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Some characteristics of communities of practice: - People want to join them. - They usually have a higher purpose, that one person alone cannot achieve. - People feel affinity for their communities of practice. - There are both strong and weak social ties. - You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice.

In the knowledge economy, content is no longer sufficient - everyone has access to a multitude of content. You cannot compete on what everyone knows. As you move up the hierarchy, it becomes more difficult to compete on individual competency - everyone is highly skilled and experienced at the top. It is hard to compete when everyone is so similar. The new advantage is context - how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to new products and services. Creating competitive context requires social capital - the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others, inside and outside of the organization. Social capital is derived from employees' professional and business networks. The new competitive landscape requires focusing on between-employee factors, the connections that combine to create new processes, products and services. Social capital encompasses communities of practice, knowledge exchanges, information flows, interest groups, social networks and other emergent connections between employees, suppliers, regulators, partners and customers.

With the current pace of change, organizations will have to be prepared for the unexpected. They will have to provide flexible access to people and information resources to serve unanticipated information needs whenever and wherever they occur. However, traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers in this respect.

I was invited to speak with Professor Arun Sundararajan's "Networks, Crowds and Markets" class on the topic of "Trust and the Sharing Economy." The discussion focused on current trust indicators on collaborative consumption platforms and potential ideas for solving the trust issue currently present.

Will the upsurge in activity around climate change and the food crisis repeat the cycle of the movement of movements over the past decade - momentary visibility then dissolution? Harry Halpin and Kay Summer say 'yes', unless different models of organising are embraced.

We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential. That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload.  In that kind of world, the ability to provide persistent context becomes paradoxically ever more valuable. Persistent context helps to orient us and connect us in ways that can accelerate our efforts to achieve our potential.

Simply put, our brain is inherently well suited for some tasks, but ill suited for others. Unfortunately, the brain's weaknesses include recognizing which tasks are which, so for the most part we remain ignorantly blissful of the extent to which our lives are governed by the brain's bugs.

The best symbiosis of man and computer is where a program learns from humans but notices things they would not

Our company is a science-oriented company, and the core belief is that behavior - human or otherwise - can be mathematically expressed. Yes, people make irrational value judgments, but they are driven by common motivation factors, and the math expresses that. I look at the so-called "big data phenomenon" as the instantiation of human experience. Previously, we could not quantitatively measure human experience, because the data wasn't being captured. But Twitter recently announced that they now serve 350 billion tweets a day. What we say and what we do has a physical manifestation now. Once there is a physical manifestation of a phenomenon, then it can be mathematically expressed. And if you can express it, then you can shape business ideas around it, whether that's in government or health care or business.