collaboration

Beyond Entrepreneurship

by Brian on 08-07-2010

in business,creativity,web

A few years ago I started developing what I call the “open conceptual enterprise.” The idea is that we need to rethink our basic assumptions about business not just in the context of different kinds of businesses but in the context of all types of human enterprise. By “enterprise” I mean the general impulse to [...]

How It Happened Last night a group of us got together to discuss ChangeCamp London and different opportunities for fostering a more collaborative & open culture in London. It was a great meeting and we’ll see some good things coming together in the near future. With that still fresh in my mind, I noticed a [...]

Creating a Platform for Collaboration

by Brian on 02-22-2010

in media,web

Yesterday I read a really interesting story about a project to develop a new tool for researchers at the massive CERN laboratory (the folks who made that gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland) to collaborate and share expertise more effectively. It’s a great complement to what John Seely Brown and John Hagel recently wrote about growing [...]

ChangeCamp: Toronto to London

by Brian on 02-18-2010

in civics,london

A few of us travelled from London to a ChangeCamp event in Toronto Tuesday night to help design a civic engagement toolkit: We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations [...]

First I’m going to straight-up admit I don’t have the disposition for them. I just don’t like sitting or standing in any audience or crowd. But I have reasons as well. In a way, the bigger the crowd, the less social it becomes. Of course it’s social in a really basic way, but there isn’t [...]

Focusing on Opportunities

by Brian on 01-11-2010

in canada,civics,media

I’ve learned not to care as much when other people are being stupid. It’s their problem. Last year I did more blogging in the spirit of “someone’s wrong on the internet,” but lately I’ve learned to lay off and let people screw up. (I’m so kind.) When I started writing about media it was because [...]

Some thoughts culminating out of the last post about how open standards emerge… a recent post by fellow Londoner Bill Wittur on some open government basics… the latest post on the Google blog defining their notion of openness… and a book I perused a couple days ago by Beth Noveck on open collaborative government. There’s no way I [...]

The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership [...]

Continuing the Thinking in the 21st Century series… Great comment by Phronk on the previous think21st post [excerpt]: Autonomy, flow, exploration, striving for material (digital) goods, relatedness, competence, they’re all represented, often in explicit numerical form. And they interact in a complex, emergent way that even the game developers can’t anticipate. See also: Twitter. I’ve been [...]

Part of a new series I’m starting to explore social, creative, and economic opportunities specific to London Ontario. Recently I posted about the benefits of educating citizens to think like journalists. Since then I found a lot of great examples of a collaborative approach to journalism — not just between professionals and amateurs, but between [...]

Two books covered in this post; best is last… Via BusinessWeek I read about a new book called Exploiting Chaos by Toronto’s Jeremy Gutsche (founder of TrendHunter and apparently an all-around busy guy). The subtitle is “150 Ways to Spark Innovation in Times of Change.” Billed as a “visually delicious business book,” it looks like a great [...]