I think I am becoming slightly American. Once upon a time I would have flinched at the word “awesome” or “awesomeness”. I have been called awesome myself – but that was many years ago when I gave a speech in a two piece vinyl crocodile suit and purple shirt at UCSB. Its true!!!!!! Just ask Julien. Have I become an extra in Teds Most Excellent Adventure?

Anyway, something else that is “awesome” is happening in Austin Texas on Sunday, The arrival of the Rally Fighter and the Local Motors Team. AWESOMELY AWESOME – in fact going a little further – I am STOKED. Why? Because I am fascinated by the model: to be precise, as Danny de Vito might say; the business model, the blended reality model, the engineered sustainability model, the crowd-funded model, the co-created model, the designed model, and the passion model. As all these make Local Motors in my book – worthy of close examination. (the back story)

I found LM in an email exchange with a guy in Santa Barbara – which is another whole other back story, reached out to LM and they reached right back.

Found them intriguing, and then compelling. So for me its a real treat to meet them IRL. so here’s the low down.

What: SXSW Rally Fighter Meetup – Austin, TX

Where: Private Residence / LM Team Rental Abode

1515 Travis Heights Blvd, Austin 78704

When: Sunday, March 14th, 2010, 12pm – 3pm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/85593720@N00/2827812861

Today we challenge the authority of our world, media, organisations and even governments via a whole set of activities that can be networked and grassroots. It is done via co-creation, the forming of a networked communications world, that affects all aspects of society right down to how we teach our kids in school. Defined as, the common spirit of rebellion,

a distrust of all forms of established authority including parents, police, college administrations and government

However, I am fearful of where we go in this wonderland of networks, engagement and a new sense of self, community and possibility, without the correct framework, insight and understanding (here).

Will it be so as the old media infrastructure breaks down more curbs and regulations by vested interests are put in place to coerce and control these self organising networks? In Britain we see actually the reverse of a new an open society perhaps? One more akin to state control than liberty and the rights of the individual. For a 1000 year old democracy this has deep implications.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peopea/2831300762/in/set-72157602027437863/

In Digital Britain loses the plot, co-written with David Bollier, we expanded a view,

that Great Britain needs a larger, more robust vision for the future delivered by a different set of technological tools.  The dynamics of our culture that are now unfolding need to be better explained to the public, legislators, industry and the press.  The boundless energies and imagination of British citizens do not need to be directed and organized, but rather, unleashed.  If you want to build a ship, it has been said, don’t divide the work and give orders; teach people to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

The question is, will Britain help co-create and develop the new paradigms of business, learning, creativity, culture and citizenship?  Or will it recommit itself to backward-looking models while other nations capitalize on the novel, emergent dynamics of digital networks, tools and technologies?

It is important for British leaders to come to terms with some inexorable realities:  New gatekeepers will arise in the information distribution wars.  Grassroots collaborations will compete with conventional hierarchies.  For example, socially based innovation is already challenging corporate R&D models.

The new tools and technologies of cooperation are empowering individuals as never before.  They are challenging the centralized institutions of the 20th Century to be more responsive and transparent.  They are enabling value to be generated more efficiently, with broader participation and new types of collaboration, than in the past.  They are empowering individuals and self-organized communities in ways that many institutions prefer to ignore.

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Which then begs the question – who is in the best position to decide policy, centralised government or a network of organised and motivated communities, who understand the needs of its communities better than any government could? The end game is far from clear however. Yochai Benkler argues in his book The Wealth of Networks that individuals in a interconnected and network society can and do play a more significant role in culture, society and the economy. And I believe him. But, at what point does that movement end when the incumbent authority realises all this openess, sharing etc., mitigates and dilutes its own purpose and power? Or because of the huge financial pickle we are in, not created by the vast majority but in fact a minority (for example), any government is going cut, and hack at anything and everything using community empowerment, without having the faintest idea of how to deliver that. Recent excursions into that space have left me feeling a little, shall we say, underwhelmed. But here’s the rub, as Barbara Ehrenrich explains

Nor can the growing size of human societies explain the long hostiity of elites to their peoples festivals and estatic rituals a hostility that goes back at least to the city states of ancient Greece, which contained only a few tens of thousands of people.

It was not a concern about crowd size that lead to Pentheus’s crackdown on the maenads or Romes massacre of its Dionysian cult. The repression of Festivities and estatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of mean and occasionally women too, who saw in the a real and urgent threat. The aspect of “civilization” that is more hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism? both of which are fairly recent innovations ? But social hierarchy, which is far more ancient.

See outline (here) and (here) Our hope is that we can help people make sense of the challenges they face and how to deal with them. So that you don’t become a 40 acre site that was once the jewel in the crown of US industry or a city consigned to the dustbin of history.

Stark but true.

We had a great turn out last time. People came from: Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, US (all over) Russia, Greece, and Trinidad.

So why not come along and be part of the conversation.

I was very interested in what he had to say, and so we stayed in touch. Recently Jeff was in touch regarding his new book Bust the Silos – I have not read it, but I think the proposition is valuable and important. Its about how companies can -re-engineer themselves for the networked society. One of the big issues is as I have often argues that a networked approach to business, marketing, production, whatever is a different logic to a linear industrial one. And for me this is the heartland of what comes next and how we move forward.

And over the last ten years some of the innovation work SMLXL has undertaken for large organisations runs into the same old same old problem. The structure of organisations that are unable to cope with or accommodate a more blended, and, networked way of working. And the friction is palpable.

Its not about a bit of social media hundreds and thousands on top of your latte – though you do have to start somewhere. Howard Rheingold sums it up best for me,

Hasting and Saperstein have identified one of the most important and least-understood changes that people and organizations are undergoing today — the shift from disciplines, departments, and silos to systems, communities and networks.  No armchair theorist, the authors draw on their own extensive experience with organizational structural change to show not only how this change is coming about but, most importantly, how to initiate and nurture this vitally important kind of change in  your own organization.

So here it is: Tuesday, March 16 at 11:00 AM in Ballroom B

My @sxsw presentation that covers the themes and topics of The No Straight Lines Project, (video) so come along to cheer me along, heckle or profoundly disagree with my point of view.

Umar Haque is not a shy retiring wall flower and his recent post confirms that observation – but I don’t disagree with his perspective either.

And this is because in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital Perez writes, about technologies cluster and ultimately create a surge of change, this is what Haque is alluding to,

A technological revolution can be defined as a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products and industries, capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy and propelling a longer-term upsurge of development. It is a strongly interrelated constellation of technical innovations, generally including an important all-pervasive low cost input.

A great surge of development is defined here as the process by which a technological revolution and paradigm propagate across the economy, leading to structural changes in production, distribution, communication and consumption as well as to profound and qualitative changes in society.

And that is exactly whatt is happening. I think Haque’s findings are sound – and make sense. I agree that a No Straight Line approach to what we make, how we make it and who we make it with is; different, better, faster, more human, more sustainable, less costly than the heavy process silo approach to business that has dominate our world for the last 150 years of so. I explored these ideas at MIT (podcast) a few years back and with Nokia (video) and more recently at The Do Lectures.

But I also think this point of view is important, as expressed by William Powers and Perez,

New technologies do not come out of nowhere, they are human inventions in the first place and they succeed or not to the extent that they met fundamental human needs. So it is no accident that all of what we define as 2.0 is centered around, as Howard Rheningold says, human talents for cooperation. Not something that legacy industrial and media companies want to hear. The nature in this context is different, its multifaceted and blended. Where reputation, identity, “I” Needs “We”, craftsmanship, commerce etc., becomes the fuzzy logic so hated by bean counters and straight line thinkers.

Local Motors, TxtEagle and Grow VC (examples here)  are also examples of the re-engineering of business that a No Straight Line approach can deliver. So what happens when push economics becomes pull and networked economics, a report by the Aspen Institute, put together by David Bollier got my neurons humming in 2006.

Indeed as Jay Burton Rogers, founder of Local Motors says,

You cant be nimble if you tool big!!

Time to Reboot. We are today, as social philosopher Richard Sennett argues; seeking too recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time.  Indeed, Stephen Heppell considers the 21st century to herald the ‘learning age’. In the 20th century, he argues, we built big things (railways, universities) but the focus for the 21st century is ‘helping people to help each other’. In his view, “The old stuff won’t do any more”. And the sooner management wakes up to that fact, the better.

I posted about it (here).

So a couple of films made by our friends at Freedom Lab that outline how Gerd and I see the world.

This week just gone I posted on the Tahato Crisp Launch as a Multiplayer Mobile Game, or we could try Roku’s Reward

Here we have Chris Billich from Infinita, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Tokyo a while back when I was there on a mobile marketing learning journey, giving us his unique perception on Japan.

The presentation is insightful pointing to our near future as mobile our remote control for life.

Just reading an editorial in the analogue version of the Guardian.

On Wednesday, a Milanese court convicted three Google executives of violating privacy and gave them six-month suspended sentences. This is an analogue verdict in a digital age. If allowed to stand, it poses a serious threat to the development of the internet and to freedom of speech.

The reason being that a film had been uploaded to “their video-sharing website” of school boys teasing and bullying an autistic boy – despicable without a doubt. But, and its a very big but,

herein lies the regulatory rub. If someone used a telephone to blackmail or abuse someone else, they would be the ones guilty of crime, rather than BT or Ma Bell. Similarly, internet sites that feature user-generated content (including news sites such as the Guardian’s) have not generally been held liable for content as long as they dealt with complaints of objectionable or libellous content reasonably quickly. This is the principle that the Italian verdict overturns, with worrying implications for freedom of speech.

These are very important issues, because there are some that would welcome the opportunity to bash, and even more crush freedom of expression. Coming soon is the time when the negotiation of what type of world we can expect to live in comes centre stage as legal fights and debates unfold, utopianism replaced by dark cynicism, or the cruel hand of a court applied like a hammer into sensitive issues.

As John Naughton alluded today,

The “google 3″ are still incarcerated, but Silvio Berlusconi remains at large.

You can view the release dates (here) And its fabulous.