November 2014 – Looking Forward

November 25, 2014

The Intelligent Community Movement In Universities

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) has been around for more than a dozen years and has developed a large knowledge base about the pre-conditions for creating an intelligent community. But, over the last year or so, ICF has expanded its reach and enlisted various universities in the effort.

Last month, for example, I was at Walsh University in the heart of what was industrial Ohio. It has become the first of the academic settings for the intelligent community movement.

I was there as part of Walsh’s 3rd Annual ICF Institute Symposium, whose focus was on “Brain Gain and Innovation: Creating Growth in an Age of Disruption”. There were a variety of interesting speakers and topics:

In different ways and with different perspectives, both Christian Long, Co-Founder, Wonder By Design and Google’s Jaime Casap spoke about schools and cities
Alvaro Albuquerque, Chief of Staff to the President, The Brazilian Small Business Agency, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, described their “knowledge squares”
Tim Jones, CEO, Artscape Toronto, Ontario spoke about creative place-making in cities

You can see these at http://www.walsh.edu/institute

In my presentation to the new ICF Leadership Academy there, I laid out eight obstacles that people in the countryside often cite as to why their areas are destined for decline. Then I showed how changes in the economy, society and technology have diminished each of these obstacles and opened up new opportunities for a rural revitalization. You can see the slides here: http://www.walsh.edu/uploads/116031415201951.pdf

Related to my presentation is the creation of a second ICF Institute at Mississippi State University. Its focus will be on rural communities. For some background, see this report in the Mississippi Business Journal – http://msbusiness.com/blog/2014/10/17/msu-extension-named-intelligent-community-institute/

There’s also a video describing the focus of this new institute, with Professor Roberto Gallardo and ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysF1MCm2Syw

And finally within the last few weeks, as well, the University of Oulu in Finland announced an ICF project to “examine innovation platforms and innovative approaches” in three of ICF’s top level smart communities worldwide – Taichung, Taiwan, Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Oulu. See http://www.epressi.com/tiedotteet/telekommunikaatio/oulun-yliopisto-ja-intelligent-community-forum-aloittavat-tutkimusyhteistyon.html (Google Translate does a passable job with this, if you don’t read Finnish 🙂

I’ll keep you updated as these three universities start to generate more about intelligent communities.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/103553994529/the-intelligent-community-movement-in-universities]

November 19, 2014

What’s Money In An Internet Economy?

Two hundred years ago in an era dominated by agriculture, most of the people in the US had little use for money. Then the industrial era arrived and a majority of Americans were paid for their labor in cash and used it to obtain the necessities of life.

Now we are in another transition. So how should we think about money in the Internet age? How is the traditional role of the dollar, pound, euro, etc. being disrupted by the changes the Internet is bringing to the economy?

I’m referring to money as a form of exchange of value which can be easily transferred. There have been barter exchanges for many years, even before the Internet. That’s not what this post is about.

Below are some of the answers I found.

First there’s Bitcoin. Despite the woes of the Bitcoin exchanges earlier this year, Bitcoin has been, in some quarters, proposed as the Internet’s new version of money. However, its major difference from traditional currencies is its independence of government control. Beyond that not unimportant aspect, Bitcoin doesn’t seem to be based on a fundamental difference in how money is viewed or used.

While the Internet made it possible, Bitcoin hasn’t so far really answered the question: what is the Internet doing to money? What is money in an Internet economy?

Last year, in his book “Who Owns The Future”, Jason Lanier focused on what he described as “off the books” activities in the Internet. In other words, things we do that used to have a monetary value, but are not now monetized. (More on Lanier’s proposals in another blog post.)

I’ve also mentioned before the inadequacy of GDP as a measure of economic activity, when much of it is not monetized. Continuing that theme of a need for a different kind of accounting, in its Networked Society City Index 2014 report released this month, the Ericsson company states: “GDP will be redefined to capture a new understanding of sustainable value creation and wealth in cities and in nations.”

Then, in a recently posted TED video, Michael Green presented his alternative Social Progress Index, which is intended to capture some of that non-monetized value by assessing the quality of life. But how can people measure this so it can support individual exchanges and thus provide incentives for more social progress?

The TimeBanks movement is, in a sense, in the business of creating a currency based on social progress. For almost two decades, this group has been getting people to provide and receive social services through a system of credits based on the number of hours of service a person provides.

Value can go beyond social contributions to social reputation. More than ten years ago, Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer, coined the term “Whuffie” for a currency based on social reputation. As social media have developed, the idea has been recurrent, more recently – as in this article “Why Social Accountability Will Be the New Currency of the Web”. There was even a short-lived Whuffie Bank.

Perhaps the most far reaching approach to design a form of money for the Internet age has been Dan Robles’ Ingenesist Project. His focus is on measuring the intangible value of the Internet’s products – its social connections, knowledge and creativity. And then using that as a form of currency that could be exchanged. His goal is nothing less ambitious than “to solve the under-mining problem that there is no accounting system for intangible assets. Only then can there be intrinsic value in the conservation of those assets.”

I’d suggest going to his website for more detail and the many videos which I can’t begin to elaborate in this short post.

What we do about measuring the products and services that are generated in the digital world is still unclear. Perhaps one of the ideas I’ve listed will lead to the world’s dominant form of currency or perhaps something else will arise. But I would expect that the way we’ve thought about and used our money in the past will indeed be changed – and not all that far into the future.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/103042523997/whats-money-in-an-internet-economy]

November 12, 2014

Is Industrialization Still A Useful Strategy For Developing Nations?

Last month, the Economist had an article titled “Arrested development: The model of development through industrialisation is on its way out” – well worth reading.

It started by describing how China successfully followed the previous model of industrialization by Japan and South Korea, among others. In turn, many other emerging economies are now planning to follow the same road as China did – initiate a wealth-creating manufacturing sector that can export to the world.

However, the Economist offered a cautionary note about this strategy:

Governments across the emerging world dream of repeating China’s success, but the technological transformation now under way appears to be permanently changing the economics of development. China may be among the last economies to be able to ride industrialisation to middle-income status. Much of the emerging world is facing a problem that Dani Rodrik, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, calls “premature deindustrialisation”…

For most of recent economic history, “industrialised” meant rich. And indeed most countries that were highly industrialised were rich, and were rich because they were industrialised. Yet this relationship has broken down.

The article went on to point out that:

Another mechanism through which new technology is changing the process of development is the dematerialisation of economic activity. Consumption the world over is shifting from “stuff to fluff”

The Economist article, however, was not complete. While it noted the impact of robots who can work cheaper than humans anywhere, it didn’t address the role 3D printing will have on manufacturing.

In my presentations to mayors of North American cities, I’ve emphasized that they cannot base their future on an old industrial era model of the economy. The same is true for countries which haven’t industrialized yet. In a global economy, even with vastly unequal positions of different nations, the same rules of the game apply.

I won’t repeat here the themes of my other blog posts, but, to get into that game, communications and information technologies (ICT) are a requirement.

Of course, it is frequently argued that ICT has to take a back seat when a nation doesn’t have clean water, etc. I understand this argument and sympathize to a degree, but I’d also note that in fact in many poor countries there are more people with mobile phones and access to the Internet than access to a bathroom. Maybe they understand that you need, to use an old analogy, to spend some money to drain the swamp or you’ll forever be stuck fighting the alligators.

For them, ICT is a path out of poverty. And, of course, from a public sector viewpoint, ICT can also help to manage and implement cleaner living conditions, sewer systems, etc.

The ultimately pessimistic view of the Economist article may not be justified, since these new rules and approaches to economic growth are beginning to be understood by a number of leaders in developing nations. By ICT investments, experimentation and innovation, they are also beginning to create the new post-industrial template for growth.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/102450208611/is-industrialization-still-a-useful-strategy-for]

November 5, 2014

Six Lessons For Mayors – Part 2

[As a reminder from last week, I’ve repeated the introductory paragraphs, but continue on from lesson 4.]

Mayors, governors and other local government leaders are being inundated by all sorts of “experts” telling them how to run a smart city. Often, the ulterior commercial motivation of these messages is not even well hidden.

Fortunately, in recent years, an objective and disciplined set of academic researchers have stepped up their focus on these questions.

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University at Albany has worked with government officials all over the world and studied their efforts to build smarter cities and use technology intelligently. As recently designated Government Fellow at CTG, I have taken a look at some of their past research and work.

Here are the last three of six lessons, which stand out to me. (By the way, it’s worth noting that these also apply in the private sector, although that’s not what CTG studied. Where it ways government, think company, and where it says citizen, think customer.)

4. Government Staff Can Be Supplemented

Lesson #4 is that cities with successful smart city services did not do this all within their own agencies.

At its simplest, CTG also saw examples where private sector partners in a city who have deep experience operating call centers can be helpful in training government staff for this kind of work. Volunteer neighborhood liaisons were also used to extend the reach of 311 and related services.

At its simplest, CTG describes examples where private sector partners in a city who have deep experience operating call centers can be helpful in training government staff for this kind of work. Volunteer neighborhood liaisons were also used to extend the reach of 311 and related services. Many times governments feel that they must take on all the aspects of an initiative, when many times there are private and non-profit organizations looking to play a role.

5. The Smart City Involves More Than City Government

From the citizens’ viewpoint, smart government services may require sharing data among different government entities. As difficult as it is to share data within a single government, it gets even more complicated to share between agencies of different governments. Understanding this complexity is critical to successful IT efforts.

As CTG reports:

“Expecting a great variety of benefits, governments around the world have initiated an increasing number of cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) initiatives. Collaborating and sharing information in metropolitan areas is different from sharing within organizational hierarchies. Normally, government agencies in metropolitan areas are not subordinated to a single entity and their willingness to collaborate and share information is mainly motivated by common needs and interests.”

“Network organizations are an alternative to hierarchies because they are based on relationships, distributed knowledge, mutual dependency, and norms of reciprocity… Networks in fact can be an alternative to traditional bureaucratic and hierarchical solutions and e-government information integration can be a good example of that.”

Lesson #5 is that a mayor may succeed faster by facilitating these informal networks of relationships, rather than going through the arduous process of imposing cooperation through legislation and complex legal arrangements.

6. The Single Most Important Player Is The Mayor

CTG’s research all over the world highlights this single most important Lesson #6: the most critical role in the whole smart city ecosystem is that of the mayor, who must provide consistent and visible leadership for a smart city across all agencies under his/her control and those his city interacts with.

CTG observed:

“despite important challenges, information integration initiatives can be implemented with relatively good results if there is enough political support from top government executives. … This work offers insights on how the support of the mayor can significantly influence the implementation of an information integration strategy in at least three different ways: (1) the creation of an adequate institutional framework, (2) the alignment of diverse political interests within the city administration, and (3) the increase of financial resources.”

“The executive support and political champions help resolve interdepartmental conflicts.”

As with all knowledge, these lessons may seem obvious once presented – but not so predictable before they are presented. Indeed, it is also clear from the research that not all of these lessons have been heeded in the rush to the smart city movement and the result has been much less than mayors have hoped for.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/101845371086/six-lessons-for-mayors-part-2]