Meaningful Participation…more thoughts

Why is meaningful participation so important? For one thing it connects the ‘small picture’, where we participate in our work, with the ‘big picture’ that provides context and meaning to what we are doing. People are more likely to work on the harvest of a crop that  sow. We all know intuitively that when our work has personal meaning we give our energy and time more fully. This is true for just about everyone else. Our work is providing us signifcance and relevance. It is empting to think that material possessions can provide significance and relevance, common sense and experience constantly reminds us otherwise. Dave Smith has written a wonderful book about this topic entitled ‘to be of use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work’ – definately worth a look. It made me rethink my approach to my own work it might do that for you too.

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Collective Intelligence & Collective Awareness

Everyone has noticed the anxiety of ‘information overload’. I have even experienced ‘information under-load’ – the feeling that I have become unplugged from the flow of what’s going on. However overload is much more common.  In Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’ (p116) he references Sturgeon’s Law which states that “ninety per cent of everything is crud” – and I supppose the Web is not immune to this law either. The challenge is to find the 10% that is not crud. Filtering is one of the main ways to deal with this problem. That’s what makes ‘Newsmap’ so fascinating – a way to see what is news in different parts of the world at a glance and focus-in very quickly on news that is relevant to you.

Facebook – What’s It Good For?

Well Mashable has found at least 30 things – I feel a little like a guy who just learned to swim and is then taken to the ‘North Shore’ for a dip in the breakers. With Facebook adding approximately 150 K new member per day I suppose Facebook must be good for something eh?

Collective Intelligence – Something’s Cooking

I had known about this for a while and forgot to mention it  – it is an event I would have given my right arm to attend – Boosting Our Collective Intelligence: Getting Smarter Together – if you have visited this link you will see that exciting things are already happening in the area of Collective Intelligence in Europe.

‘With the recent advent of the global Internet, it is only now that we humans are approaching the information exchange capacity that cyanobacteria communities have possessed for over 2 billion years on earth.’ (Margulis and Sagen, 1997, Fortey, 1997)

…and with the proliferation of social networking systems we are about to tap into that huge resource…I can’t wait to see what we will create.

Tumbling Toward Collaboration

I have just become aware of a great new resource for those of us who want to be able to set up a blog very quickly. This morning I set up a blog at Tumblr and was up and running in five minutes was going. You can go to my tumblr blog to see what I achieved in those five minutes – not BoingBoing I know but then it did only take five minutes.

Social Bookmarking & Getting Clever Together

A great new video has just appeared that explains the power of ‘Social Bookmarking’. About 2/3 of the way through this really well presented video you will see the potential behind social bookmarking for growing our collective intelligence. This is only just beginning – only the early adopters have embraced social bookmarking – think what the web will be like when the mainstream arrives!

Information Feeds Collaboration

I just tripped over a great site TED 100 Great Web Sites – that turned out to be a really great list of the ‘need to know sites’. Afterall the more information we can share the more capable we are of collaborating.

Change Me

There are so many uses of the word change- lose change (any change mate- for a cup of coffee?), making change (those socks just have to go) , all change (your train isn’t going any further buddy), waiting for your change (did they think I was leaving them that as a tip?)…and on and on..

Tis site http://changeme.gettyimages.com/ brings a nice twist to what change is about. I hope you get as much enjoyment out of watching it as I did.

Where Do Your Peers Come In?

To-day I discovered a wonderful resource for anyone intersted in collective intelligence. The site is http://p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page and contains a treasure trove of resources. Michel Bauwens co-ordinates this site. Although ‘Peer-to-Peer’ sounds kind of obscure, it is in fact guided by two fascinating maxims:

1. ending the destruction of the biosphere by abandoning the dangerous conceptions of pseudo-abundance in the natural world (i.e. based on the assumption that natural resources are infinite);
2. promoting free cultural exchange by abandoning the innovation-inhibiting conceptions of pseudo-scarcity in the cultural world (i.e. based on the assumption that the free flow of culture needs to be restricted through excessive copyrights etc…).

I touch on these topic in ‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch’ and I wished I had known this site existed before completing the writing process. I would have certainly included many references to this valuable material.

Collabrative Intelligence @ Work

To-day I experienced collaborative intelligence in action. 24 different people from all over the world / internet collaborated with me to get the message out about my book ‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch’.

By featuring a piece about the book in their newsletters and news releases to their subscribers we were able to reach over 500 K people to-day.

The result? – ‘Teaching an Anthill’ shot to #2 in the ‘Business Section’ on Amazon. This is an amazing feat and displays the awesome power of Collaborative Intelligence.