organizational

It was this early open source approach that arguably fostered 500 years of Islamic scholarship in important fields like medicine, astronomy, lexicography, literature and science.

In contrast, European data was stored in monasteries and did not foster easy knowledge transfer. As Gibbon wrote in the ‘Decline and fall of the Roman empire’ the ‘age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years’ and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals?

I believe in the power of mass collaboration.

I believe that as James Surowiecki says the many are smarter than the few.

I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever.

I said that I don’t believe the post-bureaucratic age argument. It’s just old thinking, laissez faire ideas with a new badge.

The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.

The irony that laying claim to the ownership of a policy on open source was lost to the poor researcher who had spent a day dissecting the speech. He’d been able to do so easily because it was freely available on my blog, a simple tool used for communicating information quickly and at nearly zero cost without the requirement to charge for access.

The point is, who cares? It doesn’t matter who has the ideas. It’s what you do with them and how you improve on them that counts.

It's here, at street level, where the city's next generation of community engagement and leadership is taking shape. "There is a new model," says Cecelia Thompson, executive director of the Guilford Green Foundation, which serves the lesbian, gay and transgender community, gesturing to a clutch of fellow 20- and 30-somethings. "This is the model sitting around the table."

Just as the city's economy is undergoing transformation, so too is Greensboro's leadership and how things get done

The new model emerging is one of consensus, in which many people — community activists, young professionals, the newly wealthy — work in collaboration.

John Alexander, who until recently ran the internationally renowned Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, calls this style "responsibility without authority."

While consensus-building is far more difficult than simply making a command decision, it ultimately makes for a more prosperous community

Even more interesting is that we live in a time where we find at least three generations in the workforce who all have different values and expectations for their jobs. Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in this environment will be challenging to put it mildly.

While it’s impossible to discount the findings of the Forrester report, a couple of points need to be carefully considered before taking it as gospel. The first is that Forrester reports are generally funded by enterprise vendors like Microsoft and IBM, which can lead to encouraging organizations to look to these vendors first for product selection — examine all your possibilities before assuming that an “enterprise suite” is truly the best option for your needs

As usual, IBM is absolutely right in its observations, but eons late to the dance in Internet 2.0 terms. At this point, IBM is telling us that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way around.

And IBM will never catch up. I've said this before. All IBM will ever do is bolt collaboration tools onto their preexisting application suites--a clunky approach for which absolutely no one will have patience.

What surprises me about Swisher and Perez is that they seem to buy into the idea that enterprise users will wait for the grumpy IT departments. Swisher writes:

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount and startups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM and Microsoft.

Puleease! Big copycats like IBM and Microsoft have been pouring out the same old blather about security and scaling while line-of-business chiefs are turning to their young hires and saying, "hey, how much is of those open source wiki things going to run me, and how fast can we set it up?"

4. Choose your friends carefully

Well, that’s just good advice, period. But Wollman stresses it in regard to LinkedIn. “Whereas rampant friending is the norm for Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn users should use discretion in building a network of colleagues they know and trust.” (The word “friending” threatens to give me an aneurysm, but I won’t edit it out. Don’t want to do any enemy-ing.)