One of the major catalysts that broke me out onto the technology scene was an invitation by Ideas Project to submit a video for their site. In case you’re unaware, Ideas Project is hosted by Nokia, and features videos and articles by people who are thinking about the future of communication and technology. Anyone can submit an idea (like I did), and the site can keep you busy for hours learning about new technological developments, inspiring projects being done, and disruptive ideas about where things are headed.
At the moment, they’re running a “Question of the Week” series, and this week they posted mine. I only had so many characters for the question, so I want to frame it within its context a little better, and maybe you can submit a comment to the site if you’re intrigued. Continue reading →
I wanted to let you know about a platform/infrastructure I am trying to inspire. This idea has been buzzing for months, but it finally came together in my head. Here’s a quick post about it:
The Junto is just the conversation platform, but everything is built upon it. We launched the alpha prototype on Friday night, and without “advertising it”, we had nine of us in there live on video, and about 500 people in the backchannel watching.
People are already writing blog post reviews of it:
I think this could be huge, but there needs to be a way to be certain it remains open source and free and distributed. There needs to be a new infrastructure built to distribute the bandwidth of the video streaming. I don’t really understand the technical aspects of this, but there needs to be some kind of alternative internet structure to run this, but I see it. It starts with a 3D conversation interface, where we interact in a floating space similar to the look of the Virtual Choir, and the only components it needs is a live video stream of the people, data visualization (a la Pivot), a way to record the conversations, and an AI to parse and summarize the conversations so they’re searchable.
All the components already exist, we just have to put them together, and it needs to be a global cooperative effort.
The interface is like a 3D landscape of conversations, with 2 people engaged in dialogue, and an “audience” (backchannel) of people around them listening in or taking turns to speak. The individual in the conversation has a view something like shown below. When the conversation itself is the focus, the 2 video boxes are center stage on screen. When a document or shared whiteboard or concept is the focus, the video boxes shift to the side, and the item of discussion becomes center stage. The entire platform is a concept/idea generation engine.
Personal profiles are generated by the contents of your conversations and the people you’re talking to. There is no ability or need for assertion – you are what you talk about and what you do and who you talk to. Profiles are data visualizations generated by your actions.
There’s more, but we’re talking about a microfinance platform on top and a virtual currency system. This is disruptive.
Many of us have been inspired by the cooperation meme lately, and it appears that our collective spirit has given birth to Junto!
In case you haven’t been following along, Junto is a concept we’ve been discussing for a global communications and collaboration platform. It starts with a simple interface, combining video chat with a text box and a twitter backchannel, all streaming in public, real-time. It could be used for any number of projects or goals – organizations could use it for open innovation or to show how they are taking social responsibility in the world, groups with similar initaitives could use it for huge group discussions and meetings in order to accelerate the process of organizing and taking projects from idea to action, and individuals could use it to engage in dialogue and create shared meaning and shared understanding across geographic and cultural barriers. For more context, check out the original post here.
The longer term goal is to build in a family of tools and functionality that will aid in thinking and development, such as:
– live collaborative whiteboard
– concept mapping, possibly linked with twitter in order to automatically send links to specific areas of a project
– Junto video sessions to be time-coded and tagged for easy search and later reference
– emotional/intuitive symbol language to express feelings around ideas and concepts
– data visualization, heat-mapping and sounds linked to information to quickly visually & auditorily “get” a piece of information
– tools for checking cognitive biases around information
There are other high-level concepts floating out there, but I think these are the ones that are immediately being looked at. While these aspects are being explored, a trust-based profile structure is being created, which is intended for people to be able to express inherent strengths, values, skills, social connections, and where they can contribute within a process, so that we have the opportunity to reach out to one another, make a connection, and team up to get things done!
And beyond that, it’s for us to evolve as people. If you’ve followed along here over the months, I talk about getting back to the fundamentals of who we really are, about deep values, interconnection, social learning, building intelligence, and raising consciousness. It works for some by sitting in meditation alone on a mountaintop, but I think it also happens when we make connections with people who unexplainably resonate on our frequencies and pull us forward. It doesn’t replace real life interaction – but the Web sure does allow us to make beautiful music together. 😉
So here’s a quick overview of where we’re at and who’s stepping forward so far:
Dave emailed me a few weeks ago, offering to help with prototyping the initial platform. We met up on Wednesday, and now, 2 days later, the first version of Junto “0.01” (ha) has emerged. Dirty prototype here:
We played with it a bit last night, and had nine people on video, and around 500 people who came in over the course of the evening to check it out. Here’s a quick video of what it looked like. (We were having some audio issues, so everyone is being quiet, but essentially we have the initial components of video boxes, text box, and Twitter backchannel (which is offscreen).
We’re just using this as a “proof of concept” – we’d like to build the whole thing from scratch for the real version, so hopefully some developers will start getting interested in the project. (hint hint)
Gavin has a very creative mind, and has come up with some interesting sketches and ideas about what the interface could look like, how it could function within a layered visual system, and how it ties in with the profile system. He’s also helping us think about the bigger picture of what this platform will become after it goes beyond the Junto discussion platform. We’re talking about calling it ebiidii – ebii for short.We realized that Junto is just the discussion… so what’s the other thing that it’s encapsulated by? We were trying to think of a word that describes the essence of cooperation, collaboration, manifestation, and intentional evolution, but so many times words are already laden with meanings and preconceived notions, so we wanted to create something new. We noticed how people have been shortening the name of this blog to E.B.D., hence ebiidii. Not only does the acronym describe what we want to be (Emergent by Design), but the letters seem to have a lot of symbolism in themselves. The ‘e’ could be for emergence, evolution, energy….. the b and d are like mirrors, representing how we can reflect ourselves to others, and how others are mirrors of ourselves, and the double ii’s are like two groups meeting, but also the iiii gives a feeling of an echo, or a frequency, or a resonance. We thought that that was pretty cool, and it almost named itself. And the shortened version of ‘ebii’ is just so darn cute.
Gunther and his colleagues are working on developing a platform to help local communities create infrastructure and affect change. Here’s a bit from his site:
Our partnership with CIF (The Canadian Institute for the Future) is leading us down a swift path towards a new dynamic publishing platform, designed to build infrastructure in local communities by way of transmedia development and a robust microfinancing engine. Basically, we’re hoping to re-engineer the storytelling process and make it profitable (and equitable) for entire groups of people. In our humble belief, participatory culture is something that must be empowered if we want to affect real change in the near and long term.
We’ve also been talking about how a conversation platform could evolve to include a way for individuals and groups to reach out and help each other, via a virtual currency or microfinance implementation, so it seems of mutual benefit for us to co-create this platform. This was encouraging news, as this idea can manifest more quickly with access to their financial resources. We’re also both aligned with the idea that this is to be an open source, publicly available platform for anyone to use and benefit from.
Ishan is an active member on SpaceCollective and recently attracted my attention with a project he’s working on to develop an emotion/intuition-based symbol language, called “zoacodes.” It builds on Ebon Fisher’s work, and they’re just on the front end of teaming up with designers and typographers to craft this new thing. We’re not sure yet how everything fits, but it’s unfolding. He’s also been working on how reputation works in online spaces, and has been tracking that work in on Twine under ‘Friendships in Hyperconnectivity.’
Gabriel recently reached out to me after my ‘Future is Networks’ post, and has a lot of ideas about the future of open source video http://vimeo.com/6668034 and visual storytelling. As the discussion platform evolves, and video sessions can be recorded and parsed and tagged, we’re hoping Gabe will share some insights into what that could look like.
Michael is working with Syntience, a company pioneering a holistic approach to understanding data, called Artificial Intuition. Once our platform is sufficiently developed, we’re going to see how their software could accelerate our ability to make sense of information, connect with each other, and make ideas manifest.
The other big thinkers that have been shaping these idea over the months are Bernd Nurnberger (@CoCreatr) [Location: Yokohama, Japan] ), Ned Kumar (@Nedkumar) [Location: US], Spiro Spiliadis (@spirospiliadis) [Location: Canada], Mark Frazier (@openworld) [Location: Virginia], Michael Josefowicz (@ToughLoveforX), Cole Tucker (@cole_tucker) [Location: North Hampton, MA], and Nuno Raphael Relvao (@UnfoldedOrigami) [Location: Coimbra, Portugal]. There are many more – this is a global effort, after all – but I’m going to stop here for now. Because this is a distributed effort, energy levels will rise and fall, people will come and go, and everyone will participate and contribute as long as it stays pure and fun. I’m going to just keep calm and collected and keep doing what I’m doing, and we’ll see where things go from here. 🙂
In case you’re interested, here’s the results of a brief survey I tweeted last week, just to gauge initial interest in this. We’ve also begun a Google Wave for collaboration until people decide that something else is more effective.
I’m so excited to see how all these different groups and people across space and time are coming together around this shared vision of creating something that will better help us help ourselves.
We don’t know how it’s going to unfold, but it is incredibly inspiring to see the interest mounting, and I’m eager to see more collaborators and participants getting involved!
Next steps are to entice more developers and coders to build the infrastructure so that this system can emerge, and to begin experimenting with the look and functionality of this site so that it can be as simple, intuitive, and beautiful as possible so that the largest number of people can quickly benefit from using it.
We recently discussed Pattern Recognition and the role it plays in understanding and decision making. The next topic in this 12 part series is pulled out of the Futures Thinking toolbox:
::Environmental Scanning::
Traditionally, environmental scanning is explained within a business context as a strategic approach to acquiring information in order to stay current on events, emerging trends, and external factors that could influence or impact an organization. It basically means paying attention to what’s going on within your industry, monitoring what your competitors are doing, what your customers are saying, and being sensitive to potential threats or opportunities along the way. Continue reading →
This morning I was getting some seeds started for my garden, and I was reminded of a tweet from a few weeks ago where I said something to the effect of ‘customer service is now more like gardening and less like hunting – nurture relationships.’ Well, the SCRM crowd (social customer relationship management) pushed back. [@wimrampen@grahamhill@ekolsky@myjayliebs@mkrigsman@SameerPatel@pgreenbe@kitson, you know who you are!] They said this wasn’t the case, and that studies had shown that customers don’t really want a relationship with a brand. To me, “relationship” doesn’t have to mean I’m going to have you over for dinner. There are levels. It can just mean that I will recommend you to a friend. I let it go at the time, but I want to go for Round 2.
I think that gardening is as powerful a metaphor as any for the life-cycle of a process, and I do see a correlation between what it takes to grow a garden and what it takes to build trust with a potential customer, client, or future alliance. Here’s how I see it:
Over the past few months, we’ve been discussing the various skills needed for effectively operating in a world characterized by information and accelerating change, and I’ve been assembling these ideas into a framework for a new thought architecture. This post will be the first in a 12 part series, and draws its influences from the fields of Futures Studies, Complexity Science, Systems Theory, Cybernetics, Social Network Analysis, Knowledge Management, common sense, and exploration into my own thinking.
All of the skills I’ll be covering are already in practice in our brains – it’s just a matter of becoming more aware of them so we can sharpen them. I imagine them all happening concurrently and all reinforcing each other, creating constant feedback loops that raise consciousness and build intelligence. Though I’ll be identifying 12 areas, they’re mostly components of each other, so we’ll see how we might expand or refine these as the series rolls out.
– :: Pattern Recognition :: –
The ability to spot existing or emerging patterns is one of the most (if not the most) critical skills in intelligent decision making, though we’re mostly unaware that we do it all the time. Combining past experience, intuition, and common sense, the ability to recognize patterns gives us the ability to predict what will happen next with some degree of accuracy. The better able we are to predict what will happen, the more intelligent we become. So, you might say that the purpose of intelligence is prediction. Continue reading →
This post is intended to serve as a benchmark for the progress we’ve made since the inception of this blog. What started as a personal exploration into the self and the emerging Network Culture has evolved to be a collaborative effort to better understand ourselves and our process, to share resources and gifts, and to learn and grow.
I am continuously humbled by the level of participation, the depth of thought and insight, and the consistent support and encouragement that have been contributed here daily. And not just to me, but to each other.
I believe we have reached a new level of cooperation in this past few weeks, and it bears acknowledgement before we progress further. I want to take an opportunity to reflect on what I perceive has happened so far in this collective learning loop, to capture this moment, so that we’ll always have a point of reference as we continue on this journey. I can only imagine that things will get more exciting and innovative from here on out. Continue reading →
Originally, “The Junto was a club established in 1727 by Benjamin Franklin for mutual improvement. Its purpose was to debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy, and to exchange knowledge of business affairs.” [wikipedia]
This seems rather amazing to me, and something that should always exist for knowledge sharing, information exchange, learning, personal growth, and empowerment. Not only does it make logical sense, a recent research study suggests deep, meaningful conversation actually makes us happier. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that when two people enter into a deep discussion, they create shared meaning of the world, strengthening their connections and bonds and interdependence, making them happy. (It feels good to relate to others!!! Did we need published research to really know that? Just check out the comments section of this blog, it’s living research.) Continue reading →
In a lot of ways, we all just pulled each other up to a new frequency, I think. We’ve been sharing our ideas and perspectives of our personal discoveries for a while now, and all of a sudden all these perspectives assembled into an insight that helped me understand why the human network is so important, and why building a personal ‘trust network’ is critical for moving forward in society. (For anyone new here, check out An Idea Worth Spreading post and comment thread as an orientation to this site and the thinking going on here.)
So the past few days have been spent thinking about what just happened, and how we can keep doing it.
I have realized what’s happening here is that this blog has become a public learning community, where we are all literally learning how to learn. We are learning how to think in this new way. This new way of thinking, this ‘network thinking,’ by default requires a network. We can’t learn how to think in the new way alone. We can only figure it out through experimentation and collaboration. This is the “shift” everyone is talking about, the big thing that individuals and organizations “need” to operate in the 21st Century. We’re revealing it, unfolding it, right now, together.
In case you missed it, Facebook surpassed Google last week, according to Hitwise Intelligence.
Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week.
So what?
Watch this short video of Thomas Power of Eacademy.com talking about Facebook becoming a bank. He says Facebook should catch Google in terms of traffic by the end of the year. (looks like it’s happening even sooner than expected?) He then lays out a scenario of some powerhouse acquisitions that could take place, and a possible peer-to-peer lending business model that could wipe out the current banking industry as we know it.
emergent by design 