No Straight Lines session, continued....

Alan Moore is continuing, after a wee break, to discuss the old paradigm and the new paradigm, or are they, in fact, the same paradigm?

AM: Businesses have to be:

1. Life enabling
2. Life simplifying
3. Navigational

A high social networker has a higher 'social value' than those who don't network as much. But what do we mean by 'social value'?

Social Intelligence - which surely is crowd theory, the power of many and all to do with empathic resonance, right?

Can employers demand access to a person's private Facebook page? Well, apparently so... although that is surely a breach of a person's human rights? But apart from the option of someone deciding to sue the company concerned, what young person looking for a job is going to risk their entire future (at least as far as they see it) by taking the particular company to task?

Back to the 'flow of information' - flow is good. As Goldratt said, 'Balance flow' - but there is a lot of information that simply cannot flow. Right? If I give away all my information, what value do I have? How can I sell consultancy? How can I sell my skills? How can I get money for my intellectual property (although, fair enough, I can only get paid if I allow the information to flow)? What about, however, the IP that companies block to stop competitors getting potential innovations... killing off ideas that could improve 'society'? Not a nice thing to do, but it does happen. The ever-lasting light-bulb?

"Company Command": online learning environment for commanders from, on and going to the field of battle sharing experience, wisdom and intelligence to help share and collaborate.

Alan talks about the 4 Cs:

1. Commerce
2. Culture
3. Community
4. Connectivity

and how Girlswalker.com, the Japanese fashion community, was built on the 4Cs model. It is all very clear, right? The community needs to be connected and have a common culture to create commerce from it.

Alan's now talking about his own project allowing people to tag their videos in a way that allows people to buy the products specifically used within that film... which is a nice idea for physical products.

However, what we need to also find is a way to also sell the very boring, very unsexy B2B products and services in a same way.

Obama's socially networked campaign was, according to Alan, based on: Awareness, Interaction and Engagement. The big thing, as we all know now, is how he engaged the general public, by allowing them to donate just $5 to his campaign rather than eliminating everyone who was unable to cough up the $2000 minimum for Hillary Clinton's campaign.

But I fear there are a lot of business examples that could be used in explaining how social media (or collaboration technology) that aren't being mentioned... apart from YourEncore. Open source and collaboration is easy to justify on moral grounds, but we really need to prove to the 'deciders' in business (at whatever level of the organisation they may be) that collaboration and embracing this new technology can actually be profitable.

The question is, it seems, to find where the value is: if we have mass collaboration on a project, who owns the patent? Who owns the copyright? Who can make money from it? The world benefits, but it's difficult to drive people to open their own IP to the world... as they'll feel they're giving something for nothing.