“Lets take this twelve year old girl that I am a godfather to. She has a cell phone, she is on the web, she has a Facebook page, she has friends from around the world in that space and for her, that was like for me growing up when we had radio and tv, it was just part of the atmosphere. For her it is part of the atmosphere too. So I think she is growing up not so much with the sense of entitlement, but rather a sense that this is the way the world is. And because she makes those assumptions she is going to build upon that too. I don’t know where that will lead, but being an optimist I trust in the human spirit to find its own way.” - Grady Booch, Chief Scientist, Software Engineering in IBM Research

In his Theory-U Otto Scharmer names four different forms of organizational structures that are related to the four different stages of listening (downloading, debating, dialogue and presencing) that we go through while travelling on the journey of the U: the centralized organisation, the decentralized organisation, the network organisation and the ecosystem organisation. To me it was quite an eye-opener to see the network in this row of organizational forms and to reflect on its position and its successor. But is the ecosystem an utopian ideology

Last week I have visited the ‘Stedelijk in de Stad Bouwkeet’, a project in between the closing down of the temporary location at Central Station and the re-opening of the regular location at Museumplein of the StedelijkMuseum Amsterdam. The project is a container travelling through the city and aims to bring the museum more in touch with its audience, being a meeting point, information centre and lecture location. Last week’s event was about how to set up an exhibition. Besides that I learned something about peer-education and a globalizing modern art scene.

Adobe has developed, or better reintroduced a PDF format that should be resistant to the changes of time.* The demand for standardisation of formats by libraries that want to digitally store and preserve their treasuries is growing. It looks like Adobe is contributing to the Road to Sustainability, but is it just to believe that their standards will hold and be durable? I recon the invention of printing was considered to meet this standard as well, but guess what: PDF! Now lets see what McLuhan would make of this.

We have been discussing the topic of the me and we many times before. There is this tension between the interest of the collective and the individual: when do you decide to make a decision for your own benefit and when will you consider the interest of the collective to be of bigger importance? But do we make decisions to benefit the collective or do we rather constitute a collective and a representative institute to promote the collective interests? What is the position of the me in the we in this matter? Does this position change in the networked society?

In our recent report on Africa we also covered the topic of Aids. The result was quite depressing and hopeless, according to the general view I think and it was for me personally a shock to gather that information, a realisation of truth that’s harsh and confronting. So it was quite a shock to read this article in the NRC, stating that the problem of Aids, or rather the reporting on the problem, has been exaggerated and misleading for the benefit of fund raising for research and “thus for the pockets of researchers.” Now which information to be consider truth I don’t know, but it shows the influence of media.

The popular and bad informed opinion about anarchists is most often related to chaos, resistance, squatters, absolute individualism and denial of organisation. In fact the philosophy of anarchy is much richer and very interesting indeed in the use of contemplation on organizing and communal cooperation. To the American political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff the anarchic argument has much to do with the logic incompatibility of authority and autonomy. I want to inquire his philosophy as a possible argument for communal cooperation in the network, linked to the peer-2-peer philosophy of Michel Bauwens.

“I would like to redefine the amateur because I think the amateurs have gotten a lot better.  And I’m in good company in this. Charlie Leadbeater, who is at Demos, a think-tank in England, writes about the rise of the Pro-Am. A third designation, someone who is an amateur, in that they don’t make their living by being a TV producer or a scientist, but they work to professional standards. So they are as good as a professional but for whatever reason, quite possibly choice, they choose not to make their living“. - Jeff Howe, author, contributing editor at Wired Magazine.