My better half and I recently had this OpEd published in the Washington Post, on the subject of how expertise is changing.
In the interest of enriching its context, here’s some of the background material in my Brain.
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Last night I arrived in Curitiba, where I have two goals: attending the conference on innovative cities and scouting for venues, resources and people to involve for a couple events I’ll run here this October.
Brazil’s motto, which you can read on their flag, is Order and Progress, and Curitiba is one of the big examples of recent progress. Over the last 30 years, this city has reinvented itself on many levels.
Curitiba’s famous ex-mayor Jaime Lerner keynotes the conference, which looks like it’ll cover a wide range of issues that cities face, with emphasis on how they’re solving problems creatively. There’s sub-conference on social networks, at which I’ll do a 15-minute TED-style talk on Friday morning.
As to the events I’m running, I’m looking for:
- Activitsts, entrepreneurs, innovators, connectors, artists and others from this area
- Interesting venues for our meetings (two groups: one 15 people, the other 45)
- One person, likely younger, who can coordinate activities on the ground here
- A local artist to design a couple of logos for the events
- A local source of gifts for my attendees
- A local T-shirt printer who can silkscreen those logos on nice tees
For now, off to the sessions.
If you’d like to hear about this REXpedition from me live, I’m doing two talks this week. One you can listen to; the other you can attend, if you’re in the Bay Area.
The first is a Zipcast tomorrow at 1pm Pacific.
What’s a Zipcast? It’s SlideShare’s answer to webinars. To participate in this one tomorrow, click on this link a few minutes before it starts. By the way, I’ll be in terrific company: the three Zipcasts before me are with Andrew McAfee, Jake Wengroff and BJ Fogg.
The second talk this week is a live one, in the old face-to-face mode, on Thursday evening at a nifty venue in the East Bay. Here’s the invite text:
Thursday, February 24th 7:00pm – 10:00pm
The NeXus and COREcommons present…
Relationship Economics
Navigating Massive Change Together
Jerry Michalski
Founder, The REXpedition
Presentation/Dialog/Networking
The NeXus
1414 Harbour Way South, #1010
Ford Point at Marina District
Richmond, CA 94804
Directions
Free Tea and Secure Parking
Tickets: $15 Advance; $20 Door
Purchase Tickets
REX is the Relationship Economy eXpedition.
The next social and industrial order has more to do with abundance and trust than with scarcity and stickiness. The key assets are trusted relationships.
In such a world, whom you trust and who trusts you are primary assets. You’ll choose the product (or vote for the candidate) that people you trust recommend, from among the abundant choices.
Here we’ll build key elements of the Relationship Economy, playing out what it means for business, culture, society, governance, education and more, because its effects will be widespread and durable.
This is the Relationship Economy, and we’ll be exploring it together.
Presented by COREcommons
Creative people (and I mean all sorts of creative people, from sculptors and choreographers to inventors and mathematicians) are stuck in a dilemma: they would like to share their creations openly, and they need to make a living.
No wonder many of them freak out at peer-to-peer file sharing systems and other technologies and movements that are about open sharing. They see these movements as existential threats.
Imagine an infrastructure that makes it easier for them to make a living, so they might contemplate releasing their works more openly. This post builds toward that goal.
The links I mention in the video:
- Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, by Richard Caves
- The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde
- Common As Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, also by Lewis Hyde
The WikiLeaks case shines a bright light on all sorts of relationships, such as those between journalism and activism, secrecy and transparency, government and the media, national security and freedom of speech (not again!), and watchdogs and terrorists. The Times, they are a-changin’.
Some of the questions that leap out:
- Is Julian Assange a visionary or a criminal? Should he get a Nobel or a lynching?
- What about those trying to muffle him? Are they patriots or reactionaries?
- And the hacker backlash? Are DDoS attacks free speech, or denial of free speech?
- Who has been harmed? Has anything really important been disclosed?
- What does this incident tell us about democracy? privacy? media? corporations?
- What is the real battle here? Should information be shared or censored?
- Is this a taste of the future of news?
- Do we have any more privacy? Could we all be happy in glass houses?
- Bank of America seems to be the next WikiLeak target; then what?
- Is this incident spawning many more WikiLeaks?
- Has this incident dampened private conversations, or improved them?
- What are the odd side effects?
- Might the actions so far be the start of something much larger? Is cyberwar in the air?
- Or are we overreacting? Will this all make society better?
You can find all these articles in context in my online Brain (takes a moment for app to load):
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