Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Journal: The Economics of West Bank Settlements

Civil Society, Government, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends

We were looking for a nice, peaceful place near Jerusalem'

Rachel Shabi, Guardian, 24 Sept 2010

If the construction of settlements in the West Bank is meant to be on hold, why are Israeli buyers being offered new properties on Palestinian land at knock-down prices?

The housing project currently under construction in Almon offers enticingly priced, spacious family homes with a garden and a view. The surrounding neighbourhood, also known as Anatot, sits on a ridge overlooking the Judean hills, near Jerusalem, a blaze of cultivated greenery in the parched landscape. Residents have a relaxed air, and newcomers who have recently relocated from Jerusalem wish they'd made the move years ago. If I were a prospective house-buyer, I'd be charmed. But I would not be looking here – because Almon is in the occupied West Bank.

Phi Beta Iota: Worth a full read.  This explains both the economics of the illegal settlements, and the massive financial resources that the Israeli government offers in favor of illegal settlements, at the same time that it lies to a complacent US Government that knows better, but prefers to sacrifice its diplomatic integrity for the pretense of progress.

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Reference: Social Good as Emergent Self-Organization

Blog Wisdom, International Aid
Full Source Online

How Social Good Has Revolutionized Philanthropy

Zachary Sniderman

The term “Social Good” has been bandied about, but pinning down exactly what it means in concrete terms can sometimes be tricky. Is social good the same as “the common good”? Is it the same as normal fundraising? Is it just online giving, or is it particular to social networks and web trends?

Social good is equal parts online fundraising and advocacy via social networks. While the Internet has been used before by non-profits and charities to raise money, social good implies more than just money changing hands. Social good campaigns often combine the ability of the Internet to find, introduce and bond communities around a common interest. That interest, in this case, is usually a problem worth fixing.

Where social good starts to get fuzzy is just how that problem gets fixed. Social good campaigns can be about building safe, entirely free, online support communities, spreading awareness through updates, raising cash, or a combination of all three.

Tip of the Hat to  Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: Our colleague Harrison Owen keeps stressing that the Internet has unleashed a new level of self-organization, and we are starting to realize how right he is.   What is missing in our view is a service of common concern that provides public intelligence about the true costs of every good and service (while outing corruption through transparency), and at the same time connects the one billion rich to the five billion poor one micro-need at a time BUT visible to those who wish to aggregate needs and solutions.  This is illustrated in Graphic: Global Range of Nano-Needs and discussed coherently and in detail in 2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability.

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Reference: Five Golden Rules for Data-Based Decisions

Blog Wisdom
Full Source Online
Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA intelligence

Rule 1: Understand the goals and expected outcomes of end-user information requirements

Rule 2: Remove spreadsheet based reporting

Rule 3: Establish a data quality competency centre

Rule 4: Unlock your enterprise from the transaction-based application for reporting needs

Rule 5: Get the analysis of your data done in-house

Phi Beta Iota: CEO Mehta personifies integrity and intelligence.  The full article explaining each of the rules should be required reading in both MBA and MPA courses.  It merits comment that he is talking primarily about Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and secondarily about Customer Relations Management (CRM).  As Review: Rethink–A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation draws out, both of these are being superceeded by Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the Cloud.  See also Reference: The Next Revolution in Productivity; and Review: Knowledge As Design as well as our own Graphic: The Four Quadrants of Knowledge and Review: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management–Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century.

Tip of the Hat to Dhiren Gala at LinkedIn.

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TED: Sugata Mitra–The child-driven education

04 Education, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Mobile, TED Videos

TED Short Video

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

About this talk

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

About Sugata Mitra

Sugata Mitra's “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity… Full bio and more links

Phi Beta Iota: Harrison Owen recommended this.  He has spent his life nurturing self-organizing systems.  This is one of the most moving, impactful ideas and presentations we have seen in our lifetime.  This is one of the keys.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Open Space Re-Invention

Review: Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World

Reference: Peggy Holman Free Video on Emergence

Review: The World Is Open–How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education

2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

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Journal: Unlicensed Spectrum Open for Super Wi-Fi

Autonomous Internet, Commercial Intelligence

Here it comes: ‘Super WiFi'

Todd Bishop on Thursday, September 23, 2010, 11:17am PD

Microsoft, Google and other tech companies won a key victory in Washington, D.C., today as the Federal Communications Commission moved to open up vacant spectrum between television channels for unlicensed use by wireless devices — a development expected to lead to a powerful new form of wireless Internet access.

Tip of the Hat to  Dawn Yankeelov at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This is the beginning of the end of any telecommunications business that does not realize that it is in the business of software, services, and sense-making.  Burning Man this year demonstrated that OpenBTS and related open technologies are ready for prime time.   Below is our newest graphic (click to see full size).

Telecommunications Sweet Spot
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Journal: The Time-Warped World of Harvard…

Academia, Commerce
Steve Denning

How not to get the best from your people: doing things to people vs doing things with people

I’m normally an optimistic kind of guy. Each month when I receive Harvard Business Review, I open it up thinking that maybe, just maybe, there’s been a change of heart. Maybe they have moved on from 1965. Not much to ask, after all. I become even more optimistic when I read the headline like this month, “Get the Best From Your People”. This, I think, is certainly timely, given the studies that show that only one in five people are fully engaged in their work.

But then I go to the article to which the headline refers. As I read it, I have a growing feeling of horror. There has been no change of heart. There is no heart at all. We are right back in the world of manipulating people with numbers. In fact, we are no longer in 1965. We have regressed back to 1911. We are now in the world of Frederick Winslow Taylor.  Read More…

Phi Beta Iota: The dehumanization of the enterprise will be recognized by history to have been one of the most costly failures of leadership and errors of management in all time.  We strongly recommend the author's new book, which can be bought now on Kindle or advance ordered in hard-copy at Amazon.

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