Group items tagged

Public collaboration, network effects, crowdsourcing - call it what you will, the read/write web is based largely on projects where the value of the whole is greater than the sum of countless parts. Those parts are contributed by individual people all over the world, often for free. It's world-changing stuff, but can businesses make effective use of this paradigm?

"Ashley Good from Toronto, Canada is recognized as no less than "a world expert on failure". Working on several development projects around the world she was faced with the need to address the inefficiencies, and sometimes ineffectiveness of development work. Based on her experience she created AdmittingFailure.com and FailForward.org in 2010 to spark a shift in how civil society perceives and talks about failure. In her opening keynote titled "What's So Great About Failure?" at FailCon Oslo June 6, 2013 she shares her story and some ideas for the audience to apply the Fail Forward approach to their contexts."

"Thinking is hard - yet barely a waking moment passes when we're not labouring away at it. A few of us may be natural geniuses, able to work through the toughest tangles in an instant; others, blessed with reserves of willpower, stay the course in the dogged pursuit of truth. Then there's the rest of us. Not prodigies and a little bit lazy, but still aspiring to understand the world and our place in it. What can we do? In Intuition Pumps, Daniel Dennett, one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers, takes us on a profound, illuminating and highly entertaining philosophical journey. He reveals a collection of his favourite thinking tools, or 'intuition pumps', that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. Along with new discussions of familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - Dennett offers cognitive tools built for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will. In his genial style, Dennett guides readers around the pitfalls in arguments, and reveals easier ways to better understand the world around us and our place in it. An enlightening and practical store of knowledge, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking will teach you to think truly independently and creatively."

We keep our data updated with the latest available numbers, up to 2012! Updated indicators include GDP per capita, fertility rates, among others! Dig in and enjoy the Gapminder World!

"In Virtual reality, your screen becomes your world while in Augmented reality, the world is your screen."

Chapter from the World Developmnent Report on Mind, Behaviour

Not sure what a Workspace is? Cisco employee Mark Spencer faces his technology fears and learns how to work more effectively in the Web 2.0 world.

"Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out "real world" tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments."

"In this groundbreaking book, Tim Harford shows us a new and inspiring approach to solving the most pressing problems in our lives. Harford argues that today's challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt-improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward. "

Recommended by Nick Temple at Winter Workshop

"Hans Rosling is debunking the River of Myths about the developing world. By measuring the progress in the once labeled "developing countries", preventable child mortality can be history by the year 2030."

he cigar-chomping reporter in the saggy brown suit with holes in his shoes and a nose for news is a stereotype that doesn't have much of a counterpart in today's real world. There's a new breed of investigative reporter in town: the geek who knows how to extract raw data from public sources, crunch the numbers, and spew out compelling analyses -- often with startling visuals to match.

New research from Henry Siu at the University of British Columbia and Nir Jaimovich from Duke University shows just how much the world of routine work has collapsed. The economists released a paper today, published by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, showing that over the course of the last two recessions and recoveries, a period beginning in 2001, the economy's job growth has come entirely from nonroutine work.

Workd bank report on Mind and Behaviour - chapter on Adaptive Design

The image of a robot stepping into the shoes of a human worker couldn't be more wrong. When it comes to technology's most significant applications, we are neither usurped or seduced - because the systems involved are nothing like us in either their function or faculties. As a species, we are not in competition with information technology at all: we are, rather, busily adapting the fabric of our world into something machines can comprehend.

These scenarios describe two predictions in what will be an algorithmic and smart machine driven world where people and machines must define harmonious relationships.

The Management 2.0 Hackathon, a joint collaborative effort by the MIX, Saba, and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, was inspired by hacakathons in the world of software development. A management hackathon is a short, intense, coordinated effort to develop useful hacks-innovative ideas or solutions-that can be implemented by organizations to overcome barriers to progress and innovation.

An excellent introduction to the world of online broadcasting. Very useful.

"The company of the future - and indeed the company of the present - needs new instruments to adapt to a changing reality. The new generation of digital natives is progressively being incorporated to the world of work. We are talking about a generation that has lived most of its life within the technological revolution that has occurred in the last two decades. It has connected people, who spend more time on the Internet than in front of the television and who have lived with the emergence of video games. It is not to judge whether that is good or bad, it's simply real and nothing will change it."

Looking at the HiSocial offering, I can't help but wonder about unintended consequences. The digital natives are savvy and will naturally find ways of 'gaming' the system. If you simple reward actions such as visiting intranet pages or 'downloading corporate material', you are in no way increasing the sum total knowledge, helping efficiency or decision making. What's needed is reward that stimulates participation and qualitative contribution, not just transactions.

Humans are biased, and the biases we encode into machines are then scaled and automated. This is not inherently bad (or good), but it raises the question: how do we operate in a world increasingly consumed with "personal analytics" that can predict race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, health status and much more.