• Gupta’s Law of Network Politics

    by  • April 5, 2009 • 3 Comments

    In a networked environment, the person who knows what to do next is in charge. Because, in a networked environment, everybody can propose action. Hierarchies using the network experience dissonance at the point where the feed coming off the network proposes a better plan than the feed coming off the hierarchy. There’s a counterlaw about [...]

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    Beyond Resilience: Visionary Adaptation

    by  • April 4, 2009 • 12 Comments

    I think I’ve made what I’m driving at a bit clearer in my own head by drawing some diagrams. Click the image for a PDF which builds out the model. What it comes down to is four models of change, which are: The Resilience Model: Normal State -> Crisis -> Resilience -> Normal State Successful [...]

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    why it’s not resilience.

    by  • April 4, 2009 • 8 Comments

    Everybody loves resilience. It’s a calm, reassuringly solid word. Resilience, n. 1. The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy. 2. The property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity. The problem is we are not ever going to [...]

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    Mamading Ceesay on Economies of Agility

    by  • April 3, 2009 • 0 Comments

    One late night in Soho, Mamading invented the phrase “economies of agility.” I thought it was brilliant and encompassed an enormous core idea that we all talk around and include in our discussions without having a simple, clear term of art for it. In the industrial age, mass production by firms exploited the economies of [...]

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    Ending Poverty With Open Hardware

    by  • March 30, 2009 • 1 Comment

    This is the talk I delivered at Oekonux, an open source hardware type conference in Manchester this weekend. Here is an MP3 audio version of the talk. Here are the slides. They ask the questions that the talk attempts to answer. Here are the 10 questions we addressed. 1. What is Poverty? 2. How can [...]

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    A fascinating day

    by  • March 29, 2009 • 1 Comment

    Three observations. 1> Collaboration is not about what you do when things go right. 2> Crowdsourcing isn’t about what you know you want in all cases. Sometimes it’s about people who have totally unexpected angles just appearing to help. 3> I’m done on marketing. I’ve got a serviceable understanding of the very elementary basics of [...]

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    Two talks in one day

    by  • March 28, 2009 • 0 Comments

    Open Knowledge Foundation in London (UCL) in the morning. Oekonux in Manchester in the afternoon. A little insane in terms of timing. There will be audio and probably video up as soon as possible after each talk. One thing that I’m doing for a change is substantially talking without visual aids. I thought long and [...]

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