Now if we could only get governments to pay some real attention to this…

The issues

There are four Mega-trends in the world at the moment: Climate change, Demographic change, Urbanisation and Globalisation.  Energy is linked to all four, and water plays a role in two of the four.

Although we definitely have a number of crises on our hands in Australia, we sometimes forget that we are amazingly well-off compared to many parts of the world – for now.  We have plenty of water in Australia; it’s just not all in the right places.  We have excellent access to all known forms of energy; we are currently relying too much on coal & oil, the sources with the highest per capita emissions.  Our immediate survival is not under threat.  However, the time to act is now – before things get worse.  The “do nothing” option means that we can expect an increase in emissions of 50% over the same 50 year period.

We also often tend to see only the costs of the solutions. We need to remember that new technologies also create more jobs. There are sound economic reasons for changing the game. However, “changing our view of the future can be unsettling”. It would be much better for our economy to invest in technology rather than buying in offshore CO2 certificates!

What kind of future do you want?

Siemens have applied their “Picture the Future” innovation approach to these issues; this approach is:

Concept > Research > Scenario >Validation >Picture

The validation component is where they bring in partners, such as the CSIRO and university researchers – there were representatives from both of these presenting on the day.

Some of the key items presented were as follows:

Energy

• Energy production in Australia is currently responsible for 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions.
• The blueprint calls for the electrification of all road transport (bad news for petrol-heads, perhaps).
• We need to move to more renewable energy sources – for instance, geothermal has to become a major source of power generation.
• We also need to improve distribution technology. High-voltage Direct Current (HVDC) is the power transmission technology of the future, & could allow power sales to Asia.
• With the right technology, Australia’s daylight electricity demand could be met by a desert collector area of 30 x 30 km. Big, but a number that can be visualised!
• Electricity price will increase by 30%; but if household power efficiency can improve by 30%, then it means no change.

Water

• Australia’s water use exceeded our natural supply in the mid-90s.
• Some of our water assets were built in the 19th century – this is an industry that only changes slowly.
• Change also requires major change in community values & expectations – how much recycled water can we accept in our supply?
• Waste water “factories” can extract chemicals to produce fertiliser.
• We can be more efficient – for instance, Sydney today uses the same total amount of water that was used in the 70s, but with 1 million more people.
• Water usage reduction also reduces the power consumption required to distribute that water.
• We need a target of 65% power reduction for desalination plants by 2030.
• We need flexibility and adaptability – no single solution will meet all needs, and “formulaic approaches” are unsustainable.

How can it happen?

Now the tricky part. Siemens have “painted the picture” – the technology is here, but now it is ”up to the legislators to determine how it can be managed and paid for”.  We need a better regulatory & legislative framework to make it happen. Do our governments have the will to do this? Siemens also suggest that the “power generators have to contribute”. 

Imposing a pricing regime alone should not be expected to change behaviour – it certainly hasn’t worked for petrol – we need other solutions. 

What can we do?

What can we each do to encourage real change? Can individuals make a difference?  For one thing, we need to tell our political parties that our voting depends on them taking the right steps.

The success of “Earth Hour” was quoted as an example of how rapidly people can become engaged in a change initiative.  Over just two years, Earth Hour has grown from just one city to over 4000 cities in 88 countries.  From the Earth Hour site:

Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million homes and businesses turned their lights off for one hour to make their stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, The CN Tower in Toronto, The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Rome’s Colosseum all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.

In March 2009, hundreds of millions of people took part in the third Earth Hour. Over 4,000 cities in 88 countries officially switched off to pledge their support for the planet, making Earth Hour 2009 the world’s largest global climate change initiative.

* For more information, download the resources from Picture the Future here.

Some of these systems allow you to take control of your profile, and edit and update it.  The business models used by these sites can also be interesting.  Some are free, and offer premium services for a fee.  Some only allow you to take control of your profile for a certain fee. The information collated on the site may include details that are correct or incorrect; and the information may be current or out of date.

One that I have registered with is ZoomInfo, which allows me to log in and take control of my profile free of charge. I have been able to clean up the information there – although since my first clean-up, a heap more out-of-date info has been added, and a second profile created based on a mere mention of my name on another site with a link to a blog post here.  I have been able to easily merge this in to my existing profile. (Although some of the changes I made today may still take some time to appear on the site!) The site also keeps cached copy of the content that they found my name in – some of which is now up to four years old, and no longer exists at the original site. It seems that although I can edit my profile, I have no control over what out-of-date info they store about me in their cache. 

This has mostly been a positive experience, although I don’t remember seeing a lot of security to stop anyone else (whether of the same name or not) taking control of a profile.

I did once have a similar experience with a site called “Spock”, which seems to now have been subsumed into “Intelius“, purporting to be “The world’s largest and most accurate public record source.”  Although this does still provide links to some relevant sites on the search results, it no longer gives me any control over a profile, and all of the  “more detail” links refer to a name only vaguely like mine, and all results are within the USA. This seems to me to be a rather limited view of “the world” – as I understand it, the USA only accounts for 4.5% of the world’s population (according to the US Census Bureau).  However, for those in the USA, the sort of information stored here can supposedly include criminal records and “background checks”, which you have no apparent control over. 

This trend highlights the great benefit of occasionally searching for your own name on the net – that’s how I found out about ZoomInfo. It’s worth occasionally finding out what others are saying about you online. However, this is easy for someone with a name like mine – a Scottish first name and a French surname. So far as I know, I am still the only “Keith De La Rue” on the net. I pity all the “John Smiths” out there, and those with names of similar popularity of other ethnicities. (The secret is to choose your parents wisely – or change your name!) 

The appearance of sites that gather personal info without allowing you any control is a disturbing trend. Given the nature of the Internet, I don’t see that an awful lot that can be done to directly stop it. I don’t believe that there is any particular “authority” that can regulate this somewhat unethical behaviour globally. Whatever happened to Identity 2.0?

In the meantime, I believe that it is worth taking control of your own online identity on these systems where possible, provided that you are not exposing yourself to other forms of unethical behaviour when you do.

Without wanting to make light of the topic, I wonder if there will be a trend in future to give children more unique names to help them to have a globally unique online identity? Maybe ICANN should take a role in personal names as well?

The Government is hosting the “Realising Our BroadBand Future” forum on 10 and 11 Dec, to map the applications and business models that will thrive in Australia’s high speed broadband future.

Thanks to John Wells and co at CivicTEC, I am facilitating a parallel session in Melbourne that will generate some contributions to the discussion.  The session is at 8:30 to 12:00 next Thursday 10 Dec. Deloitte are very kindly hosting us at 550 Bourke St. This is a free session, but you must register. See the details, and click through to register here.

We’re talking about our connected future. This isn’t about technology, it’s about how we can all use it – to connect communities, build businesses, improve our education and health systems, create and innovate, improve our quality of life for all.  For those of you wishing to come along, please register as quickly as you can, as there are limited places available!  Read more in the Press Release.

I have circulated this to various networks in Melbourne – social media people, creative people, trampoline attendees, geeks, telecoms consultants and knowledge managers.  There should be some diverse points of view.  If you can’t make it, follow us on Twitter at #bbfmel.

Without clear thinking, valuable work may grind to a halt

The following is the introduction to an article that I wrote, published in the November/December KM Review.

Despite everything that the modern KM practitioner knows about communities, collaboration and technology, communities of practice (CoPs) often fail and collaboration often breaks down. In order to establish an effective CoP, it’s necessary first to think about the nature and structure of a community and recognize that it’s an entirely different entity from a work group or a project team. As such, it must be treated differently, too. In this article, author Keith De La Rue examines the pitfalls associated with CoPs and why helping them to grow and flourish requires a better understanding of three words: “community”, “practice” and “technology”.

Read the full article.

Talking Cock (v.): A Singaporean term meaning either to talk nonsense or engage in idle banter.
 - The Coxford Singlish Dictionary

Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of traveling to Singapore on a number of occasions to speak at conferences.  I have greatly enjoyed the experience - both the conferences, and wandering around Singapore as a tourist.  I have met some fantastic people there, and have greatly enjoyed the culture – and the food!

Singapore is a land of contrasts.  It is richly multicultural, with all public signage in four languages.  The population is predominantly Chinese, yet most of the public institutions are as British as they were before independence.  It has earned a reputation as a non-democratic nation, yet the country is alive with art and innovation, and not in the least like a totalitarian state.  I feel safer walking around the streets anywhere in Singapore than I do in some parts of Melbourne.

Some would like to portray Singapore as a place where freedom of speech is suppressed by the government, yet Singapore is now becoming increasingly open. One friend I have made in Singapore is Enrico Varella.  Enrico introduced me to a fantastic local web site – Talking Cock.

This site bills itself as “Singapore’s premier satirical humour website”, and includes the delightful Coxford Singlish Dictionary.  (Singlish is the version of English spoken in Singapore.)  Talking Cock presents itself as apolitical: “Our main aim is to celebrate all the nonsensical parts of Singaporean life. We make fun of people in every sector, strata and profession in a completely democratic way.” Yet a sensitive government could easily take much of the satirical content on the site as criticism and take action against it.  The site also warns that “We have employed… language which might be upsetting to some and which some consider unsuitable for children.”

So what does this have to do with Mr. Conroy?

It appears that Australia’s Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed imposing a filtering system on the Internet.  This purports to be an attempt to shield children from inappropriate content.  A number of people have raised many problems with this.  At the very least, it would significantly slow Internet traffic for all Australians – some estimates put it as high as an 87% reduction in speed. If indeed it is primarily aimed at protecting children, then it also takes away from parents the responsibility of making their own decisions on what is suitable for their children.  There are many more arguments about this proposal – others have advanced these very eloquently.

My view on this is typified by the Talking Cock website.  Would this be one of the estimated 10,000 sites that our government is likely to block as “unsuitable”?  Would we block a site that the Singaporean government overtly allows?  If not initially, would sites such as this be blocked in future? Is it possible that our current or future governments would block sites that are deemed to be critical of the government of the day?  And if so, how would we ever know which sites were being blocked? 

This all seems like an attack on freedom of speech and access to information that is far too open to abuse.  Who will be making the decisions about which sites will be blocked, anyway?

If Talking Cock was determined to be a site that should be blocked, will my blog site also be blocked, because of this post?  As I also use this site for my business, would this expose the government to a liability for unfair restraint of trade?  Does the fact that the site you are looking at now is actually hosted on servers in the USA make me more or less likely to be subject to government scrutiny?

It seems that Mr. Conroy is attempting to use a simplistic industrial-age concept to address a very complex problem, and like most simple solutions, I believe that it is totally inappropriate.

Will we be able to say in future something like this statement on Talking Cock’s home page:

We donno how we’ve escaped the speech-smothering tentacles of the state, but we suspect it’s got a lot to do with you Singaporeans and your tremendous (and very touching) support for us since we began.

US researchers said they are able to selectively erase memories from mice in a laboratory, raising hopes human memory afflictions like post-traumatic stress syndrome can one day be cured. 

An initial step has now been taken towards the ability to erase memories.  This takes us one step towards the scenario in Philip K Dick’s story – now also John Woo movie, starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman – Paycheck.

In the movie, this capability is used for less altruistic purposes. 

Even though most science fiction writers deny that they predict the future, it is always interesting to see life imitating art…

Mistake makes ‘iPhone girl’ a celebrity

“A Chinese factory worker has become a celebrity after her smiling face was accidentally loaded onto an Apple iPhone and shipped to the other side of the world, her employer has said.

“The unidentified worker flashed a smile and made a peace sign to a co-worker whose job was to test the device’s camera in the southern city of Shenzhen, said a spokesman for Foxconn, which assembles the phones for Apple.  The woman’s colleague apparently forgot to delete the photo from the phone, which was sold to a consumer in Britain, who posted it [to MacRumors.com] on the Internet, Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun told AFP on Wednesday.”

Apparently Apple have no plans to adopt this as standard practice, but this raises an interesting question:

“As one person wrote in an Internet post: ‘It would be great for every Chinese worker who makes your iPhones to take a snap of herself or her factory friends … a hello from a person you would never otherwise meet.  Globalisation in practise.’”

A new social networking technology?

I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth.  In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog.  This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos.  Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.

I am still not quite sure what happened.  I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason.  I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.

Ironic that I was about to take a full site back-up and install a later version of WordPress!  Thankfully, my host service provider, my good friend Stephen Brehaut at Sricom, was able to ride in on his white horse this morning and roll back the site to Tuesday, and I have not lost anything!

It is at times like this that you realise how much you come to depend on your blog, particularly when it is at the heart of your business!

Still, if you rely on older technologies like paper, they can be just as vulnerable to various sorts of damage…

Even the team arguing against freely admitted that technology is an important enabler – we aren’t Luddites – the argument is that it’s first and foremost about people.

Arthur asked another question – how many people changed their mind as a result of the debate? Only two.

http://acknowledge.mofuse.mobi/

(The idea is to open this URL from a mobile device – but you can see a simulation on a PC browser…)

MoFuse is “Mobile Fusion”, and it was mentioned by Chris Brogan in an email that was forwarded to me.  It is “a web application that allows content publishers to easily and instantly create a mobile version of their blog or website.”

I wonder if it will be friendly to me?