(2008-06-18) Haque Worldview Disruption

Umair Haque defines a Worldview Roadmap: using the Network Economy to "organize" the world's biggest needs/problems (Games To Play).

• Scott Heiferman comments that the emphasis should be on enabling/facilitating Self Organization.

Fred Wilson is having similar thoughts. But I am a bit jealous of friends who are working on finding and funding alternative energy or biomedical technologies that have the potential to address the serious problems facing the Real World. At times it seems that helping the web become more social, intelligent, mobile, and playful is not as impactful.

Stowe Boyd's more-philosophical musings on the Culture of the web are related, I think.

July: Tim OReilly and John Battelle connect this to the theme of this fall's Web2.0 Summit on "The Opportunity of Limits" and the need for Collective Intelligence to be Actionable.

Jul23: Brad Burnham's thoughts on USV's MeetUp investment are relevant too. I Commented to hope that MeetUp does more to bridge the Real World interaction with online Social Networking.

Aug8: Scott Heiferman blogs I've come to realize that the uphill battle MeetUp faces isn't just getting people away from the screen to go offline & face strangers - nor even having them embrace community or realize the power of Self Organized groups. Perhaps the biggest challenge is getting people to see the value in institution, in organization, in structure... a "Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything" means there's a grounded community organization in-place when you need it. When your Social Network can't do what you need. The Social Graph is great for a lot of things (eg. relationships & help & events), but there's a need for Organizations. Just-in-time organization is flimsy. It's not there when you need it. Relationships aren't in-place. Infrastructure isn't there. Commitments are weak. Engagement begets durability - structure & relationships that weathers storms.

• Hmm, would Clay Shirky agree?

  • Yup - Now we need to turn around and do X out in the world. I don't think that there's anything digital that we could do that would solve this gap. I think the gap is produced by the difficulty of translating thought into action. I think the kind of things that help people turn thoughts into action are much more about social and legal structures (Governance)... Who's out there that's thinking about the structural difficulties of turning thought into action? I know it's not me. I wish it was. It may be David Johnson at New York Law School (creator of DoTank, Democracy Design Workshop]. Whoever gets that right is going to be providing the key thing that's missing right now... For those sorts (Car Pool) of point-to-point matching, social networks are quite good. There are a lot of effects there where if you take a group of people that just needs a coordination Layer, to come together and do something, the FaceBook-s of the world are great. Here's the problem: lowering demand alone tends to lower the price and lowering the price, lowers it for everybody. Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the Energy equation.

• Does a MeetUp really change this?