It’s all good

I am often ambivalent about big firms and this includes the “uber-cool” Google. While I think a lot of what they do is actually quite amazing, and I am an active user of many of their products, there still lays a certain level of mistrust that everything is perfect as it is sometimes portrayed.

But, every once in a while (which in the current innovation cycles means every other month) they come up with something that seduces me again and makes me belief that the doubts are unfounded. Today, is such a time, Google announced “All for good” which “helps you find and share ways to do good”.

This means that if you’re in the mood for helping, you can find where you can help near you (if you were to live in the US) doing whatever you want to help with. Once again technology is at the service of good. Good one, Google.

Filed under: Links , allforgood, community, good, google, help, social, technology

Gnovis, like academic/internet love at first sight.

While tinkering around looking for info, I found a great website full academic goodies for the thesis: Gnovis. It describes itself as:

“an online academic journal and forum that cultivates new ways of seeing and understanding culture through critical inquiry. gnovis presents work by graduate students pioneering interdisciplinary perspectives on issues in technology, media, politics, and the arts.”

With academic articles like “Engagement 2.0? How the New Digital Media Can Invigorate Civic Engagement” by Lindsay Pettingill,  “A Shift Realized: The Banking Crisis as the First Postmodern Event” by Andrew Hare or “Academics’ Views On and Uses of Wikipedia” by Firat Soylu it is easy to see the big appeal for the thesis.

Adding to this are some great blog posts. My personal recommendation for anyone interested in participating is the post named “Thesis Blog: Approaching Open Culture” by Brad Weikel, where he tries to deal with the definition of Open Culture and finds some familiar struggles I faced when researching for my own thesis. Truly a must read.

Weikel also tried to blog while he wrote his thesis in an attempt that reads very familiar to what this project is about. I will write to him soon and see if he can drop in to the project blog and drop his two cents, or maybe even more.

Filed under: Links, Source Review , academic, academic article, academic thesis, culture, link, open

New introductory video added

On the An Open Thesis Blog, I’ve recently added on the side bar a video that gives a very short introduction into the project. I hope this helps translate what it is all about in the quickest of terms. Please feel free to leave any comments or to spread the video around.

Here is the video:

Later on I will be adding some slideshows that go a bit more in depth into how can people help out and the tools to do so.

Filed under: Links , video academic thesis introduction understanding

Ushahidi, one of the projects I’ve liked the most

Ushahidi is a platform that allows people to submit information on a crisis situation (like the N1H1 virus or the Gaza Strip situation) via web, text message, etc. Then, it allows the information to be mapped and ordered, aggregating the different sources of information to draw up the a bigger picture of the crisis situation.

As an example you can check out the page set up tracking the voting in the recent elections in India.

This innitiave is an answer to anyone doubting how the intenet can be utlized for social good by collecting and aggregating the information that crowds posses.

Filed under: Links , crisis, crowd, crowdsourcing, example, social, ushahidi

Reading about the city. 10-06-09

Last night I finished “FTA and the City: Imagineering Sustainable Urban Development” by Rattcliff, Krawczyk and Kelly, recommended reading by my tutor Diane Nijs.

Obviously, the title itself is captivating as it touches on two themes that are important on the investigation for the thesis: Imagineering and Sustainable Urban Development.

I am very intrigued by the concepts they use of the biosphere and technosphere and how these separate entities interact and the promise that lays in this interaction. Also, I have found in their paper several reinforcement for arguments about the need for a ‘broader’ approach to the generation of urban solutions, not only considering the shortcomings of individual practices like urban planning, governance or business trying to be one-off saviors but also considering the ever-expanding complexity of cities growing in numbers (and with it, bringing about new complications).

The proposed use of a ‘futures oriented approach’ to guide cities into a transformation to solve urban problems is on par with discussions my tutor and I had about the use of images as guiding elements in transformations. The benefit coming from the  shift from incremental solutions that seem more reactionary to a more proactive approach to getting to a desired state and shaping the path to fit that desired image (often with disruptive change).

My main querry (and where I believe that internet-based crowd collaboration models come in) is who is constructing such image or future (or scenario) and who will be in charge of translating that into actions?

Towards the end of the paper, the authors mentions the need to:

“demonstrate how the individual agents and actor within the city technosphere contribute to collective action within the city, and how that process leads to the structuring and institutionalization of the city milieu and the deployment of it’s resources.”

This I believe is a great need and deserves even more attention. In fact, this is why I have decided to study with the thesis. I believe in the marriage between the biosphere and the technosphere lays the solution to a farther reaching outlook of the city that can even help reclaim community ties based on geographical commonality, something constantly weakening to technosphere communities based more on affinity.

This is not to say that these (internet communities brought together by affinity transcending geographical boundaries) are wrong, yet I believe that reclaiming some affinity based on the geographical setting we live in can help improve this space (for delimitation purposes, let this space be as proposed, the city).

Bringing together the different people, with different inputs, talents, knowledge and domain that reside in the highly concentrated population of a city may help us create a greater aggregation of ideas, solutions and images that can help achieve urban sustainability. Through citizen participation, one insures that information will be propagated to a wider base.

This is increasingly important to cities in the context of differentiation from others in the competition as a desirable place for the attraction of new businesses, talented workers and greater flow of tourists.

To sum up, this paper has contributed to the process of my thinking about the thesis as it has reintroduced the concept of drawing up a desirable future image as a goal for the process, and put it squarely on the context of urban sustainability and I believe that all of this I have written about will be important in the development of the upcoming chapters of the thesis.

Filed under: Source Review , academic article, academic thesis, city, Imagineering, review, sustainability

An interesting documentary: Us Now

This is a nice video I saw a couple of weeks back that talks on issues I would like the thesis to adress. Interviews with many people involved in different ways in this crowd collaboration discussion such as Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody) and Charles Leadbeater (We Think).

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Filed under: Links , cities, city, community, documentary, network, usnow

Reading about the crowd. 09-06-09

Yesterday, after a little over a month of reading, I finally finished Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

I must admit that I thought the book was going to be traditional business book rhetoric of “a new gold rush is-a-comin’ so come get some!” Fortunately, I was wrong.

Jeff Howe manages to give a very nice description on everything crowd-related, with great interviews and stories and theory to back up his points of view.

This helped me get a clear view on many of the new business models that are beginning to surge and it ties into the theory I’ve been getting in these past couple of months:
Engage the consumer to create what the offer is? Check.
Flexible business models? Check.
Making the best of what new technology has to offer? Check.
Leadership is not about to-down orders but about being a facilitator and catalyzer at the service of those doing the work? Check.

What’s more, the book did a very good job of triggering my imagination to new possibilities before me, starting with the thesis I must turn in by the end of August.

But my thoughts also went to how sad it is that broadband Internet access is not ubiquitous (everywhere) in this world. How much are we mutually missing out on the ideas we can trade with those not part of the “billion”? How many more rule-breaking models lay in the minds of people with completely different mind models then those who do use? And how many more people could benefit from the technology in ways we haven’t even thought of?

All in all, I must thank Jeff Howe for helping me find a spark to what I wanted to dedicate day and night to for the next couple of months, not to mention possibly engaging whatever the future might bring.

For more on Jeff Howe’s take on crowdsourcing, visit his blog, read the original article or buy the book.

P.S. Tonight I start Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Tomorrow, two academic articles.

Filed under: Source Review , book, book review, crowd, crowdsourcing, jeff howe, sources

Getting started

It has come time to start and get feedback. This will come in many ways, I am sure. From praise to soul-crushing critique, I expect it to come in many forms but hoping it comes at all.

About what is coming up, I have come to many conclusions on the past couple of days:

First of all, I have decided that the interaction and development will determine what the project is. My goal is to have people who are interested to contribute to the thesis. The amount of time and effort will be up to what people are willing to give.

If it is considerable, then I believe it will be “open source” and all credit will be shared. If it is a small effort, I guess I’ll call it “crowdsourcing”, since people would be helping me out with particular problems and not necessarily owning the thesis as their own as well. Maybe it’s “crowdcasting”. Maybe it’s a new term that will rise up in the next couple of minutes.

Any assumption towards predicting people’s behavior would be rushed and probably wrong. I will begin with opening up all the information I have and externalizing any problem I seek help on. Feel free to contribute as you wish, be it by offering links, information, comments, debating points or just referencing to someone that might have knowledge on the subject.

The second thing I concluded was that I am still not completely sure where I am going with this. Although my “topic statement” has been presented (and approved by my tutor), I feel I still need sharper objectives. Maybe moving towards social goals to see how the application of this knowledge could be used to help those involved in different facets of city management spark citizen innovation.

My final motive is, in my view, the ultimate goal. When I signed up for this Master Program, I wrote on my application letter that what i want out of my professional life is to “my wish is to do well in life. This does not mean to conquer the world, nor do I dream of fame and fortune. This means I hope to do something that means something to someone else”.

Now the time has come to shape that goal.

Filed under: Opinion , academic thesis, collaboration, open, starting point

A little bit about what I’m studying

Imagineering may sound a bit Disney-ish. This is not personal opinion, but acquired insight after months of talking to people about what I am doing in the Netherlands. The best way to look at it is as a business innovation process that is founded on the idea that business success does not mean ‘make the most money’. One way to express it, can be through a slideshow I prepared in the beginning of the year:

Now as you see, I do buy into a ‘poetic’ lenguage of sorts. I can do business lingo, I can do academic lingo… but I believe that sometimes things can get across better with a powerful metaphore. Though I have learned that there is a time and place for everything.

So on that note, I will give a description offered in the webpage of the university I go to, about the Master Program:

“In a creative economy there is a growing need for high level professionals who can create and innovate value from the experience perspective. This Master in Imagineering is designed as a roadmap for that new ‘outside-in enterprise logic’.

…Imagineering, value creation and value innovation from the experience perspective, is a new approach towards the trinity of branding. It is a way to discover the possibility of a new kind of convergence between consumers’ desires, technological capabilities and organisational innovations. These three elements will be combined to form new enterprise logic. “

This is basically where the thesis starts from: creating new value for citizens. And since I do believe in the power or wisdom of crowds, I not only want to talk about it in my thesis, but also put it to practice in the writing of it.

I hope this illustrates what this Venezuelan student is doing in the Netherlands. If not, here are some useful links:

Imagineering Academy Website

Master in Imagineering Blog

Filed under: Links , Imagineering, master program, new business logic, student

All I know is that I don’t know nothing

The truest cliche in my life.

This groundbreaking realization (add sarcasm here) has been one of the guiding mantra of my post-adolescent life. Once I admitted that to myself, it taught me humility and I was free to be curious and read and ask and see everything with hungry eyes to try to fill up the Grand Canyon sized gap in my mind… one drop at a time. I have learned more, by admitting that I don’t know.

So truthfully, I am amazed this way to produce my thesis did not come to me before. It is no news to me that everyone else in this world knows something I don’t know. And most know things I think I know… and they know them better or, at worst case scenario, in different way. Why, then, shouldn’t I ask a global call for help?

Whilst researching this, I was reminded of that great Isaac Newton quote “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” And this is true for me as well, I hope to get a further glimpse into the subject by looking for a few (or many) good giants amongst us that may lend me their shoulders. But the difference is, I want us to take turns looking. I wouldn’t mind lending my shoulders for other to see further and hopefully a dialogue can start to build whatever we see on the horizon.

I guess more than a research tool, I’m looking to prove to myself that cliche mantras exist for a reason, and that this one I base part of my thoughts on (however simple it may seem), may actually be true. I hope, I am not wrong.

Filed under: Opinion , admission, reasons