4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Maps, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Venessa Miemis

4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Venessa Miemis | May 9, 2011

This post originally appeared on CNN.com's Global Public Square.

Humanity and technology continue to co-evolve at an ever increasing pace, leaving traditional institutions (and mindsets) calcified and out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, where everything is increasingly connected and the nature of collaboration, business and work are all being reshaped. In turn, our ideas about society, culture, geographic boundaries and governance are being forced to adapt to a new reality.

While some fear the loss of control associated with these shifts, others are exhilarated by the new forms of connectivity and commerce that they imply. Transactions and interactions are growing faster and more frictionless, giving birth to what I call a “superfluid” economy.

Business will not return to usual. So let's discuss 4 key concepts to help us  better understand the shifts that are underway:

1. Quantifying and mapping everything
2. Everyone has access to the internet
3. Self-organizing expands
4. Peer-to-peer exchange changes the future of money

4 Trends discussed below the line with links

Continue reading “4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy”

Patrick Meier: Ushahadi Election Monitoring

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, Government, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Open Government, Reform, Standards, Tools
Patrick Meier

Analyzing U-Shahid’s Election Monitoring Reports from Egypt

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Patrick Meier| Leave a comment

I’m excited to be nearing the completion of my dissertation research. As regular iRevolution readers will know, the second part of my dissertation is a qualitative and comparative analysis of the use of the Ushahidi platform in both Egypt and the Sudan. As part of this research, I am carrying out some content analysis of the reports mapped on U-Shahid and the SudanVoteMonitor. The purpose of this blog post is to share my preliminary analysis of the 2,700 election monitoring reports published on U-Shahid during Egypt’s Parliamentary Elections in November & December 2010.

Read full posting with links & graphic…

Transformational Pivot in the Internet’s Nature

Advanced Cyber/IO, IO Mapping
Ric Merrifield

5 May

Uber and Intersect usher in a transformational pivot in assumptions

Uber is a cool new car service  that Jenna Wortham recently wrote about in this article for The New York TimesIntersect is an equivalently cool new site that for all practical purposes is the opposite of Twitter that is all based on location and what is happening in a specific location at a particular time so it becomes a chronology of everything that happens at that location.  Their web site does a better job of describing it than I do.

So what?  And what do these two totally different companies have in common?

I’ll get there, but it reminds me of something my friend Tom, who is an executive at Microsoft, was telling me a couple of years ago about modern phone technology (in this case the design of Windows Phone 7).  He pointed out something pretty obvious, but at the same time prettty incredible.  Historically with computer technology the size of the screen of the device software was written for was known and fixed.  Also, things like “up” and “down” were fixed.  Now with mobile devices like phones and tablets, we expect to turn the device upside down and have it turn the screen around for us, and if we want to change the amount of information in the screen, we are now able to pinch in and pinch out and slide – and we expect that.  That has been trasformational for mobile devices.

Back to Uber and Intersect.

Read rest of post….

Google Owns You…What’s Your Problem?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, IO Mapping

Google Memo Reveals Importance of Android Location Database

Location Services Icon in Maps

Just how important is location-based data to Google? Just how important is it for the sun to rise each morning? Same deal.

This question comes in the wake of eyes turning toward mobile handsets—specifically, Apple's iPhone and smartphones based on Google's Android OS—for the information they collect about the various wireless access points and cell phone towers the devices connect to (or notice) throughout the course of a given day.

Read more….

Reference (2003): Augmented Social Network

Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Methods & Process, Policies, Reform, Serious Games, Standards, Threats, White Papers
Venessa Miemis

NEW: Archived & Expanded at P2P Foundation/ASN

this paper covers a lot of the ground we've been discussing here [at Google Group Next Net] about what kind of intentions a ‘next net' would facilitate. worth a read.

Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next-General Internet by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, Steven Foster

as presented at the Planetwork conference on “Networking a Sustainable Future” in San Francisco on June 6, 2003

as published First Monday, Volume 8, Number 8 – 4 August 2003

Phi Beta Iota: The current approaches to “identity” are vestiges of the industrial-era commoditization of humans and the fragmentation of the commons.  In the 1990's the Hackers Conference (Silicon Valley) discussed trust and identity authentication in combination with anonymnity (or better, invisibility).

Journal: Cheery Waves Flags How Supercomputers Alter Science

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Maps, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Research resources, Serious Games, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, True Cost, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Cheery Waves Recommends....

Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science

By JOHN MARKOFF

New York Times, April 25, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Inside a darkened theater a viewer floats in a redwood forest displayed with Imax-like clarity on a cavernous overhead screen.

The hovering sensation gives way to vertigo as the camera dives deeper into the forest, approaches a branch of a giant redwood tree, and then plunges first into a single leaf and then into an individual cell. Inside the cell the scene is evocative of the 1966 science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which Lilliputian humans in a minuscule capsule take a medical journey through a human body.

There is an important difference — “Life: A Cosmic Journey,” a multimedia presentation now showing at the new Morrison Planetarium here at the California Academy of Sciences, relies not just on computer animation techniques, but on a wealth of digitized scientific data as well.

Read balance of article….

Comment and Seven Graphics Below the Line…

Continue reading “Journal: Cheery Waves Flags How Supercomputers Alter Science”

Participatory (Crowd-Sourced) Futures Planning

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, Tools
Venessa Miemis

whether talking about a intelligent knowledge infrastructure, robert's global brain, or suresh's project matching for climate change initiatives, this article seemed useful.

Noah Raford
Large-scale participatory futures systems

Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future.  As a user interface system, it is horrible.  As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works pretty well.  Several people asked me about this after my last post, so here is some more detail.

Following the logic of collective intelligence (as part of my my PhD), I broke up the the scenario thinking process into discrete chunks, came up with a system for analyzing and relating them together, and then distilled them into key outputs for helping the scenario development process:  1) Emergent Thematic Maps  2) Revealing Hidden Connections  3) Drilling Down

Read full post.

See Also by Noah Radford:

The Three Systems, an Overview

The first system is called “Futurescaper” and was developed in partnership with the International Futures Forum (IFF), Tony Hodgson and my friend Nathan Koren.  This was piloted on a project for the UK Government, exploring secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change.

The second system is called “SenseMaker Scenarios.”  This uses a customized version of Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker Suite to aggregate micro-stories about the future into themes and patterns for scenario generation.  This was done with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz, and was unveiled at the 2010 RAHS conference in Singapore.

The third system is called “FogCatcher”, and was developed with Anab Jain and Jon Ardern from Superflux.  This was based on a modified version of Jerome C. Glenn’s futures wheel, combined with a “hot or not” style cross-impact analysis engine.  As before, this approach benefited greatly from previous conversations with my colleagues above, but also from others such as Andrew Curry of the Futures Company, Emile Hooge of Nova7, Indy Johar of 00:/research, Vinay Gupta and others.

All three projects are still in continuous development and available for experimental project use.

Read more about the three systems.