Saturday, October 29, 2005

Innovative Solutions Simplify Complexity Bigger Than a Bread Box Design There's more to the design world than the design of objects. On September 21, as part of the series "Why Good Design Matters" at the Apple Store in San Francisco, Fred Dust, Smart Space Practice lead at IDEO, described how his firm uses innovative design methodologies and applies them to housing, cities and even governments. "We do design with a small 'd.' Design with a big 'D' results in the preciousness of the object. Design with a small 'd' uses an adaptable, investigative process to come up with innovative solutions across a range of fields." Side panel in Apple's page: The IDEO Team What makes IDEO successful? Dust points to the eclectic backgrounds of the design team at IDEO. "We[base ']re mutts" Dust says. You won't find "purebred designers" at IDEO. You will find a multidisciplinary team of architects, communications specialists and interaction designers. Combine that with the IDEO ethos of looking closer, investigating problems in innovative ways, an eagerness to work side-by-side with clients and applying a process that yields better answers and you get a powerhouse design firm that has become the poster child for business design strategy.... Design What? Reimagining retail space, a product or a service is one thing, but what about an entire country? IDEO was asked to use its design principles in the service of Finland. "I got a call from someone who said they were from the government in Finland, and they wanted to come over and see what IDEO could do for their country," Dust said. Apparently government ministers wanted to imagine new social policies based on the design principles put into place at IDEO. "I thought it was a joke," Dust said. Until two busloads of Finnish cabinet and parliament members showed up six weeks later. 3:04:43 PM    comment []

Informed Consent If not, who is missing the point? Terrorists Don't Do Movie Plots - Wired News September 11, 2005 4:41:54 PM MST ...One problem is that our nation's leaders are giving us what we want. Party affiliation notwithstanding, appearing tough on terrorism is important. Voting for missile defense makes for better campaigning than increasing intelligence funding. Elected officials want to do something visible, even if it turns out to be ineffective. The other problem is that many security decisions are made at too low a level. The decision to turn off cell phones in some tunnels was made by those in charge of the tunnels. Even if terrorists then bomb a different tunnel elsewhere in the country, that person did his job. And anyone in charge of security knows that he'll be judged in hindsight. If the next terrorist attack targets a chemical plant, we'll demand to know why more wasn't done to protect chemical plants. If it targets schoolchildren, we'll demand to know why that threat was ignored. We won't accept "we didn't know the target" as an answer. Defending particular targets protects reputations and careers.... 2:53:25 PM    comment []

Community and conversation Guerilla Philanthropy Random 1 Breathing real life into the Good Samaritan, RANDOM 1 features a feisty, passionate crew who scout the streets of America looking for people who need help solving everyday problems. On each one-hour show, the team finds a way to give two strangers a special "nudge," a helpful push in a life-changing direction. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, everyone is surprised. Watch this original, riveting series as a dedicated team of grassroots do-gooders travels the USA, banking on honesty and offering RANDOM 1 acts of kindness. Apple has some background on their process. To most passers-by Jan was just another derelict - a nuisance, perhaps, if you even noticed him, but more likely an invisible blotch of human paint on the noisy canvas of the urban streetscape. To John Chester and Andre Miller, however, Jan was a person of immediate and immense interest: the target for their next guerilla philanthropic encounter... Playing Against Type By WILL HERMES, New York Times, October 17, 2005 (article is about singer-musicians) Just how tethered must an artist be to fan expectations to succeed? Poet, 79, Wins Prize and New Audience By DINITIA SMITH, New York Times, October 17, 2005 Why did Landis Everson stop writing poetry for 43 years? The question arose last week, after the Poetry Foundation awarded Mr. Everson its newly created prize for a writer over 50 who has never published a book. Mr. Everson, 79, quiet, pixieish and a little frail after a cataract operation, answered, smiling, "Imagine, if you had written a letter to a friend in Chicago and you never had an answer, and you kept writing and writing and not getting any answer back, would you keep writing?" No matter. Mr. Everson will now receive the Emily Dickinson First Book Award of $10,000, with publication of his book underwritten by the foundation. It was not that Mr. Landis's poetry had been rejected, but rather that, for him, poetry is a communication between friends, not a commercial enterprise. "I wasn't seeing my friends," he said simply. Those friends were among the poets who became known as the Berkeley Renaissance writers: Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser. Although each poet's work was different, they were rebelling against East Coast formalism.... It takes effort. It takes paying attention. 2:41:10 PM    comment []

I thought I'd posted something about this apparently not. Meet The Life Hackers Clive Thompson wrote a good piece at the New York Times on our interrupt-driven world (although there is a leetle too much Microsoft in there). Thompson doesn't provide a pointless list of conventional wisdom how-tos, but instead examines the real imperatives of how we live now, splitting our attention across a bunch of different projects, activities, and goals, and responding all day long to an endless series of interrupts. [from Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times] Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark's study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the high-tech workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all claimed that they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But they grudgingly admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see; if a cellphone call breaks through while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything. As we switch to a real-time basis for our work and lives, we will need to adopt new strategies for coping with the disruption this causes. Rejection of real time is not a successful strategy, because business is moving onto a real time footing, and people have to move along, or be bounced. We are all part of a new ethos, rapidly emerging in the world of instant messaging, RSS feeds, VoIP presence, blackberries, and always-on-cellular communication. Finding a balance between complete interruptibility and complete inaccessibility is core to our success in accomodating the new pressures on our time and attention. Thompson's focus on gizmos -- like bigger computer screens -- as a means to better deal with life's complexities, is interesting but ultimately not relevant. The social aspects of real time life will swamp any specific technology's impacts. I believe in tools, but effective application requires changes in behavior. For example, effective use of IM in groups means people must adopt the five cardinal rules of IM: Turn on your IM client, and leave it on. (The Turn It On rule). Change your IM state as your state changes. (The Coffee Break rule.) It is not impolite to ping people. (The Knock-Knock rule.) It is not impolite to ignore people. (The I'm Busy rule.) Try IM first. (The IM First rule.) [tags: Clive Thompson, Five Rules of IM, continuous partial attention] [Get Real] 1:56:48 PM    comment []

Due Process can mean so many things. Plan for Internet "Backdoors" Draws Coordinated Attack The FCC's new tech mandate requiring Internet backdoors exceeds the FCC[base ']s authority, is arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by the evidence, and is contrary to law, and EFF and six other groups have teamed up to stop it. The coalition has petitioned an appeals court to review the FCC ruling that would expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to broadband ISPs and VoIP providers, forcing them to build insecure backdoors into their networks. Law enforcement says it needs the backdoors because, they argue, it's just too hard for them to intercept all the communications that they need. But that kind of easy access will also endanger the privacy of innocent people, stifle innovation, and risk the Internet as a forum for free and open expression. EFF has already argued against this expansion of CALEA in several rounds of comments to the FCC, and we'll be there every step of the way during the court battle. [EFF: Deep Links] 1:48:34 PM    comment []

Layered Complexity Asbestos Removal Laws and You Asbestos removal laws regulate the removal of asbestos because asbestos has turned out to be such a terribly toxic substance. Thousands of people have come down with horrifying, painful cancers as a result of asbestos exposure[sigma]. Direct and Related Links for 'Asbestos Removal Laws and You' [Lockergnome's Net Connections] There was a program on TV this past week on a gold mining company trying to become a good partner to the towns people harmed by the company's past environmental contamination. They've made great progress and both sides are happy. And no one is touching the sacred mountain thought to contain a billion US in gold. Meahwhile, New Orleans' complex post-Katrina cleanup includes asbestos risks. 1:44:41 PM    comment []

We see Tree Farms, rather than the Forest. aka, mis-aligned risk management. Being a Patient When Health Insurance Is Not a Safeguard By JOHN LELAND, NYTimes, October 23, 2005 ...Never have patients had so many medical options to extend, enrich or alter their lives. But these new options are expensive, and with them has come a change for which many Americans - even those with health insurance - are financially ill prepared. After decades in which private and government insurance covered a progressively larger share of medical expenses, insurance companies are now shifting more costs to consumers, in the form of much higher deductibles, co-payments or premiums. At the same time, Americans are saving less and carrying higher levels of household debt, and even insured families are exposed to medical expenses that did not exist a decade ago. Many, like the Dorsetts, do not realize how vulnerable they are until the bills arrive. Lawyers and accountants say that for the more than 1.5 million American families who filed for bankruptcy protection last year, the most common causes were job loss and medical expenses. New bankruptcy legislation, which went into effect Oct. 17, requires middle-income debtors to repay a greater share of their debt.... In a study of 1,771 people who filed for bankruptcy, reported this year by four researchers at Harvard and Ohio University, 28 percent said the cause was illness or injury. Most were middle class, educated and had health insurance at the start of the treatment. Many lost phone service, went without meals or skipped medications to save money. Although the study relied largely on people's own accounts of their finances, the figure suggests that as many as 400,000 American families file for bankruptcy each year because of medical expenses. "Not only are the bills higher, but the way we pay for care has changed," said Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the study's authors. "My mother always carried a bill with the doctor, but every dollar she paid went to principal. "Today, the doctor takes a credit card, and a family might be paying that off at extraordinary interest rates. So people may recover physically from major medical injury, but may not recover financially."... Some Experts Say It's Time to Evacuate the Coast (for Good) By CORNELIA DEAN (NYTimes) 1530 words Published: October 4, 2005 ...He added, ''I have never been an advocate for the federal government telling people that they have to move out, but it's important to have a discussion at all levels of government about what can be done to make sure more people do not put themselves in harm's way. It will not be an easy dialogue.''... ...A.R. Schwartz, a Democrat who for decades represented Galveston and much of the Texas coast in the State Legislature, said he now regretted some of the legislation he had pushed that subsidized development on the coast, particularly a measure that provides tax relief to insurance companies faced with wind damage claims. Mr. Schwartz, whose constituents knew him as Babe, said that measure was ''a terrible mistake -- in my mind, as opposed to my heart, because the people need the insurance -- because it has been an invitation for people to build homes on barrier islands and on peninsulas that are exposed to storms, at public expense.'' ''We are facing a crisis now because of that law I passed,'' said Mr. Schwartz, who now lives in Austin where he works as a lobbyist and lawyer. Daniel P. Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, said that as coastal areas, and islands, recover ''there has to be a discussion of what responsibility we have not to encourage people to rebuild their houses in the same way.'' Even the fate of New Orleans should be open to discussion, Dr. Schrag said. ''Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild a city that puts it in harm's way once again and relying on technology such as higher dikes and levees seems to me a very dangerous strategy,'' the more so in an era of global warming. Erosion already threatens 70 percent of the nation's coastline, and is especially severe on the east and gulf coasts. In a report to Congress in 2000, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that more than a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the coast might be lost to the sea by 2060. The report said these losses would put an intolerable burden on the federal government, which insures many of the structures through its flood insurance program.... Like others who study this issue, he said two good candidates for retreat were Dauphin Island in Alabama, much of it wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, and North Topsail Island, N.C., which, he said, ''gets wiped out routinely.'' But plenty of people reject the idea that those who live on the coast are any more at risk than those who live in areas prone to tornadoes, earthquakes or forest fires, even in an era of increased storms. ''There are engineering solutions to almost any problem we face,'' said Mr. Simmons of the beach association, who is mayor of Caswell Beach, N.C., near Cape Fear. He said the problem with places like North Topsail Island is too little infrastructure support, not too much. ''We are not doing a good enough job maintaining things'' like beaches, he said. In the past, the promise of engineering has prevailed against efforts to get the federal government out of the coastal development business. More than a decade ago, for example, FEMA scientists suggested imposing new limits on federally subsidized flood insurance and government support for roads, sewers and other infrastructure in erosion hazard areas. But advocates for development denounced the move as undue federal interference, and it was defeated. Setback requirements have been successfully challenged as unconstitutionally limiting people's use of their property.... Sept. 8, 2005, 8:35PM Coastal rates must rise, group argues By PURVA PATEL Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle HURRICANE KATRINA The Texas Windstorm Insurance Association wants to raise rates 10 percent, citing rising construction costs and the possibility of a hurricane like Katrina hitting the Texas Coast. The windstorm association, a state backstop created to take on the riskiest properties along the coast, said if not for a 10 percent cap on its rate increases, it would seek to raise rates up to 58 percent for homeowners and 42 percent for commercial policyholders, said Jim Oliver, the association's executive director. Texas insurers could face a major cash crunch if such a hurricane hit the state, industry officials said, because the association may not be able to absorb a catastrophe on its own and would have to rely heavily on private insurers to pay its claims. Those higher projections are based on models commonly used by the insurance industry that look at hurricane losses going back 100 years and simulate future losses. But state law prohibits it from using such models and instead requires the association to look only at historical losses going back at least 30 years. It can break the 10 percent cap only if a catastrophe occurs.... 'Clearly insufficient' Geeslin suggested looking at all the options available, including allowing the association to issue bonds, restructuring how the association uses reinsurance, and re-examining how the funds are accumulated. "There's no magic fix here," Geeslin said. "You really need all your tools in the toolbox." Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo, pushed legislation during the last session that would have, among other things, allowed the association to issue up to $1 billion in bonds. Smithee, chair of the House Insurance Committee, also thinks the 10 percent rate cap should be lifted. But lawmakers on the coast were reluctant to pass anything that would raise rates, he said, and others couldn't agree on how those bonds should be repaid. "We've got a fund that is clearly insufficient by any standard and the system won't withstand any kind of major storm that hits the coast," Smithee said, adding that if the state endures more hurricanes as predicted by scientists, "rates will go through the roof. It makes more sense to get rates up now then have them suddenly balloon up." Viewpoint, THE NEW MEDICARE LAW: A BAD DEAL FOR SENIORS On December 8, 2003, President Bush signed into law the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. For more than 38 years, Medicare has successfully provided basic, nearly universal health coverage to America's older and disabled citizens. Because older Americans generally have higher health care costs than any other segment of our population, they are mostly shunned by private health plans. Before Medicare was enacted, about half of all seniors had no health insurance, and nearly 35 percent lived in poverty. Medicare changed all that. By creating a universal insurance pool, Medicare allowed the previously uninsurable senior population to share their risks and resources, providing affordable coverage where little had existed before. But the Medicare program had one major shortcoming [^] it did not provide seniors with out-patient prescription drug coverage. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has spent years advocating for a comprehensive, affordable prescription drug benefit. What we now have instead is a complicated program that places the interests of the drug manufacturers and private health insurers before the interests of seniors. While the law will help subsidize the cost of medications for some, its glaring flaws erode the value of what seniors are receiving, and could undermine the Medicare program itself. We believe Congress must revisit this law before it is fully implemented in 2006 to allow for an affordable drug benefit offered to all through the traditional Medicare program.... The Privatization of Medicare: Proponents of the new Medicare law claim that injection of competition between private providers will result in better benefits to seniors at lower cost. But it is clear that private companies simply cannot match Medicare for its low administrative costs and efficiency, and they'll only participate in the program if they are given more money than it costs Medicare to provide the same benefit. The 2004 Medicare Trustees report bore this out as it projects the Trust Funds have lost 2 full years of solvency due in large part to the extra costs of privatization in the new Medicare law. The truth is that most proponents of the new law don't support a national social insurance program, and want to transform Medicare to individual [base "]risk pools of one[per thou]. Healthier seniors may do better in such a system for a time, while older, sicker seniors are left with fewer choices and higher costs. Ultimately, dismantling the national insurance risk pool will likely cause the entire system to collapse, taking us full-circle back to the days before Medicare began providing universal, affordable insurance coverage to all of America's seniors.... The mission of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a membership organization, is to protect, preserve, promote, and ensure the financial security, health, and the wellbeing of current and future generations of maturing Americans. 1:29:33 PM    comment []

Part of the stratification of Healthcare The Incidence of Health Insurance, October 27, 2005 by Arnold Kling I recapitulate some basic economics in my latest essay. American firms will not become more competitive by shedding health care costs, unless in the process they can reduce the net compensation paid to workers. Cutting health insurance benefits and raising take-home pay or payroll taxes by an equivalent amount is a wash. My liberal friends are all telling me that our auto companies would be more competitive if we had national health insurance, as they do in Canada. The concept that most people seem to miss is the theory that says that the cost of employer-provided health insurance is most likely to be borne by workers, not by employers. 1:25:22 PM    comment []

Update on current news in the field Nanotechnology: Less Dangerous, Potentially Life-Saving Jamais Cascio: There has been a flood of nanotechnology-related stories popping up of late; it's almost enough to make one suspect a major breakthrough was near. I... [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 1:19:27 PM    comment []

Windley: "structured open space" & digital identity IIW2005: Day Two Wrap-Up. Today we ran the conference using something called "structured open space." Kaliya Hamlin was anxious that we use it as a way of creating discussion. I'll admit that I was somewhat skeptical, but it turned out very well. Here's how it worked:... We're planning to do another one of these in about 6 months. It won't be exactly the same format, but the goal will be the same: encourage cooperation and cross pollinate the Internet identity space. Watch this space for more details as they become available. [Phil Windley's Technometria] 1:03:15 PM    comment []

Wrong end of the telescope, or.... right end of the microscope? Culture wars, Darwin Awards, and optimal attention. As web services automate the work performed by millions of white collar workers, where will these folks go next? Not to worry. People are the exception handlers in all automated workflows, and their intelligence and judgement won't be automated anytime soon. What does worry me, though, is how we'll gracefully connect people and services. Managing that scarcest of resources, namely our attention, is a huge challenge. ... Everyone has different preferences, so it's vital that people choose which channel to be interrupted on. Phone? Sure. Email? Fine. RSS? OK. Instant message? Absolutely. Any of the above based on your presence indicator? Cool. ... But stuffing the same messages down one channel or another doesn't alter the nature of those messages, or reduce the total effort required to process them. To rewrite that equation, we'll need to tap our latent visual, auditory, tactile, and maybe even olfactory abilities. Today's notification systems make poor use of that rich sensorium. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 12:59:22 PM    comment []

Information Eco-system Complexity The many meanings of metadata. As we weave more and better metadata into software, documents, Web sites, and file systems, the information stored in these various containers will become more available, more cohesive, and therefore more useful. The next challenge is how -- in this new era of interconnected systems, people, and business processes -- to unite these separate realms. The solution is a complex recipe, but we can find many of the ingredients at work in the emerging discipline of SOA (service-oriented architecture). We use metadata to describe the interfaces to services and to define the policies that govern them. The messages exchanged among services carry metadata that interacts with those policies to enable dynamic behavior and that defines the contexts in which business transactions occur. The documents that are contained in those messages and that represent those transactions will themselves also be described by metadata. There's no overarching schema for the metadata that flows through the service network, touching routers, registries, security gateways, databases, and end-user applications. And, in view of its many forms and uses, it's not clear that convergence on a single standard is necessary or even desirable. What is necessary is that within each metadata domain we strike healthy balances between the constraints we apply to metadata vocabularies and the evolutionary freedom we allow them. Across domains, we'll speak the lingua franca of data and metadata, namely XML. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 12:57:22 PM    comment []

G. K. Chesterton. "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." [Quotes of the Day] 12:45:52 PM    comment []

Stratification of Healthcare continues Being a Patient: For a Retainer, Lavish Care by 'Boutique Doctors'. A new breed of "concierge" doctors are lavishing time and attention on patients in exchange for a yearly cash retainer. By ABIGAIL ZUGER. [NYT > Home Page] 12:45:06 PM    comment []

Part of the emerging conversation. While this isn't there yet, I think it will become a discussion of more the "Web 2.0"  Nicholas Carr and Om Malik on Who Owns The Commons Nick Carr wrote a great piece, The Amorality of Web 2.0, intentionally throwing cold water on the Web 2.0 party. His central point, to my mind -- after suggesting that Web 2.0 is a cultish mindset, that Wikipedia is inadequate, and amateurism leads to shoddy products -- is the contention that Web 2.0 is amoral:... Here, Om gets down to something I think is potentially amoral: the appropriation of the new commons -- our shared space on the web -- by the folks that create the web 2.0 tools that are allowing us to populate it.... [tags: Nick Carr, Om Malik, Amorality of the Web, web+2.0, creative+commons] [Get Real] 11:45:40 AM    comment []

"What happened to the civility of doing the 'right' thing as part of a larger community?" Who's in control? Nobody, that's who. Get over it. Each time I hear somebody say or see someone has written that, "The consumer is in control," I sense an aneurysm developing. This is particularly troubling to me since I too spent the better part of a year repeating that same mantra to anyone who would listen. Besides, it fits so nicely with the Web's democratic mythos, regardless of release version (i.e., Web 1.0 or 2.0). What makes my temples throb is, however, this patently ridiculous non sequitur being used... [recursiveProgress] To thine own self be . . . partial The following is an HTML version of an essay I just finished. It runs about 2,700 words. I would gladly accept feedback and comment. What happened to the "moral core?" What happened to the civility of doing the "right" thing as part of a larger community? Why is it that so many people strain to castigate others for not being "part of the team," speaking in the royal plural, while incapable of acting except for their own good? Where, above... [recursiveProgress] Where are our communities of communities? The closest we may get to "control" The ecology of business ...This recognition of complexity is much more beneficial than blindly pursuing single objectives like profit, customers or social responsibility. It's important to ask ourselves when pursuing a particular business goal, "At the expense of what?" When executives are blindly pursuing shareholder value, are they doing it at the expense of employee loyalty, which then leads to a declining customer experience, which then impacts profits? This is what I call the 'ecology of business,' which has a lot of parallels with traditional ecology and conservation. The definition of ecology is "the science of the relationships between organisms and their environments." There's another phrase called human ecology, or "the branch of sociology that is concerned with studying the relationships between human groups and their physical and social environments." So business ecology deals with the relationships between stakeholders, corporate decisionmakers, and their environments. Every decision has a ripple effect that impacts multiple stakeholder groups, competitive activities, market dynamics, etc. A good decision-maker will evaluate decisions based on the consequences of those ripple effects.... [What's Your Brand Mantra?] I'm shifting this blog a bit. Will more explicitly address "Social Architecture" and personal responsibilites. As we "drill down" into our holes of narrow, egocentric beliefs about how the world works, we collectively push our "Human Ecology" off a cliff. Right behind our natural environment that sustains and feeds us in so many ways. 11:24:49 AM    comment []

We live in an increasingly complex world. One we are not designed to live in, let alone "manage." In this complex, digital world we can finetune what we hear, see, taste, smell and touch. From these "unique" experiences, we become countries of one. Our world, on  the inside of us, differs from even those we live with, work with, laugh with, cry with. We are at a point where we need to individually find ways to shape partial, local, narrow models for what works and then nest those into a coherent, functional, ever evolving, life-sustaining way. And then seek others headed in the same direction. If not, The Matrix wins. Humanity, our humanity, loses. We all want to categorize everything. We want to put each element of business into neat little boxes. Then we can point to one element and say, "this is the key to all our problems." It's just like fad diets: first, calories were the problem. Then, fat was the problem. Now it's carbs. Finally, consumers are starting to figure out that it[base ']s more complex than that; it's more about balance. And just as there is no fast fix for dieting, there's no fast fix for business. Right now we're focusing so much on the customer that we've lost sight of the big picture. When we focus on the customer, we see a person out there - separate from "us" - that we need to identify, label and categorize. Companies like Best Buy are segmenting groups and assigning names. Sure, it[base ']s resulting in sales. Yes, it's better than trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong person. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not the answer. It's just part of yet another fad that won't deliver on everyone's expectations, and then we'll all go rushing off to figure out the next piece of the puzzle to fix. And that is the fundamental problem: focusing on the puzzle pieces and not the puzzle itself. We are artificially creating separation between the company and customers - and between different departments within the same company - when in fact we are all part of the same system. The customer is simply a component of that system; no piece is more or less important. It's what I call the ecology of business. We need to switch our focus from components to connections. A brand is an ecosystem. The strength of the brand is directly proportional to the number and strength of the connections within the system. Connections, not components, are the brand drivers. http://brand.blogs.com/mantra/2004/11/brand_as_ecosys.html Jennifer Rice "And that is the fundamental problem: focusing on the puzzle pieces and not the puzzle itself." Yes, indeed, and not just about "business." Symposium on Social Architecture Program for the upcoming Symposium published I know that many of you have been waiting for the final program for the Symposium on Social Architecture, which we are producing in partnership with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School this November 14th and 15th. The program is out and published and as they say when you waited long for something that comes out real good - it was worth the wait! The Symposium will investigate the emerging social architecture[~]the convergence of social software, social media and social computing[~]that is a critical element of the next generation Web. We will explore the implications for business and beyond of these technologies and their application. And we will conclude the program with a fascinating case study In Web-based civics: Katrina and Recovery 2.0 - looking at how the social Web can support better planning and response to disasters: hurricanes, tsunamis, or terrorism. [Technorati Tags:... [Corante Blog] 10:44:52 AM    comment []

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