blog (February, 2007)
incentives for architectural resilience
Institutionally, we could build in tax incentives and subsidies for people to make households more resilient. For example, if we have an energy grid that's unreliable, maybe we shouldn't build condo apartments that are totally dependent on electricity for elevators, water, and air conditioning. In some business towers, the windows don't even open without power. This kind of housing is fundamentally reliant on large-scale centralized power production.
But what if our economy provided tax incentives for residents and commercial centers to have autonomous power production? If these kinds of incentives were incorporated into everyday policy - whether transportation, electricity, food or water - our systems would evolve to be more capable of withstanding shocks.
-- Thomas Homer-Dixon, Worldchanging Interview: Thomas Homer-Dixon (Worldchanging.com)
data services: from ownership to facilitation
At the moment, proprietary data-sources own the space, [...] They're starting to license their data, selectively, and I think, over the next few years, we'll see them turning to increasingly fluid and commoditized services...
But, [...] perhaps the future -- perhaps the game-changer -- is to be the business or organization that throws all this model away; who says that the future is not in owning data, but in creating an ecosystem filled with data that's bubbled up from the people, in which you can offer new services that come from being the main facilitator of this new kind of web, and a new kind of relationship; a more collaborative relationship between company and consumer.
-- Tom Coates, Greater than the sum of its parts, speech at The Future of Web Apps Summit 2006 : audio, slides
where old media meets new
I hope that we will see, in the next few years, some much more ambitious experiments about how content gets created and shared in a group of people in an effective way.
I suspect that it won't be two things. I think that it won't be simply practices and standards that were created in formerly physical media applied to online stuff. [...]
But I also don't think it will be another thing [...] like YouTube, where you have masses of people creating content, sharing it, and sort of bubbling up the hot stuff. I think that those sorts of things are very much an artifact of simply not having been able to do that before, that the thrill is going to wear off that in a fairly short period of time. I think that we are seeing that, in fact, large numbers of people doing bits of content don't always actually lead to very good content, and that there is some model in there which is a sweet spot as yet uncreated, where the curatorial excellence of old media meets the freedom and versatility of new media, and we have a whole new form born.
-- Alex Steffen, Sharing Solutions: An Interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging (NetSquared)
toward a multi-dimension GDP
To me, development of alternative social well-being indicators is a very important stage in this overall process, because if we shift from GDP to something else it lengthens the "shadow of the future" - it gives us a tighter, more obvious connection to future generations and to other biota on this planet. That can change the discourse really dramatically - change the whole calculus of values and factual assumptions within which we see human behavior.
-- Thomas Homer-Dixon, Worldchanging Interview: Thomas Homer-Dixon (Worldchanging.com)
In all areas of human endeavour, there are hard data and soft data. The happiness of a society or the progress of a civilisation, are multi-dimensional: components are determined by subjective consensus, not objective measurement.
[...]
So long as everyone follows [an internationally agreed set of statistical] conventions, movements in GDP tell you something about national prosperity and economic progress, even if it is not entirely clear what. But no economic data, hard or soft, can ever tell the whole story. Prosperity and progress are soft concepts and official statistics are at best a supplement, not a substitute, for evidence of eyes and ears.
-- John Kay, Why data, soft or hard, cannot replace eyes and ears
continuous philanthropy
That's been philanthropy, the whole Carnegie model. If I made a bunch of money in my life, at the end of my life, I give it back and try to offset the damage that I did making a bunch of money in my life. It'll never work. So the question then becomes, how can you make philanthropy the way you spend your money every single day?
-- Robert Egger, Egger Speaks, Homeless Grapevine Issue #78 (print edition)