generativity

Here’s Chris Brogan’s talk on serendipity at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, here’s my earlier one relating to generativity, and here’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of serendipity & generativity in action on Twitter: No, they’re not on the same list, nor are Jeff Jarvis and The Clever Sheep ever normally in the same [...]

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Few people would disagree that as more brands & memes vie for our attention, the simple act of communicating has become an accelerating arms race. We shouldn’t necessarily complain. Not more than a decade ago it would have been impossible for most of us to get any kind of public attention for our products or [...]

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Generativity is one of the core concepts I keep coming back to. I think it’s at least as important as “sustainability” and we shouldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. Recently I noticed Tim O’Reilly mention it with new (to me) associations in a TechCrunch post about Gov 2.0: The government may build [...]

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An Economy for Living

by LDNbeta on 09-10-2009

in civics,economics,london

This is a more positive followup to yesterday’s post, trying to work out what the key idea or shared ethic might be for London’s economy. I’ve already expressed doubts about the “transporation hub” idea here and here. It isn’t a bad idea to beef up London’s transportation capacity as one specific part of a broader plan, but [...]

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The Young in Politics

by Brian on 08-12-2009

in canada,civics,london

Who’s responsible for the “inspiration deficit” in Canadian politics? Why of course,  blame the young: The young reject the political status quo, as they should, but they are too lazy to do anything about it. Most of the under-25s don’t even bother to vote. Instead of fighting for change, they wallow in their vanities and [...]

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At HarvardBusiness.org, Tammy Erickson writes, Future leaders in all spheres will have to contend with a world with finite limits, no easy answers, and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points [...]

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Random Generative Thoughts

by OpenConceptual on 07-15-2009

in concepts

Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.” That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate [...]

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The Best Disinfectant

by OpenConceptual on 07-14-2009

in commentary

This morning I realized I was a little unfair to Glen Pearson in my last post at BrianFrank.ca. I excerpted a bit of his blog as a jumping-off point, but the rest of my post didn’t really have much to do with what he wrote. I kind of left it hanging there as if he didn’t [...]

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Fluid Factors of Success

by OpenConceptual on 07-06-2009

in commentary

If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well). At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise… The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion [...]

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I was going to do this Thursday night but I got sidetracked.  Dan Brown at the The London Free Press took up my challenge (which was “both 100% ironic and 100% sincere at the same time”) to “take a few hours or a few months to figure out what really matters” and compose it into [...]

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Our Creative Roots

by OpenConceptual on 06-23-2009

in examples

A recent paper published in Science argues that our big brains aren’t what ultimately caused early human cultural development. In fact, it took maybe 100,000 years (give or take tens of thousands) for the human brain to find its mojo. What was the secret? Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there [...]

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Social Media Yin & Yang

by Brian on 05-01-2009

in belief,london,media

I had a longish essay half-conceived on this and partly written… but instead of that I’ll keep it short and let you fill the rest in for yourself (which I need to do way more often). The gist is this: online sites and links exist for the sake of promoting offline experiences (communities, friendships, profit, [...]

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