Volunteers Behind Libya Crisis Map: A True Story
Patrick Meier, iRevolutiion, 8 March 2011
My colleague Clay Shirky called it “Cognitive Surplus” in his recent book. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams refer to it as “MacroWikinomics” in theirs.
What is cognitive surplus? The trillion hours of free time enjoyed by the world's educated population every year. Don and Tony describe MacroWikinomics as mass distributed collaboration on scales we've never seen before thanks to technology.
We're familiar with deficits and shortages, writes, Clay, but when it comes to surplus social capital, things quickly become unpredictable—especially when this capital scales thanks to the use of social networking platforms and Web 2.0 technologies. But then again, says Clay, “Many of the unexpected uses of communication tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy.”
Phi Beta Iota: Over bagels and lox yesterday, Doug Rushkoff summarized his intention for ContactCon: “to take us back to 1992, but this time with 2012 technology and human understanding.” Here is what the US Government was told in 1992 about crowd-sourcing. 20 years and 1 trillion dollars later (20 years, average of 50 billion a year), we still have the world's most expensive ineffective wasteland pretending to “do” intelligence. The lunacy continues.
1992 AIJ OSS Steele’s Original Vision
1992 AIJ Fall ‘New Paradigm” and Avoiding Future Failures
Reference: 1992 USMC C4I Campaign Plan
1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (An Alternative Paradigm)