Well, Patricia and I are taking a break from lazing at the pool enjoying the Goan sun to sit in the business centre and write a few emails, and I thought I might give a short update for those of you not here and for those of you coming later for the Open Space on Open Space conference.
Executive summary: This place rocks!
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Expect light blogging over the next couple of weeks, which Patricia and I will be spending in Goa, India. We’ll take some vacation time and I will participate in the international Open Space on Open Space conference.
Dan Gillmor’s new book “We the Media”, can be read for free on the net. The book is about how
Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.
Yay!
The First Law of Mentat: A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it, and flow with it.
– From Dune by Frank Herbert.
Dune is one of my favourite novels. I read it for the first time when I was 15, and I must’ve read it at least 10 more times since. It has a depth that reveals new details even after many re-re-re-readings. Frank Herbert has created a weird and wonderful world in intricate detail: Technology, religion, politics, ecology, warfare, history and much, much more are all described in a way that is elegant, subtle and above all believable. It’s a world resting in a long-standing precarious balance between mutually opposing forces – a balance which is upset once and for all. There are more Dune-quotes here.
Of course there’s no way you could engage thousands of people world-wide in creating a comprehensive, up-to-date, on-line encyclopedia. If you simply opened up the system, so anybody could contribute to any subject, it would be completely impossible to protect the system against vandalism, jokes and random errors. Such an encyclopedia could never work.
Except it does: The Wikipedia may be the coolest application of the internet so far. I use it constantly and I find it to be incredibly comprehensive. But don’t take my word for it.
Here’s another testament to the power of Open Source development. Sourceforge (home to 80.000+ Open Source Software projects) interviews the people behind Azureus, the project of the month, and check out this quote:
What has been your biggest surprise?
Olivier: When I started this project, I didn’t know anything about the Open Source world, at least not as a developer. My biggest surprise was to see how much support you can get, and how people can involve themselves into your project.
Alon: The incredible community involvement that Open Source seems to bring. Besides the core developers, many other people donate their valuable time to submit patches, test code, write documentation, do translations, provide tech support, express their thoughts and recommendations, and even donate money. People love to get involved. Azureus was my first experience in Open Source development, and I’ve been very impressed with the process as a whole.
The Open Source movement is based on the assumption that people want to be involved and are willing to give freely of their time. The currency in Open Source is not money but rather peer recognition and a sense of accomplishment, and I’m sure that as a model, it will be at least as succesful as the corporate model we’re currently familiar with.
And why limit it to software development? I’m sure that wherever you can set up a similar system, you can get people to contribute in the same way. We’re doing just that with the Happy At Work Project, where all our intellectual source code is Open Source – we’ll give it away to anyone who wants to use it, and hope that they’ll make it even better.
I’m on the map. Go see, and click on Denmark.
Michael Pannwitz rocks for being behind such a cool tool.
I found a very interesting article on Using Moral Imagination for irreplicable Strategic Advantage.
Based on “The Moral Advantage Model” the author argues that there is a strategic, competitive advantage beyond the traditional two of low cost and differentiation. From the article:
With agility, companies with moral imagination evolve their strategies and operational practices to changing worlds while simultaneously remaining steadfastly faithful to the values and purpose that define them.
…
The key … lies in using Moral Imagination to understand two dynamics. The first concerns the degree to which work satisfies the deepest human needs of employees and concerns the company’s Values and Ethics. The second concerns the degree to which a company’s product and service satisfies the deepest human needs of its customers and concerns the company’s Strategy.
I like the article both for it’s logic which is clear and compelling but also for the way it talks about moral choices grounded in clear strategic concepts and thinking. Read it!
I’m currently talking to our designer about a re-design for the Happy At Work Project’s web site, and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with.
She’s done all our design work so far (you can see some examples here), and if you’re ever in need of good design, on or off-line, I can’t recommend her highly enough. She’s extremely talented, and most importantly, she can grasp the important features of a task really quickly.
I’d like to translate her company name into english, but unfortunately, what is in danish a quirky and fun word becomes, when translated into english, something that is entirely unmentionable in polite society :o)
The ever blogging Chris Corrigan points to an excerpt of Ricardo Semler’s book The Seven-Day Weekend. A small teaser:
I believe the old way of doing business is dying, and the sooner it’s dead and buried the better off we all will be. Incendiary words, yet Semco’s alliance with Cushman & Wakefield, as well as other joint ventures that I will describe shortly, suggests that the transition from the old to the new can be hugely profitable and not nearly as socially disruptive as might be feared at first. On the contrary, the path Semco has been blazing for more than twenty years has led to an unprecedented record of innovation, customer satisfaction, growth, and an end to repressive command-and-control management practices that cause much labor unrest and personal misery, from the top to the bottom of many organizations.
That does it, Semler is going on my list of people I’ve gotta have a conversation with.
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