--'Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, pp. 79-80
Available from http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/SAQ/saq-15.html#pg79.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The good attributes and virtues which are the adornments of man's reality
Internet socially integrating humanity
From Forbes.com.
Excerpts:
...communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
...a key point about the social nervous system: It coordinates (and sometimes directs) physical activity in the world.
It is no coincidence that "transparency" is a catch phrase in government and business these days. It is a natural byproduct of this emerging social nervous system. The social nervous system engenders a healthier balance of power in society and helps to connect our individual actions into a larger context in a clear way.
The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe.
Excerpts:
...communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
...a key point about the social nervous system: It coordinates (and sometimes directs) physical activity in the world.
It is no coincidence that "transparency" is a catch phrase in government and business these days. It is a natural byproduct of this emerging social nervous system. The social nervous system engenders a healthier balance of power in society and helps to connect our individual actions into a larger context in a clear way.
The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe.
The Rise Of The Social Nervous System
Joshua-Michele Ross, 03.09.09, 01:40 PM EDTThe Internet now connects humanity into a hive mind. Is that a good thing?
SEBASTOPOL, Calif.--No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
There are now at least 1.6 billions of us connected via computer and 3 billion mobile devices that touch the Internet. The rise of "social" technologies--such as wikis, blogs, Twitter, SMS and social networks--means that the barriers to participation across the planet (in terms of the cost, access and skills required) are rapidly approaching zero.
As ever more people get connected, we see an acceleration in the way the Internet is used to coordinate action and render services from human input. We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system. Consider these three cases:
Emergency Response
The Mumbai attacks showcased the use of Twitter as a real-time, peer-to-peer information service. Throughout the event, people twittered the movement of the attackers. The police were on the service admonishing people not to disclose their own movements. Though there was criticism of whether or not the details were accurate (the BBC was criticized for integrating Twitter into its reporting), the larger point is that this real-time communication system influenced the physical behavior on the ground in Mumbai. This is a key point about the social nervous system: It coordinates (and sometimes directs) physical activity in the world.
Coordinating Political Action
The Obama campaign's Houdini project on election day used real-time data from polling stations to adjust its "get out the vote" program. As one participant noted, poll observers "took the real-time results of who actually showed up at the polls and fed it back to the campaign so that they could adjust their GOTV calls and canvassing as the day wore on. Every time someone came in to vote, their names were entered into a computer system, and their names disappeared or escaped, Houdini-like, from the call and walk lists."
Global Virus Forecasting
As millions of users search for health information, Google
Watch the news, and you will see daily evidence of how a system that connects billions of people is influencing the physical world--from recent protests in California against Proposition 8 organized by Facebook to the riots in my hometown of Oakland after several witnesses uploaded video taken from their mobile phones of a police shooting. New services such as Qik are now bringing live mobile camera feeds online (think Webcams for mobile phones). That will make what happened in Oakland a small foretaste of what is likely to come. I used Twitter during the Oakland riot to stay updated on local transit outages and plot a new route home from work.
It is easy to confuse this concept with the emerging field of machine learning such as the smart energy grid, traffic control using the sensor Web or the Planetary Skin Initiative recently announced by Nasa and Cisco
The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe. We can leverage the ubiquity of communications to coordinate real world activity--and just about anyone can do it. Even a kid with a mobile phone can capture a revolution.
Using a social nervous system, we are finding solutions to some big problems such as controlling disease or responding to emergencies. Most important, we are creating a feedback mechanism that exposes the actions of a powerful few to the many--and the trivial day-to-day life of the many to the whole of humanity.
It is no coincidence that "transparency" is a catch phrase in government and business these days. It is a natural byproduct of this emerging social nervous system. The social nervous system engenders a healthier balance of power in society and helps to connect our individual actions into a larger context in a clear way.
Another outcome of the social nervous system is that we see the shift away from privacy as an inalienable right to an individual responsibility. In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life.
Older generations expect that digital natives will one day wish to erase all their indiscreet photos online. But I don't believe this nonstop exposure will go away as the digital natives mature. Our lives are increasingly being logged on the Internet. It is part of the trade. Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.
As vice president with O'Reilly Radar, Joshua-Michéle Ross runs O'Reilly Media's consulting practice, helping clients apply Web 2.0 principles. He is also working on a video series, "The Future at Work." E-mail him at joshua.ross@oreilly.com.
See Also:
Applied Wisdom in Project Managment [UNITY], [RESPECT], [COOPERATION], [DECISIVENESS], [WISDOM]
This is from Scott Berkun's excellent blog - scottberkun.com. His observations can be generalized to so many situations in life!
Focus quotation:
Excerpt:
Focus quotation:
"No man can attain his true station except through his justice. No power can exist except through unity. No welfare and no well-being can be attained except through consultation."
- Bahá'u'lláh, quoted in The Prosperity of Mankind, p. 8
- Bahá'u'lláh, quoted in The Prosperity of Mankind, p. 8
Excerpt:
As a program manager (glorified title for project manager), all of my power actually came from the programmers. I only had a job because of the programmers. No programmers means no code, no product, no revenue. End of story. My power was an extension of theirs. I had to treat them with respect and go out of my way to earn their trust over time.
This meant first and foremost I had to earn their respect. Help them make decisions. Bulldoze organizational road blocks out of their way. Prove I was smart, that I could help them make tough decisions, and could make the product much better even though I couldn't write code as well as they could. And only after establishing that value could I be a team leader and be of true use to the project.
The Berkun Blog
Management and creative thinking
How project managers establish power
March 12th, 2009
I remember the day I started working as a program manager on the Internet explorer team. On my second day, Joe Belfiore, my boss, came to my office, closed the door, and told me two things:
1. Your relationship with programmers is everything
2. There are only two teams at Microsoft to care about, Windows and Office.
Forget for a moment these specific points. Joe did the most important thing in the world as a boss. He gave me clear priorities. Even if they were wrong, from day one (ok, it was day two) he imparted his private view of how to succeed and how to make sense of things. It was amazingly empowering. I could slice through all of the work being thrown at me from across the team and the company, and divide into two neat piles: a) things to care about, b) things not to care about. Joe was a great boss and provided this kind of clarity all the time.
It turns out both bits of advice were right.
Your relationship with programmers is everything
As a program manager (glorified title for project manager), all of my power actually came from the programmers. I only had a job because of the programmers. No programmers means no code, no product, no revenue. End of story. My power was an extension of theirs. I had to treat them with respect and go out of my way to earn their trust over time.
This meant first and foremost I had to earn their respect. Help them make decisions. Bulldoze organizational road blocks out of their way. Prove I was smart, that I could help them make tough decisions, and could make the product much better even though I couldn't write code as well as they could. And only after establishing that value could I be a team leader and be of true use to the project. With programmers as allies, working with marketers, testers, executives, or leaders of other teams, became easier, and my role as a team leader became possible.
When I visit companies or talk to people, and they tell me they rarely talk to the programmers, a red flashing light goes off in my head. How on earth do you have any power? I wonder. You don't know the people who actually make the thing you are managing! You have no idea if they believe in what they are doing or not, or if they have better ideas than yours. Something critical is broken if project managers don't have collaborative and trusting relationships with programmers. If there is a problem between PMs and programmers, it's the PMs job to fix it. Odds are they're better at communication, conflict resolution and have more perspective, all of the key skills for resolving differences and building relationships. Put another way: if you're a PM and your team hates you, what else do you have? Your relationship with your team is everything.
There are only two teams at Microsoft to care about, Windows and Office.
Back in 1995 when Joe gave me this advice, it was true. There were only two groups at Microsoft that were successful and brining in sizable revenue. The problem was working on Internet Explorer during the browser wars, every one of the 100 teams in the company wanted something from me, and every other PM on the team. They wanted us to add features to help promote their work, code changes to fix bugs that bothered them, etc. There was a huge pile of people who wanted to influence the work I managed. My phone rang all the time and my inbox was always full. If I treated everyone equally I'd be doomed. Couldn't be done. I had to ignore, or say no to, most of the people who wanted something from me. With Joe's advice I had a rough guide for sorting it out. Tons of exceptions of course, but the baseline advice was right and useful.
Good managers give these little bits of power insight all the time. Dividing up the complex, stressful working world of projects into two piles. A project manager derives his power from this kind of clarity, especially if he can articuate it to others like Joe did to me.
Visionary thinking - integrating it into life-, business decisions [INTELLIGENCE], [AUDACITY], [RESPONSIBILITY]
From Forbes.com.
Exerpt:
Work on Something that Matters More than Money
Consultants are the honeybees of the business ecology. We spread the good pollen around in the form of insight, methodology and best practices. So the question for consultants is this: Am I helping a company with ethics and an impact on the world which I support?
Exerpt:
Work on Something that Matters More than Money
Nothing great or lasting was ever created by pursuing money for money's sake. Momentous innovations and companies emerge from visionary goals...
--Take the Long View
Tim calls it "taking the long view." I call it "systems thinking." In both cases, we mean understanding how your work fits into a larger context and set of outcomes. In business, as in life, we often make local, fragmented choices that promise us an immediate benefit while ignoring the long-term costs...Even though it's hard, taking the long view is a key not only to business success but to planetary survival.
Consultants are the honeybees of the business ecology. We spread the good pollen around in the form of insight, methodology and best practices. So the question for consultants is this: Am I helping a company with ethics and an impact on the world which I support?
Underlying the power of Web 2.0 is the idea that every contribution made on the Internet--from an action to a link to a blog or any other commentary--adds value and significance to the network.
Every choice and action counts. This dynamic is true, too, in the "real world." Where we spend our money, our labor and our attention define the world we live in. It is the aggregate of our choices that brought us to this place. It is only through individual choice that we will emerge on the other side.
O'Reilly Insights
Big, Hairy Audacious Work
Joshua-Michele Ross, 02.17.09, 06:00 AM ESTHow to rethink work in the 21st century.
SEBASTOPOL, Calif. - In March 2008, two days after I joined O'Reilly Media, I found myself at ETech, O'Reilly's emerging technology conference, listening to my new boss, Tim O'Reilly, give a speech about the importance of working on "stuff that matters." His point boiled down this: "We have some really big problems facing us. Let's apply our talent to solving them."
Implicit in that call to action was its mirror opposite directive: Stop working on stuff that doesn't matter (like developing a new way to throw sheep in Facebook). The government's intervention to save Bear Stearns a few days later brought that speech into sharp relief.
Tim's "stuff that matters" theme gained clarity and focus over the year, and current events added urgency to the message. Gas climbed over $140 a barrel. Shearson Lehman collapsed the same week Tim gave a similar talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.
A few weeks into 2009, the message has become simple: We cannot continue "business as usual" in the face of dwindling oil supplies, environmental degradation, climate change and a worldwide economic meltdown.
Yet Tim's call is answered by a different question: "What is the stuff that matters?"
Working on stuff that matters is a personal choice--not a project checklist. In that spirit, here are a few first principles we talk about at O'Reilly. (Tim has written about this on his blog, too.) It's just a beginning. I hope Forbes readers will add to the conversation in the comments below.
--Work on Something that Matters More than Money
Nothing great or lasting was ever created by pursuing money for money's sake. Momentous innovations and companies emerge from visionary goals, or a "Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal."Google's
Google didn't have much money, but it did have an audacious goal.
--Create More Value Than You Capture
In this era of corporate meltdowns, it is easy to see that the captains of Wall Street were guilty of pulling more out of the ecosystem than they put in. By contrast, the tech companies that have thrived are those that have built strategies where their partners are invested in building joint success. Microsoft
--Take the Long View
Tim calls it "taking the long view." I call it "systems thinking." In both cases, we mean understanding how your work fits into a larger context and set of outcomes. In business, as in life, we often make local, fragmented choices that promise us an immediate benefit while ignoring the long-term costs. Logic tells us this is the very definition of unsustainable growth. Even though it's hard, taking the long view is a key not only to business success but to planetary survival.
This last point is particularly critical for me in my role leading the consulting arm of O'Reilly. Consultants are the honeybees of the business ecology. We spread the good pollen around in the form of insight, methodology and best practices. So the question for consultants is this: Am I helping a company with ethics and an impact on the world which I support?
Underlying the power of Web 2.0 is the idea that every contribution made on the Internet--from an action to a link to a blog or any other commentary--adds value and significance to the network.
Every choice and action counts. This dynamic is true, too, in the "real world." Where we spend our money, our labor and our attention define the world we live in. It is the aggregate of our choices that brought us to this place. It is only through individual choice that we will emerge on the other side.
The current recession obliges us to rethink business practices. As Stanford University economist Paul Romer has said: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. So work on Stuff That Matters.
As vice president with O'Reilly Radar, Joshua-Michéle Ross runs O'Reilly Media's consulting practice, helping clients apply Web 2.0 principles. He is also working on a video series, "The Future at Work." E-mail him at joshua.ross@oreilly.com.
See Also:
Great Inventors Living Among Us
The source of technological innovation [ZEAL], [JOY], [CREATIVITY], [AUDACITY]
From Forbes.com.
Exerpt:
[Creative innovation] started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun. I call these people "alpha geeks." They are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its originator expected.
So don't follow the money. Follow the excitement. The people inventing the future are doing so just because it's fun.
Exerpt:
[Creative innovation] started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun. I call these people "alpha geeks." They are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its originator expected.
So don't follow the money. Follow the excitement. The people inventing the future are doing so just because it's fun.
O'Reilly Insights
Where Real Innovation Happens
Tim O'Reilly, 02.03.09, 06:00 PM ESTDon't look for the gilded road to fortune. Look for passion.
SEBASTOPOL, Calif.--Forget Silicon Valley. Traditional wisdom is that it represents the model for American innovation: a hotbed of young entrepreneurs with easy access to capital from a large pool of savvy investors.
Think again: The World Wide Web was started by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee because he was frustrated with how hard it was to share information at CERN, the huge physics lab in Switzerland where he worked. Linux was developed by a Finnish college student who wrote the operating system "just for fun" and is only one example of thousands of open-source software projects begun around the world by people who were writing software to "scratch their own itch" and giving it away for free. Even the personal computer revolution, which took root in Silicon Valley, began with a bunch of hobbyists at the Homebrew Computer Club.
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rssIt turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive.
Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun.
I call these people "alpha geeks." They are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its originator expected. The alpha geeks exercise an idea or a gadget, pushing it past its current limits, reinventing it and eventually paving the way for entrepreneurs who figure out how to create mainstream versions of their novel ideas.
I've watched this process now for better than 30 years as a computer book publisher, conference producer, technology activist and early-stage investor. I learned early on that many of the innovations behind my best-selling books weren't coming from companies but from individuals. Their ideas spread through a grassroots network of early adopters and tinkerers long before entrepreneurs and investors appeared on the scene to figure out how to make money from the idea.
The Internet developed in this early adopter Petri dish for more than 15 years before entrepreneurs and venture capitalists clicked on their first e-mail. I was publishing books on free and open-source software in the mid-1980s; Silicon Valley didn't get the open-source message till 1998.
Even recent venture booms, like the one around Web 2.0, a concept that my company popularized in 2004 to remind people that the Web had continued to evolve after the dot-com bust of 2001, missed the story till it was well underway. Key ideas and projects were born during the years when investors had given up on the Web. Only developers driven by a strong personal vision kept at it.
So where's the alpha-geek innovation happening today?
I see it bubbling up in areas like manufacturing, open-source hardware, sensor networks and robotics.
Yes, there are start-ups in these areas, but, more important, there's an enthusiast boom. The Maker Faire, an event O'Reilly Media launched in 2006 to celebrate the people playing at the interface of digital technology and the physical world, last year drew 65,000 attendees, including many families, to view the work of the 500 exhibiting "makers."
Or consider synthetic biology, where high school students are exploring the frontiers through events like the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition. When high-schoolers are doing genetic engineering, you know the future holds some big surprises!
We see innovators working from the outside to put flesh on the vision of government transparency articulated by the Obama administration. Software "hacks," like chicagocrime.org, one of the first Google Maps mash-ups, are becoming a prototype for how government data can be turned into new consumer services by start-ups like everyblock.com.
Tools for investigative journalism put together by nonprofits like the Sunlight Foundation presage the work of start-ups like Apture and Evri. And of course it's hard to ignore the fact that tools for grassroots activism, born out of political enthusiasm by a few "hackers" working for Howard Dean in 2004, turned into real products that helped win the national election only four years later.
How about the energy crisis? Yes, some of Silicon Valley's biggest investors are going after this opportunity. But even here, serendipity and personal curiosity play an unexpected role.
Consider Greenbox, a start-up founded by Jonathan Gay, one of the creators of the ubiquitous Flash technology for online video and animation. After retiring following the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe
So don't follow the money. Follow the excitement. The people inventing the future are doing so just because it's fun.
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. He can also be found as @timoreilly on Twitter.
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