Here's a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:
Most people don't believe they are capable of initiative.
Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you're not putatitively in charge.
At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing.
So finding people to fix your typos is easy.
A few people are vandals, happy to anonymously attack or add graffiti or useless noise.
If your project depends on individuals to step up and say, “This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe,” then you need to expect that most people will see that offer and decline to take it.
Most of the edits on Wikipedia are tiny. Most of the tweets among the billions that go by are reactions or possibly responses, not initiatives. Q&A sites flourish because everyone knows how to ask a question, and many feel empowered to answer it, if it's specific enough. Little tiny steps, not intellectual leaps or risks.
I have a controversial belief about this: I don't think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it's possible and acceptable for you to do it. We've only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it. [Emphasis Added.]
There's a huge shortage… a shortage of people who will say go.
Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more.
Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship.
The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren't open enough, aren't willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate.
America needs a leader that is balanced, thoughtful, integrative, supportive of dissent and debate, and above all, educated enough to craft a national strategy for security and prosperity that will stand the test of time. I want a leader who is at least as committed to the future of my children as to the passing security and prosperity of the moment. Individuals obsessing on being elected or re-elected need not apply.
In my view as a citizen, there are four areas where the right individual, as a team builder rather than a personal icon, could help America restore its balance. These four areas are: 1) electoral reform, 2) intelligence reform, 3) global issues & national security reform, and 4) governance reform inclusive of corporate ethics and accountability. I would sum up the objective of all four reform initiatives with the phrase: “Creating a Smart Nation, Of, By, and For the People.”
At MWC, Claes Magnusson saw the following slogans on 25 different high tech booths (companies like IBM, HP, etc.)
Built Around People, Shaping Tomorrow With You, Leading A Smarter Planet, Your Messages Shape Our Future, Now What?, The Power Of Now, Today Changes, Power To You, Powering The Smartphones Of Tomorrow, Just Add Friends, Connecting the world enabling value, Creating experiences TOGETHER, Delivering Tomorrow's Experiences Today, No Longer Just An Idea, Bringing You Closer, Smart Devices, Simple World , Innovation Delivered, Simply Your Solution, The Future Changes Everyday, Take Charge Of Profits, Simply Different, Deploy Everywhere, There Is Here, Discover What's Possible, and No Hidden Surprises
What are they for? Do they mean anything at all?
I think the big company corporate slogan is like heavy paper on the annual report, white space on the billboard and a suit on the sales rep. It's a signal, a sign that the company is big, that it's able to waste time dreaming this stuff up and waste money yelling about it. No one actually reads the slogan (at Yoyodyne, the internet company I founded in 1992, our stolen slogan was, “Where the future begins tomorrow.” It was written on our business cards and everything. I don't think 1 person in a 100 commented on it).
Not everything you do actually gets a response. In fact, most of it doesn't. But each effort is a tiny brick in the wall of perception, even when it appears to be dumb and even senseless.
Phi Beta Iota: The working slogan for Earth Intelligence Network (E Veritate Potens–From Truth We the People Are Empowered) is now joined by a new slogan (needs scholarly checking) that focuses on Phase I of Revolution 2.0:
Although the question has been asked often, we did not understand it ourselves until we saw the US Government ignore the Somali pirates despite a coherent, unclassified, and very explicit report done for CENTCOM J-2 Plans in 2005. In 2007 both Special Forces and US Navy Irregular Warfare were asked why they had ignored the “clear and present” danger, and the answer was stunning identical from both: “Not an expensive enough problem.”
In our view, the open source concept got squelched, first by MITRE and CIA, then across the board as others rushed to spend money on false, fraudulent “butts in seats” OSINT, because it directly threatened the very expensive and very dysfunctional US secret intelligence community and US defense industrial complex. These people are not stupid–they are just unwitting or unethical or both. Their focus is profit (or promotion) at any expense to the public, not on the public interest. They give up their souls for a meal ticket and go through the motions because no one is holding them accountable.
Had there been proper attention to OSINT since the Aspin-Brown Commission recommended it be a “top priority” for DCI attention and funding in 1996; since Boyd Sutton's Global Coverage report was blown off by George Tenet (“not an expensive enough solution”) in 1997, since the 9-11 Commission recommended an Open Source Agency in its 2004 Report, by now we would be well on our way to eradicating the ten high-level threats to humanity, eliminating the 50% of the US federal budget that is fraud, waste, and abuse; eliminating all 44 dictators, and empowering/educating the five billion poor “one cell call at a time” while also unscrewing the secret world by providing a comparative benchmark for creating faster, better, cheaper decision support for Whole of Government and multinational hybrid coalitions, and empowering the US public with the power that knowledge gives…
This blog is focused on India’s development from the perspective of the Next Generation Infrastructure Lab at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), a Bangalore think tank launched in 2008. The bloggers are CSTEP’s researchers, its visiting students, and scholars. It is a collaborative, creative space to blog about the issues that we think about at CSTEP, including clean energy and climate change, transportation, infrastructure, information design, how to make technology and information more democratic, and ways technology can make democracy more participatory.
Based on mathematics but also executable at multiple levels
Powerful framework, especially for engineers
Essence of the problem: what is creativity–RESISTENCE to past fixations
Provoke expansion in a step by step way, adding properties, studying attributes, rearranging both
Already existing knowledge does not lead to innovation in a natural way–innovation has to be forced by circumstance or process–this is a process that forces innovation.
C-K theory implements forcing as a process
Mixing attributes and properties from disparate objects (e.g. floating and flying) can force a new third way.
