Following last month's release of the iPhone 3G , along with the launch of the App Store , and what Brian Fling called the " first true Mobile 2.0 ," everyone around here is talking about the emergence of the mobile device as a critical facet of web strategy. And as mobile evolves to support more kinds of tasks, a self-reinforcing cycle will emerge, where the mobile device becomes the device of preference for an increasing number of activities. Location awareness is a critical differentiator between the mobile and, um, non-mobile web experience. My colleague Anders Rosenquist, who is seriously deep on mobile, presented a first take on the company point of view on mobile strategy at a recent meeting; another colleague, Justin Marshall , is knee-deep in an iPhone app; and in general things are just all abuzz about mobile.

And of course from this we are capitalising on opportunities, and there emerges an element of self organisation and autonomy. This is not giving management some sort of x-ray vision, this happens in a distributed way, where everyone together as a result of their networking, will by default leave tracemarks of who know’s what? Tags: km conversation network emergence learnin Here’s an excerpt from a one page flyer I’m doing for Communities of Practice at our work: “We like to think that people in our [firm] are more than their job title describes, we all have many talents, and we all have many needs to draw on each others talent.

And in complex, emergent and self-organizing systems, behavioral metadata is especially powerful, because in those kinds of systems it's a challenge on the one hand to present content in meaningful ways and on the other hand to generate business intelligence to drive smart decisions. As content and people increasingly cross freely between domains in the emerging standards-based social universe, I think we'll see a shift in business models from today's focus on owning content to a new focus on owning the metadata about the content and the people interacting with the content. As an information architect, I work with metadata a lot.

The more bloggers there are, the more we have to read and learn, the more comments and linking result, and as a whole we have a richer distributed conversation. We know the aim is all the things I mentioned directly above, but we don’t explicitly work towards that aim, rather we just participate and value emerges that achieves these aims. Tags: network community emergence collaboration tasks proces A while ago I posted that size doesn’t matter when it comes to effective communities. You don’t need a lot of members to make a community of practice successful,

all this work is distributed in a closed and distributed email system course this is all about balance, if all our social tools were strictly about tasks (processes) then we’d miss out on the, social productivity , self-organisation and emergence that comes from general networking. Tags: emergence community network conversation email tasks process k In my last post I pointed out the difference in the dynamics between Teams and CoPs . The main defining aspect is that teams exist to do tasks.

Great cross-functional CoPs are emerging like Bulk Materials Handling, Sustainable Development, Software Architecture and Approaches, 3D Visualisation and Animation, Bauxite and Alumina, etc.. But there is something else that’s emerging that we didn’t quite expect. So the unexpected emergence is that CoPs are being used for lots of different things that are cutting Not long ago I posted about how our Communities of Practice (CoP) are hitting a sweetspot …bottom-up and grass roots tools that provide more of a sense of place and better coordination over email, and are more enabling than the Intranet.

Clearly, the emergence of cheap desktop technology for custom machining parts in small batches will greatly lower the overall capital outlays needed for networked physical production of light and medium consumer goods . The above comes from a great 38-page overview essay by Kevin Carson where he reviews current trends to more distributed manufacturing, often based on open source design, as well as a new type of machinery. * The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production.

And the websites for various emergency services, local radio station websites were overloaded with visitors so didn’t work.  Civil Defence skills are not just for war time emergencies; they are equally useful in the fight against terrorism and applicable during peacetime emergencies. We discussed was peer-to-peer emergency - not all the responsibility should be on a handful of official or volunteer representatives. If you are looking to download Social Media and PR Crisis Communication courseware for your workshops, it’s here .  I’m watching 4 Corners

a distributed communication and coordination infrastructure, which we essentially already have, despite its imperfections (some would argue we need a distributed decision-enabling infrastructure on top of that, but I think that a virtual infrastructure is not essential, and that the tools for open and transparent government are also essentially there) - a distributed money infrastructure: we need civil-society based mutual credit and open money systems that can be used both locally and for online affinity groups. in real terms, even when you factor in all of those costs, solar power is likely to produce power at about half the cost of the cheapest coal-fired power plants

The creation of immaterial value, which again needs to become dominant in a post-material world which recognized the finiteness of the material world, will be characterized by the further emergence of non-reciprocal peer production. Peer production is a more productive system for producing immaterial value than the for-profit mode, and in cases of the asymmetric competition between for-profit companies and for-benefit institutions and communities, the latter will tend to emerge I wrote these summary theses about two years ago, but I believe they are still valid, food for thought, and show the specific approach I’m proposing to politics, state and governance issues: