and networking between the relevant players. Investors still don’t talk enough with CleanTech entrepreneurs, mostly because the CleanTech people don’t know how to talk to them. The interest is there, especially in the energy sector; but the flow of dollars, which requires first a flow of words, is still weak.

Moreover, the relevant technologies, which usually go under the heading of CleanTech (new energy, water, recycling, and waste disposal methods), are still perceived as high risk. Even risk-capital investors therefore want higher-than-normal returns. They are interested, they are moving in that direction, but they are wary — especially since the relevant markets are highly politicized. As experience in countries like Denmark shows, your investment in something like wind energy may be entirely dependent on which government wins in the general election, and what policies they set.

Add the challenges of operating in a developing country, where the legal frameworks and working cultures are nowhere near as predictable as, say, Sweden, and you get a world of pent up demand for investment capital … and a dribbling supply.

Nearly everyone at this seminar spoke of the need for greater partnership, dialogue, and collaboration between sectors. Those working on climate negotiations, like EU climate negotiator Angela Kallhauge, spoke urgently about this: “We have 325 days left till Copenhagen,” she noted, and mobilizing stable investment flows over the long term was just one of the great challenges she saw ahead for the world. (The others were agreeing on ambitious mitigation targets, securing the participation of all parties, creating a sense of shared responsibility, and enhancing the role of adaptation in the negotiation process.) “We need to open up the ‘black box’ of what the private sector is doing … We know things are happening, but we need to pull them into the debate” before the world meets to determine its climatic fate in December 2009.

Actually, much adaptation work has become mainstream business practice — something several speakers noted. Nowadays, banks looking at “long-term risk management” for a dam project routinely include climate change projections in their calculations (or they should be doing so). This is adaptation work by another name. Kallhauge spoke of other examples, such as South African mining firm that projected an increasing, and therefore increasingly costly, prevalence of malaria among its workforce as global warming proceeded. So they invested in a strong malaria prevention program. It looked like a health program, with present-day benefits — but it was actually a program to protect a key corporate asset against future climate change.

Strangely, the current financial crisis seems to be having no negative impact on the steady, if slow, growth in investment heading in this direction. Indeed, the economic crisis seems only to be strengthening the case for climate change investment. A senior executive from PriceWaterhouseCoopers spent half his speaking time quoting, verbatim, from a December 2008 speech by Prince Charles of the UK. The Prince drew the parallel (as others have done) between the credit crunch and the “climate crunch.”

Both the credit and climate crises are characterized by (1) a huge increase in debt (in the climate case, the debt is a drawdown of natural capital); (2) overconfidence in the ability of markets and regulatory systems to identify and mitigate the risks of this accumulating mountain of debt; and (3) incentives driving individuals and organizations to prioritize short-term gains irrespective of their long-term sustainability. “Both crises require us to work together with urgency,” said Lars-Olle Larson of PWC. “A growing chorus of voices urge a response that is geared to dealing with both [the credit and the climate] crises at the same time” and create a “transformation toward an ecologically durable economy.”

Lars Wärngård, who heads a Swedish funding agency that provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to advance Swedish business innovation for sustainability (Vinnova), closed with some counter-intuitive thoughts about how to make that transformation happen. “We must be problem-oriented,” he said, not oriented around today’s perception of the solutions. Long-term focus on the problem of climate change — how to stop it, and how to adapt to it — will give rise to many solutions, over many years.

At long last, the issue of climate change adaptation is on the world’s table — and not just as a problem for researchers to study and activists to chant about (as well they should). The problem is reaching quickly into senior levels of business and government, and being framed as a problem, yes … but as an opportunity-creating problem.

And where investors see opportunity, change is sure to come.

This article originally appeared on the AtKisson Group blog, WaveFront.

Photo credit: flickr/C.Nichols, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Columns at 11:10 AM)

Originally by Alan AtKisson from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

Image by Il Primo Uomo via Flickr

For those of us participating in the global economy, going to the grocery store is an international experience — mangoes from Chile, a box of macaroni and cheese from Wisconsin, cocoa beans from Africa.

Food products travel thousands of miles just to reach the store shelves every day, but how often do we stop to think about this distance or its repercussions? A project-in-the-works called The Food Map is in the very early stages of bringing awareness to the issue of food miles and sustainability.

Two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin - Madison recently created the project as a way to “shed some light on the U.S. food network.” Although still in its super-beta form (currently, you can use it to see how far different brands of mac and cheese have traveled to get to from the factory to your kitchen), the Food Map idea is visionary in is mission to create awareness and interest in knowing where our food has been.

Kai Johnson, one of the Food Map’s creators, says that the idea for the Food Map was spurred by the love of food and the quest for knowledge. He hopes that this project will create an awareness that will change behaviors within the food system:

We believe that Awareness is absolutely paramount when you try to address any issue. However, this awareness is many times hard to come by, and most people do not have the time to investigate these things sufficiently to become educated consumers. Additionally, there are billions of dollars spent annually on advertisements that aim to keep our views focused on the surface and not dig deeper into the more interconnected reality. With The Food Map, we hope that we can make more people aware of the intricate and extensive interconnections of our current world by showing them a bit more about where their food has been. Potentially, this could be adapted to a number of other sectors of the economy: clothes, computers, cars, etc etc. Or also turned into a more wiki-style user produced content site. The more we know, the better informed we are in making decisions.

Creating awareness about the benefits of eating locally is not easy, especially when up against megaphone-style messaging from big name companies. But having a powerful visual, like the distractingly entertaining Food Map, and readily accessible information on the Internet, just might help the creators of this project achieve their mission of making the food network visible.

For more on the food system and food miles, see our archives:

Food Miles: Green Good Sense, Ill-Considered Hype, or Naked Protectionism?

Eating Really Local

Wrapping Our Heads Around the Global Food System

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Food and Farming at 2:33 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Sarah Kuck


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Sarah Kuck from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

 

The immense gap between the world’s rich and poor has finally become a topic of serious discussion throughout the developed world, reaching even into G-8 meetings (although not the U.S. presidential campaign). And we can be sure that in poor countries it has always been talked about—a lot.

But this new conversation about global poverty misses some key points. The narrow monetary focus of economists, political leaders, the media, business, and philanthropists overlooks an essential nature of the problem. Yes, it’s a tragedy—and truly a sin according to the moral or religious beliefs of most people around the globe—that half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day while most Europeans and North Americans make exponentially more than that.

It’s also a tragedy to reduce the meaning of life to an economic index.

As my friend Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk and Gandhian activist in India who now edits the UK green magazine Resurgence, once told me: “It’s commonly assumed that the opposite of poor is rich, but actually it’s sufficiency—a sense that there is enough.”

When you think about it that way, the most impoverished people in the world may be the high-rolling speculators on Wall Street and their colleagues in Frankfurt, London, Tokyo and elsewhere whose insatiable drive for money nearly tanked the world economic system last week. For them, there was never enough.

The overwhelming topic under discussion right now is how to repair our tattered global economy, a crisis that threatens to shove aside concerns about global poverty.

Yet these two crises are inextricably linked. We live on a bountiful planet, not a poverty-stricken one. There is enough for everyone if we follow the simple but sharp wisdom that money isn’t everything. Poor people have always realized this—otherwise they would have no reason to get up each morning. Let’s hope elite bankers, investors and economic policymakers have now understand it.

The great financial upheaval we’re experiencing is no momentary bout of bad luck, it’s the direct consequence of looking at the world as an economic engine that runs on money rather than a living organism nourished by natural and human resources. By learning that lesson, we’ll know everything we need to create a sound global economy that sustains everyone.

This piece originally appeared on the Ode Editor’s Blog.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

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(Posted by Jay Walljasper in Bright Green Economy at 11:15 AM)

Originally by Jay Walljasper from Worldchanging: Bright Green

Posted under reblog environment

This isn’t just about carbon … it turns out that cap and trade could be the largest economic redistribution program the US has ever seen.

I attended a symposium a few weeks ago at Evergreen State College about preparing our communities for climate regulation. The keynote was a thought-provoking talk about the economic implications of cap and trade system design by Peter Dorman, an economist and professor at Evergreen. This post is based largely on his talk.

In the United States, after years of local climate action pursued in the absence of federal involvement, we are suddenly standing in the midst of an unprecedented opportunity. We need climate action, we need economic intervention, and we have federal leadership that just might understand how deeply they are interrelated.

It seems certain that federal action on climate will involve a cap and trade system. It is of primary importance that citizens understand what’s at stake in its design. This policy will impact citizens as individuals, and our economy as a whole. Personally, I have not had a full appreciation of the economic changes this one mechanism could bring. As Dorman points out, global economic growth has been driven by increasing carbon densities for 2000 years – that is the size of the historical trend we are attempting to shift. Cap and trade will trigger a massive transfer of dollars from certain losers to certain winners. We can be confident that the economic implications of system design are not lost on those parties.

“Harry and Louise x 25”
Here is a wonderful cautionary tale: in 1993, we had a young, passionate new president with a mandate to change the way the US dealt with health care. It was part of the platform he ran on, and people had hope that it would finally happen. But the administration failed to anticipate the strength of the opposition (mainly the insurance industry), who responded with an expensive and well-organized ad campaign - centered around the fictional couple Harry & Louise - aimed at frightening citizens away from supporting the policy. The plan went down like a lead zeppelin. What was at stake? Twelve billion dollars in potential losses, back when $12 billion was real money.

The annual estimated value of carbon permits in the first year of a nationwide cap and trade program is $300 billion. We have seen nothing yet… and I see that we are unprepared for that fight. We expect our exciting new administration to lead on this, and it may. But do we dare pit an Obama administration against the combined fury of the oil, coal, gas, and chemical industries (and agriculture, and automobiles, and etc…)? Who represents the counter-force to industry in this? Us. How do we ensure that our voice is heard?

A large part of the problem is the emphasis in current media stories on setting the targets – what percent reduction by what year. Dorman charges that this is entirely the wrong emphasis; climate science continues to evolve, so whatever targets we set now will be revisited later, more than once. The targets need to be set, but we don’t need to get them exactly right, right now. But the opposite is true for what matters: the architecture of the mechanism. Once put in place, it will be – must be – hard to change. If it is easy to change, it will keep changing and a market will never develop. Yet if we make it hard to change and design it badly, it will fail.

The Architecture of the Western Climate Initiative
Dorman turned his attention to laying out his criteria for what good policy architecture for cap and trade looks like. He then used those criteria to inspect the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). Eric de Place, senior researcher at the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, has written an excellent series on the WCI, including discussion of implications. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in digging deeper than I will go here.

The main question as it is currently asked is one of setting the scope of the permits – who will fall under the regulations of a cap and trade scheme? This tends to be done – it is in WCI – by economic sector. But sector-by-sector emissions rights are an inherently political decision about the relative value of industries. The danger here is that clout trumps science. That’s a fail.

“US to Auction 100 percent of Emissions Permits, in Cap and Invest System”
So if it’s not the emissions targets, and it’s not the industries affected, what is the big question that we should be asking? What should the media headline include? We should be discussing the two most important points of system design: the percentage of emissions permits that will be auctioned, and how auction revenue will be disbursed.

These are the big stories, because the success or failure of a cap and trade system depends on getting these things right. According to Dorman, the best system will be fair, efficient, and transparent; will address the issue of price spikes (price signals are good, price spikes are bad); will auction 100 percent of credits/ permits; will recycle all auction revenue to the public; and will not allow offsets.

I’ll unpack these statements, briefly, one at a time:
1. Fair, efficient, and transparent
This is accomplished by making the regulations as comprehensive and upstream as possible. In practice this means regulating carbon as it enters the United States, so that the market – rather than politicians – determines who gets to emit how much.

2. Price spikes
In Dorman’s view, regulatory mechanisms for anticipating and addressing price spikes don’t need to be included in the cap and trade regulation itself. After all, price increases are part of how cap and trade works. But there needs to be some means of addressing prices that have escalated beyond a social/political standard.

3. 100% auction
The way a cap works is to drive down emissions by driving up prices of permits that allow the holders to emit. As those prices are transferred to consumers, we decrease our carbon consumption – this is how the carbon market works. So as Dorman says, rising energy prices will mean money leaving our pockets … where will that money go? There are two options: if the permits are given away, the money stays with the businesses, as profits; if the permits are auctioned, the money is reclaimed by the government. It is useful to think of cap and trade (in its function) as a sales tax. Prices for goods and energy will rise, and the impact will be regressive, hitting the poorest hardest. How will these impacts be dealt with? With revenue from the auctioning of permits. No auction, no revenue.

4. Revenue Recycling
If there is revenue, it should be returned to households — that’s revenue recycling. There are many differing opinions about how to best spend this money, with some advocating investment in specific programs, and some encouraging redistribution to the workers and businesses most affected. Dorman’s point here was interesting – that if we expect this program to survive, it must be exceptionally fair, with all of the money being recycled, in an equal amount to every citizen.

5. No offsets
Voluntary offsets are good. They represent efforts by citizens and businesses to pay for emissions-reducing projects. But as part of a cap and trade system, Dorman argues that “they create incentives for both the companies buying the offsets and the companies whose investments are being subsidized by the offsets to exaggerate their carbon benefits, and their additionality can never be fully determined.” (Additionality is itself a concept that not everyone supports, but that’s another post.)

Now, keeping these arguments in mind, let’s examine how the WCI design recommendations address each one:

1. The WCI is sector-based; non-comprehensive and downstream. Dorman described the process as a “free-for-all wrangle between business sectors to determine who gets to burn the most carbon.” Sightline’s de Place is more optimistic, reminding me that the WCI will cover more emissions than either the RGGI or the EU cap and trade market (recently written up here). In that sense, the WCI is fairly comprehensive. However, its shortfalls are that different business sectors are treated differently, with phased-in timelines, differential auction rates, and other unequal treatment.

2. The WCI only requires that 10 percent of the permits be auctioned, meaning up to 90 percent could be given away. See the point above about the importance of auctioning all the permits.

3. Up to 49 percent of reductions can be offset. Ditto for offsets.

4. The stakeholders throughout the process have been predominantly businesses. An indication, in Dorman’s opinion, of whose opinion mattered in crafting this agreement.

5. The economic analysis performed on the WCI focused on impacts to business. The more important question of economic impacts on households was not measured. This stands in clear contrast to what Dorman calls the “most elementary economic principles for evaluating a public policy” i.e. its impact on average citizens.

So how much does this matter to households? To you and me? If, as Dorman put it, life before cap and trade has been about trying to get meaningful action, then life after will be all about dealing with the many implications of higher prices for damn near everything.

In an analysis by Boyce & Riddle in 2007 on the distributional impacts of carbon regulation on households, researchers found the following: with no revenue recycling, the lowest economic quintile lost about 10 percent of their income due to higher prices. With revenue recycling, they gained nearly 15 percent, while the highest quintile lost only about 2.5 percent.

This isn’t just about carbon… it turns out that cap and trade could be the largest economic redistribution program the US has ever seen.

Now it’s important to point out that the WCI is not the final word – the states are crafting their own systems. And while we hope that they go further, recent news stories do not make me hopeful here in Washington. But even that is not the final word – I started this post discussing a federal cap and trade system. But we risk much if we pin our hopes on the federal government correcting our mistakes.

We talk about this kind of legislation as though we knew what we were talking about. But 2050 is 40 years away. We should be thinking hard about where and how much we can compromise. We need to be thinking about policy sustainability. We’re attempting to put in place a program on the scale of Social Security. We have to get it right.

Justus Stewart is an urban planner and designer living in Seattle. He currently works on climate planning for local governments. Justus’ main interest is the overlap and interrelation of fields usually held as separate.

Photo of smokestacks, credit: flickr/Broken Haiku, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Justus Stewart in Columns at 11:16 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Justus Stewart


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Justus Stewart from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

As many of our readers know, Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen has brought the message of big-picture, bright green change to audiences around the world, from Toronto to New Zealand. He has held the attention of world leaders, businesspeople in suits, students in sweatshirts, and many others in between (including the distinguished audience members at TED).

Last spring, Alex delivered the keynote at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival here in Seattle. Though this intimate event was more informal than most, it’s one of the few presentations from which we have a recording in full. We’re happy to have the chance to share it with you here:

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 12:02 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

I’m generally disappointed by business books, and for that matter non-fiction books in general. It’s rare to get a fresh idea, let alone one that is argued well. I’ve followed Mathew Bishop’s work (he is New York bureau chief of The Economist) over the years and confess to some skepticism when I saw he had co-authored a book (with Michael Green, an international development expert) entitled: Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. When I look at the many problems confronting the world today it seems to me that the rich, more than any other group, have messed it up. And what a mess it is.

However, Philanthrocapitalism is a great book, and I can’t think of any category of educated person who should not read it. The authors argue that philanthropists can be critical to helping solve society’s large problems because of their unique perspective.

Philanthrocapitalists are “hyperagents” who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else. They do not face elections every few years, like politicians, or suffer the tyranny of shareholder demands for ever-increasing quarterly profits, like CEOs of most public companies. Nor do they have to devote vast amounts of time and resources to raising money, like most heads of NGOs. That frees them to think long-term, to go against conventional wisdom, to take up ideas too risky for government, to deploy substantial resources quickly when the situation demands it—above all, to try something new.

The authors clear away much of the mud on the windshield when it comes to social investing, venture philanthropy, philanthropreneurship, social innovation, social entrepreneurship and the like. Every chapter is packed with interesting stories about the players who are making this happen, leveraging their wealth to improve the state of the world. I learned about the ecosystems of social investing, and was stunned to discover how business principles were being transferred so successfully.

[P]hilanthrocapitalists are developing a new (if familiar-sounding) language to describe their business like approach. Their philanthropy is “strategic,” “market conscious,” “impact oriented,” “knowledge based,” often “high engagement,” and always driven by the goal of maximizing leverage of the donor’s money. Seeing themselves as social investors, not traditional donors, some of them engage in “venture philanthropy.” As entrepreneurial “philanthropreneurs,” they love to back social entrepreneurs who offer innovative solutions to society’s problems.

For some time there has been the expression among the Corporate Social Responsibility community “You do well by doing good.” I don’t think this has been true. Many companies have done well by being awful – by having terrible labor practices, bad products bolstered by good advertising, externalizing costs (such as industrial emissions) on society and the like. However increasingly in the age of transparency everyone is being held to higher standards. And a new generation of people with wealth are beginning to understand that you can’t succeed in a world that is failing.

My hope is that wealthy people will read this book and follow the lead of their most progressive peers. How ironic, should the rich actually end up being key to making this smaller world a better and more sustainable one?

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Don Tapscott


reBlogged

on Jan 5, 2009, 10:55PM

Originally by Don Tapscott from Wikinomics on January 5, 2009, 11:55pm

Posted under reblog innovation

(note: you can see the original post here).

For the last few weeks I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift“, which has become particularly relevant in today’s turbulent economy. As everyone knows by now, one of the driving forces of the problems revealed in 2008 was that consumers took on too much debt. The natural anecdote for this is for consumers to stop borrowing, and start saving - but that’s where the paradox lies. If everyone does that, aggregate demand will fall, the economy crashes, and the savings rate falls further still (also noting that when one saves by putting money in bank, it has to become debt for someone else in order to earn interest). Thus, we have a problem.

So it’s a case where doing what looks like the right thing for the long-term success of the economy has some perilous implications - at least in the short-term. In turn, it got me thinking about whether there is a similar, and potentially much larger, “Paradox of Wikinomics” as well. What I mean by this is that while application of the wikinomics principles might appear to?? be the right thing for many companies and industries acting in their own self-interest, everyone adopting them at once could have similarly dire consequences - again, at least in the short-term.

In order to explain, let’s start again (also used in the wisdom of crowds vs. uniquely qualified minds post) with the first story in the book - GoldCorp. The gist was that the company ran a contest to find the best methods for identifying gold on their property, to great success. In theory, the methods they identified are probably the best for many such potential mines around the world. A logical extension would be that there are probably thousands upon thousands of people employed trying to discover ore deposits, that might very well now be redundant, if all similar companies adopted such approaches - transparency, information sharing, etc. - simultaneously. The old model, while less “efficient”, created more jobs.

So fine - one small subset of workers in the world potentially losing their jobs would barely cause a ripple in the global economy. But as you extend the principle of what made the GoldCorp story a success to other industries, such job loses can pile up. Other ideagoras (like Innocentive) would be an easy example, as companies start only paying for successful results (and a winner-takes-all economy takes hold) in R&D, while numerous people can no longer earn a living. But on a much larger scale, transparency and information sharing within the enterprise could make an extraordinary number of jobs redundant - jobs companies might be less resistant to cutting in the current economic climate than before. One easy example is “white collar grunt work” replaced by more effective, collaborative technologies - but there are many others.

And it of course doesn’t stop there. We’re already witnessing the demise of many newspapers, with the hyper-efficient Craigslist model being held responsible by many people. While I’m confident that the creation and dissemination of news will figure itself out again in the long run (and check out this excellent Clay Shirky interview for more thoughts on this), we’re seeing tremendous pressure on all creators of content tied to an advertising supported model. As the popularity of social media continues to increase, I expect that this trend will continue - and a lot of current jobs will be threatened.

I could go on, but I think you get my point by now. In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox - what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Given that the tagline of wikinomics is that mass collaboration changes everything, this dislocation could be on such a scale to make it a much tougher paradox to deal with. In such a case, the challenge is to ensure that the wave of innovation that can be unleashed through applying the wikinomics principles creates enough economic growth, and jobs, to compensate - and make sure the displaced workers can be re-trained to do them.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Denis Hancock


reBlogged

on Jan 6, 2009, 7:47PM

Originally by Denis Hancock from Wikinomics on January 6, 2009, 8:47pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

The World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai late last year was a new, unique gathering of the world’s leaders from academia, business, government and society. The Summit’s purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. The over-arching message that came from the many discussions: The world needs to examine the basic operating systems that drive its economies, markets and societies and aim for a “fundamental reboot” to establish a fresh platform based on renewed confidence and trust, and on sustainability, responsibility and ethical principles. As part of the proceeding delegates could record their thoughts on the most pressing issues of the day. I discussed why the Obama administration must embrace Government 2.0.

reBlogged

Originally by Don Tapscott from Wikinomics 

Posted under reblog wikinomics

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 short piece really struck a chord, mostly because it made me question some of the fundamental assumptions underlying our assertion that mass collaboration is not just a new business model that harnesses openness and participation; it???s a fundamentally new model of human organization and a new way to orchestrate our collective ingenuity to address the growing number of global challenges that may well overwhelm our traditional institutions.

Eno???s premise is that the game-changing development is more of a feeling than an idea???a creeping and insidious feeling that the world is getting worse rather than better, that the Earth???s natural capital is being pillaged rather than replenished, that war is more fruitful than peace, that your neighbor is more likely your rival than your friend. In this new world, fear, secrecy and mistrust reign. They replace optimism, openness and social cohesion as our dominant social operating principles. We will have reached the end of progress and then perhaps even the end of civilization.

The implication is that an end to optimism and a return to baser instincts would annihilate the conditions that make wikinomics possible–conditions such as high levels of social trust, a culture of openness and idea sharing, a deeply-ingrained sense of entrepreneurialism, not to mention a healthy dose of leisure time.

Here’s an excerpt from Eno:

Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960’s. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point ‘up’. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part.

But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-cataclysm novel The Road. What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere. There isn’t time for them. Long term projects are abandoned???their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned???not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits.?? Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right.

I think Eno provides us with some food for thought–though I’m more of an optimist than he. We probably underestimate the importance of how much our collective faith in progress and ever-increasing prosperity has shaped the way the world has evolved, particularly over the last century. Now things have hardly turned out as well as they might have, but what might have happened if that broadly accepted notion that there will be continuous improvement in the human condition was rejected in favor of much more distopian worldview? And what about the future? There is no doubt in my mind that we will need new institutions for governance if the human species is to survive the 21st century. I still think wikinomics could be part of the solution-set. But what prospect will we have to build these institutions in an environment of scarcity, conflict and mistrust.

Thanks to much social research, we know quite a bit about how people???s expectations of the future profoundly shape their behavior in the present. It???s probably time to start thinking more about how people???s behavior will change if and when our collective expectations of the future take a sharp turn for the worse. Will the spirit of wikinomics survive in harsher times? I don???t know yet. But before the world ends I???m going to enjoy giving this more thought.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Anthony D. Williams


reBlogged

on Jan 7, 2009, 4:54AM

Originally by Anthony D. Williams from Wikinomics on January 7, 2009, 5:54am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

I???m Jeff Perron, a Research Analyst Intern at nGenera in Toronto. I???m immersed in some pretty fascinating research at nGenera and am happy to be able to share some of my interesting finds. Any feedback and comments are very much appreciated.

We???ve all heard about how technology, namely the internet, is ruining lives in a number of different ways. Personally, instead of resisting and complaining about the fact that we live in a ???plugged-in world,??? I???m more interested in how digital interconnectedness can directly improve quality of life. One field that is important to quality of life that could benefit from embracing innovation is mental health counselling.

Traditionally, mental health counselling is delivered behind the closed doors of health care institutions and the private offices of the professional delivering the treatment. This represents a significant barrier to care that is particularly relevant to NetGeners, who can be reluctant to access traditional, face-to-face counselling (particularly in instances of social phobia or agoraphobia).??

In this article, I learned that psychologists seem to be picking-up on the need to make changes to the traditional model of counselling in order to provide more help to more people. What exactly are they suggesting be used as a tool in counselling NetGeners? Social networking sites, namely Facebook.

Online counselling (or e-counselling), is not entirely new. (The Wikinomics Playbook [p. 31] actually discusses how wikinomics principles can be applied to mental health treatment). However, more engaging e-counselling models are foreign to many mental health professionals, particularly for use with NetGeners (although check out this grief-counselling site for teens).

It is promising to learn of mental health professionals who are ???reaching out??? by adopting new modes of engagement in order to meet the needs of NetGeners. The full potential of social networking sites as counselling tools has obviously not yet been realized. However, to provide the highest level of care to the greatest number of people it will be necessary for health care providers to tap-into these channels.

??

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Jeff Perron


reBlogged

on Jan 9, 2009, 11:35PM

Originally by Jeff Perron from Wikinomics on January 10, 2009, 12:35am

Posted under reblog wikinomics