The Global Ideas Blog

Sticky ideas podcast + art/innovation

Just a brief note to say that Chip Heath, author of Made to Stick, which we talked about on the blog previously, features in a podcast on the subscription-worthy Social Innovation Conversations....See more detail of the show here and download for the Friday commute home...

Whilst on the subject of interesting reading and listening, also check out an article on "Art and Social Innovation" by Larissa Sansour on the Kaos Pilots website. Really interesting sweep of the intersection between those two concepts, covering everything from Palestine to Jean-Luc Godard to the internet revolution.

Book reviews: 500 Ways to Change the World

Navel-gazing via the power of blog search. Some reviews of 500 Ways to Change the World from people online...

- SapphoQReviews

- Brother Daniel San (presumably a gift from Mr Miyagi)

- L-E-Mental

- John's Ideas and Creativity (ok, so he has some ideas in the book ;0)

- Joe Vitale: my top 15 books of the year (nuff said)

and reviews on Amazon

865 Ways to Change the World ... for a Fiver

So most of you will be familiar by now by our most rcent book of social innovations, 500 Ways to Change the World, which I continue to mercilessly and relentlessly plug (first rule of entrepreneurship: never miss a chance to promote). Some of you may also be familiar with some books with similar titles, namely 365 Ways to Change the World and Change the World for a Fiver. A few people have asked me who is behind these lovely publications, and what (if any) the differences are....so here is an unbiased (as far as possible) summary:

- 500 Ways to Change the World is a best-of, edited compilation of the Global Ideas Bank's greatest social innovations: the best ideas from the last decade; a mix of existing projects worth telling people about, fledgling initiatives worthy of support, and new bright ideas that could change our futures. Its underlying philosophy, like that of the GIB, is that those who deal with the problems on the ground are best-placed/informed to come up with the solutions. So it is about social innovation; creativity for social good from the ground-up; sharing, disseminating and collaborating on the generation of new ideas to change things for the better.

- 365 Ways to Change the World is a calendar of actions that an individual can take to make the world better in a small or large way, be that buying a fairtrade football, or using a click-to-donate site. They have been amassed by Michael Norton of CIVA and his team to tell people what differences they can make every day. So it has quite a lot of information from campaigning organisations, and ideas that are 'achievable' and can be done from home. Its underlying ethos is "the smallest actions can impact on your local community and the wider world".

- Change the World for a Fiver is also a book of actions that people can do to make a difference or, as it puts it: "   A book of 50 simple actions to change the world and make you feel good." It's VERY well designed, and the organisation behind it is more of a brand/virtual organisation called We Are What We Do. That, in turn, was set up by David Robinson who, for many years, has led the pioneering charity in East London, Community Links. Their aim is to reach as many as possible, and their actions reflect that, being very accessible. They have an impressive reach, and are doing some great educational downloads as well. They say that "We Are What We Do is a movement. We’d like to inspire people to use their everyday actions to change the world".

So there you go. While there is some limited crossover between the three books, 500 Ways has little in common with the two other books, being more about YOU generating the ideas, and being involved in the creative process. Rather than telling you what the solutions are, the GIB aims to encourage you to come up with them. I hasten to add that the web arms of both the others ask people to submit their actions (indeed, that was one of for a Fiver's 50 actions), but these are generally small, one-person actions, rather than new ways of doing things, new schemes, new projects or new innovations.

Hopefully that helps clarify the difference a little for those who are interested. I would only add two final thoughts:

1) that it is refreshing that all three books are out there informing and inspiring people. And, in the future, I believe we will all work together in one way or another.
2) 500 Ways is best value per idea: 500/£8 = 1.6p per idea; 365/£8 = 2.2p; 50/£5 = 10p. ;0)

Peter Drucker: obituary

Just a brief note to say that Peter Drucker, one of the first (and best) writers on management and business, died on November 11th. You can read an obituary here.

For me, reading Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship was hugely useful and informative, and it has aged remarkably well in the field. I still recommend it to others looking for a starting point today.

CBPP, FUD and why Wikipedia works

Excellent article in Free software magazine by Aaron Krowne refuting an article by Britannica honcho Robert McHenry about Wikipedia. Excellent for a number of reasons, namely that:

• it belatedly introduces me to two marvellous acronyms: FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and CBPP (commons-based peer production)
• it amusingly points up some massive flaws in McHenry's logic
• it is an excellent introduction to Wikipedia and the reasons why it works

• and, particularly, it posits what Krowne calls the first two laws of CBPP.

Having handily defined CBPP ["Commons-Based Peer Production refers to any coordinated, (chiefly) internet-based effort whereby volunteers contribute project components, and there exists some process to combine them to produce a unified intellectual work. CBPP covers many different types of intellectual output, from software to libraries of quantitative data to human-readable documents (manuals, books, encyclopedias, reviews, blogs, periodicals, and more)."], Krowne puts forward his two laws:

"1) When positive contributions exceed negative contributions by a sufficient factor in a CBPP project, the project will be successful.

2) Cohesion quality is the quality of the presentation of the concepts in a collaborative component (such as an encyclopedia entry). Assuming the success criterion of Law 1 is met, cohesion quality of a component will overall rise. However, it may temporarily decline. The declines are by small amounts and the rises are by large amounts."

Interesting stuff, particularly in the light of the open source seminar I attended last week, when a lot of the discussion centred around what could be called open source, and what was merely a renaming/reworking of more traditional concepts (peer review, networking etc). Commons-based peer production seems useful in this context. What intrigues me is what other laws there might be for CBPP: the bit in the definition above about there being "some process to combine" efforts into a "unified intellectual work" seems to need one, as the judgement/editorial aspects of the project are surely crucial (i.e. the combining/aggregating aspects). Could there be a relation between the number of users/contributors and the number of 'editors' (for want of a better term), for example?

Wisdom and Crowds

Have been reading The Wisdom of Crowds on the tube this week, and most interesting and entertaining it is too (apologies to those who read it last year: like British Rail used to say, we're getting there). I'm reading it partly because I've read so much about it, and there's nothing more annoying than reading lots of people's opinions of something you haven't read (a bit like reading a film's reviews but never seeing the film), and partly because it could potentially offer some sort of theoretical or philosophical underpinning for what the Global Ideas Bank does.

Namely, that Surowiecki lists four important things which allow the wisdom of crowds to become apparent in problem-solving: independence, diversity, decentralisation and aggregation. Which would seem to virtually define us: no hierarchy (unless you count our editing), a democratic voting system, independence from outside pressure (judgements made on 'private information') and a diverse and wide base of people contributing. Perhaps tapping into this collective wisdom can help us truly create the democratic think-tank (see Dave Pollard's thoughts on this) to which we aspire....

Anyway, I will write again when I finish the book and, most crucially (I assume), the final chapter on democracy. Am enjoying it, particularly as I studied Gustave Le Bon's "The Crowd" at university, when it was taken as gospel by quite a few....

[One caveat: I'm sure this has been discussed before somewhere (Demos? Smart Mobs? Ah yes: in the Demos archives), but the Who Wants to be a Millionaire example still grates. Surowiecki quotes figures that state that the audience get 91 per cent of the questions right, while the phone a friend gets 65 per cent right. He takes these figures to deduce that the crowd is 'wiser'. He does say that this doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny, and adds that "it is possible, though not likely, that the audience were asked easier questions". To anyone who watches the programme regularly, it is almost ALWAYS the case that the audience are asked an earlier question and, therefore, an easier question. Perhaps the lifelines are generally used in a different order in the US. A more interesting comparison (and more accurate?) would be to compare the rates of success on the same level of question: how do both perform on £32,000 questions? The crowd may still 'win' and be wiser (and more consistent), but at least it would be a fairer comparison, no?....ok, pedantry over; loving the book]

The Rough Guide to A Better World

Queuing up in the serpent-like labyrinth of my local post office, I picked up a copy of the Rough Guide to a Better World. I had read a bit of the press about the guide, which is a collaboration between the Rough Guides travel publishers and the Department for International Development in the UK, but hadn't realised it was being given away free in post offices up and down the country. Marvellous, and innovative. Are you sure this is the UK govt?

And it is (quite) marvellous. Ok, so you can line up some usual suspects (Bob Geldof, Chris Martin....er....Ronan Keating), but it's well put together, concise and impact-ful. More importantly, its focus is not on "information" but on "information to be put into action": information on how the average punter can amend their ways to make a difference.

Let's hope it does, otherwise people will say the £1 million should have been spent on making a better world, rather than on making a guide to making a better world. Certainly, it should reach a different crowd through being distributed in the way it is. You can also Download it as an e-book, read the whole thing online, or ask for a free one. Worth it for the resources sections alone....

How to Save the World? Read our books

Dave Pollard discusses the Global Ideas Book on his How to Save the World blog on Salon.com.

He starts off today with Bradley Hall's idea for a Currency created to 'limit' people's exploitation of the environment. Dave will be covering more over the next few weeks, and has praised the book for "the sheer ingenuity of the ideas". Nuff said.

[In general, btw, the How To Save The World blog is well worth checking out, as it deals with subjects in-depth and is not a "responding to news"-type blog, which means its insights are often a refreshing and interesting change.]

The Global Ideas Book

As mentioned yesterday, the Global Ideas Book is published this week, packed with ideas, projects and social inventions to change our world. And all at a bargain price. As I also mentioned yesterday, Charles Handy, the social philosopher, has written the foreword, so I thought I'd post it up here:

THE GLOBAL IDEAS BOOK
Charles Handy

"Once again the Institute has produced a great cornucopia of social inventions in this its Global Ideas Book. I read it for personal pleasure, delighted to find something that, for a change, talks of possibilities rather than problems. I read it also as a nudge to get me thinking of ways in which I could perhaps make a difference to the world immediately around me, because most of the ideas here do not require legislation or government approval, just a bit of local energy and initiative. We have tended to become a very passive society, waiting for some unseen ‘they’ to take action in response to our muttered and often muted grouses.

So it is with some delight that I see that many of the most interesting ideas in this year’s book are not just ideas but actual projects, examples of people who don’t wait for the slow wheels of democratic government to churn out some bureaucratic response to an urgent need but who have gone ahead and done it themselves. The Wireless Internet project in Nepal is a nice example of this, a way of connecting remote yak farms in rural areas, started by a local teacher, Mahabir Pun, who saw the need and did something about it. Back in France a homelessness charity, Emmaus, has been using the new technology to do much the same sort of thing, connecting isolated people, in this case helping the homeless to set up web sites and providing them with free email accounts to allow them to search for jobs or just keep in contact with friends.

In Australia it is a bank that has taken the initiative to bring help to rural areas, where the branches of the big banks have been closed leaving the inhabitants economically deprived as people go to the bigger towns to bank and shop Bendigo has enrolled the local communities as franchisees, requiring them to put in some capital, hire the staff and manage the day-to-day running while Bendigo performs all the technical banking functions, provides training and support and distributes any profits as dividends and grants to the communities. It is a nice example of corporate responsibility which helps to give real meaning to that rather tarnished concept.

Central to these and other ideas is technology. Without the internet and the Web these ideas would not work. It is exciting to see how this technology is releasing energy in the smaller globules of the world, allowing individuals to make a difference to communities as well as taking more control over their own lives. Perhaps this is the real meaning of democracy which originally meant ‘people’s power’ rather than ‘people’s votes’. We have a lot to thank Tim Berners-Lee for, he who invented the World Wide Web only a dozen years ago, and then decided to give it to the world for free. That was a Global Idea if ever there was one, and its multiplier effect is evident for all to see in so many of the projects and possibilities listed in this book."

Wikipedia: can you trust it?

WE've written a great deal on Open Source recently, both on the blog and also in this year's Global Ideas Book, including the rise and rise of Wikipedia. But news of it possibly publishing a print version has cuased a bit of a furore. The best piece I have found on it is on Corante's Many 2 Many blog, here: Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia project.

Essentially, the question posed is this: has open source gone too far when we could be educating our children with an encyclopaedia put together without the necessary checks and balances.....or is that exactly the point and shows a great way forward for the future? I'm torn between my traditional side and my groovy, non-narrow-minded side.......