“Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild”
Conenza is passionate about business social networking and loves this article by Don Tapscott, “Top 10 Themes from 2010 Davos”. Below are a few highlights that we have pulled from the article that relate to corporate social networking:
The World Economic Forum has wrapped up and the small, Swiss town of Davos has been returned to the skiers. Among top concerns at the World Economic Forum: fix the global economy, sort out executive pay, create sustainability, and enhance collaboration
The state of the world is not good.
The theme of Davos was “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild,” which may have sounded a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.
Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated that unemployment in the world jumped by 50 million during the recession, and that the number of working poor increased by 200 million.
Everywhere new collaborative models are emerging to solve global problems.
Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake isn’t just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in nontraditional ways, donating time, money, goods, and services via new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Social media have become the preeminent tools to connect people around the world, empowering them to become active participants in relief efforts.
There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes—the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.
It turns out that the Internet does change everything.
The much-discredited phrase from the dot-com period is not just geek speak. The Internet and social networks were central to many discussions here. The digital age seems to be coming of age.
I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. A few minutes into it, we solicited questions from Facebook. In the first two minutes, 6,000 questions appeared.
New business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society. I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging—changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles, too.
I was also a panelist at a private session asking the provocative question: “Will social networks replace the nation state?” Of course the answer is no, but it’s significant that we can ask the question. If Facebook were a country, it would be more populous than Russia. Nation states have based their authority on control of individual identity, association, and currency within territorial boundaries. Now social networks operating across geographical frontiers have the potential to offer all these things. They also offer the potential for power divorced from traditional political systems. What are the prerequisites for the emergence of the first digital nation-state?