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Tom Munnecke
What's *really* new on the Web, as opposed to buzzwords and soundbites?:
I like to think of levels of complexity in terms of toasters, cats, and snowflakes.
Toasters are systems whose whole is equal to the sum of their parts we can take a toaster apart and put it together again, and we have the same toaster. If we fix what's wrong with a toaster, we make it whole again. Toasters are built.
Cats represent a different level of complexity - the whole cat is greater than the sum of the parts of the dissected cat. Fixing what's wrong with the dissected cat no longer makes it whole. Cats grow and evolve.
Snowflakes happen when conditions are just right. By lowering the energy level, we get greater order and greater diversity, possibly at massive scale. Snowflakes condense.
I like to think that for the past decades we have been building and growing the environment out of which good things will condense. I think that the convergence of open source, the scale and diversity of the web, and new tools for group-forming networks brings us to the cusp of a major transition in how to make the world a better place.
Which tools best embody the new opportunities from your point of view and why?:
The IT world has long had excellent tools for transaction processing - things that can be characterized with a single commit point, evaluated by pre-defined categorizations, and added up linearly to reach a single bottom line. This is wonderful for doing things like ATM withdrawals.
However, the really powerful things in life are not measurable with transactions, but are transformational- a flow of events and activities, which may not be understandable in terms of its transactions. I am particularly interested in tools which allow us to see the flow of transformational activities. Some of these emerging tools are reputation systems (ala eBay), complementary currencies, social networking systems, folksonomies, prizes and awards, story-telling, and pattern languages.
Who's doing the best work with the new tools (technically or in terms of social benefit or both)?:
Not sure... that's part of my interest in Net Squared - to find out.
I would have to rank Martin Seligman's work with Positive Psychology as an outstanding model for "flipping" the field of psychology from the deficit discourse model of only studying the negative emotions. David Cooperrider's work with Appreciative Inquiry is also quite powerful. These provide a foundation for moving from the "too many problems, not enough money" model to "networks of abundance" thinking that is necessary for the next stage.
What's the bad news? What are the greatest barriers preventing web-based technology from producing social change?:
I am not sure that we have to characterize this as "bad news/good news." Knowing where the barriers are is a good way of knowing where to focus. For example, I don't pay a lot of attention to what Kofi Annan and George Bush are saying, but rather focus on the grass-roots level of communications networks. What is working out to make the world a better place, and how do we do more of it. I very much think that this is a "smart edges" network model, that the "inside" of the network should be simply be a very efficient router of activities, and not the repository of the intelligence.
From this perspective, I guess the bad news is all about those who would shut down the freedom of the internet in order to re-establish their dominance of the traffic of the internet. The recent actions of the cable companies to regulate VOIP, for example.
I'd also re-phrase "technology producing social change" to something like "people using technology for a better world."
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