Grassroots Evaluation of Intellectual Capital of Nations
13-Jan-04
IC of nations is a popular essay topic this week with the McMaster World Congress awarding a student prize for best ICN paper. As a lateral approach, I have always preferred to believe that nations were the communal property of the people ( like this first para says )
So my question in this thread to you is: how can we use interactive technology to start the world’s biggest conversation on what people of nations or any place want to be differentiated most in their culture, their educational curricula, their infrastructures, their natural resources, the transparency of their communications systems and identities?
This seems a particularly relevant time as 25 countries converge for the first time in a Union as well as maintaining their diversities . I assume too that in any significant Network of Excellence sponsored by the EU every nation should have a chair in sharing openly in the progressing of excellence, whether that chair is participative 24/7 or has equal rights to apply any produce. Am I democratically correct to make a transparency assumption of this kind?
Here are some ideas I have heard of including a few that I have set in play as a professional opinion researcher and student of network economics and societies since 1984 ):
The Game of Sweden – I gather about half a million people participated in this survey of what they saw as the nation’s particular greatness for the future ( tell me if you have a bookmark reference)
As a foreigner, I love this nation – data collection takes space here in the form of postcard thank you to peoples of 196 nations visited
Stakeholder quiz : which of the constituencies on this family tree do you feel your nation should and shouldn’t give priority identification with? Are the other constituencies you feel we’ve omitted
What networks of excellence in knowledge or other areas most important in a networking age have global or local headquarters in your region? (eg the E100 KM network of excellence is coordinated through a place juts North of Boston, Mass.) What other practice or social cultural understanding are you most proud of being researched in your region. 25 countries have begun reporting from this EU gateway staging post.
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- Author:
- Chris Macrae
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 13-Jan-04
- Categories:
- Knowledge Angels
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Visions of ICN of Russia
I had prepared a few more positive ICN reports but I was reminded by some deeply voiced questions from people in Russia, that ICN also provides the conversational possibility to discuss visions we'd love to see...
Let me try to speak out for the Russia I dream of seeing...
I see Russia as the greatest people in need of an open constitution which establishes minimum system of law and maximum open participation in governance and just everyday community conversation. The trouble is its easier for a whole country to align its future around a Declaration of Independence http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html when expelling foreigners like Imperialist Brits than reconciling a system that defeated a lot of the people's greatest spirits and trust and innovative endeavours and cultural transparency from within
I think Russia needs to invite cultural exchanges with everywhere in the world. I don’t know at what level this is permitted. Could towns and cities across Russia start twinning themselves with foreign places by choosing something culturally passionate in common? Or would such grassroots initiatives get trampled (human ideas also need right timing and sitting 12 miles from the White House I'm too far from the pulse of Russia's grassroots). I think both inside and outside of Russia there is a legacy of being scared for people to relate openly with people, without the apparatus of nations getting in the line of fear or fire. (System thinkers can map how this spins terror). I would be delighted to be told a lot of the above is a historic and now erroneous perception.
Sincerely
Chris Macrae
Open the third spaces every way we can
Eg1 http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/ jan16 entry on 3rd space
Eg 2 discuss why openness is the new key to sustaining development of any nation or place http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=121706&d=1&h=417&f=418&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y
Eg 3 world's biggest conversation - now what could it be? http://www.valuetrue.com/home/gallery.cfm
ICN of India
Consider how the ICN of India is suddenly networking together like magic: in Bangladore you have the world’s most cost-effective logical outsourcing virtual community- speaking english, enough people highly educated in maths and computer logics, and well able to serve 24/7 service needs of huge sectors like global finance and insurance (1)
Perhaps this is the kind of talent mix that could turn India from one of the region’s tortoises in the last quarter of 20th Century to a fast sustainable developer if the lessons of what makes Bangladore can be transferred across other regions of India.
I am quite optimistic because web sites out of India seem to me well above the world norm for focusing on important communal conversations rather than trivia. And as a Brit who is the first to admit that the old Empire left India with an unfair legacy in many ways, I would be one of the first to rejoice if India’s broad familiarity with the English language turned out to be a 21st C blessing for these peoples of great diversity and rich educational/cultural heritages.
ICN of FINLAND
Finland seems to me to be almost everything that I could look for first as a modern day best case of ICN.
Finland’s people didn’t enjoy the impact of a globally known world company prior to Nokia’s existence and for this reason many are proud of the company. Conversely the company is modest enough to see that the people of Finland have become heavily dependent on its capability as a relentless learning organisation, And the government of Finland openly declares as its main duty
http://www2.eduskunta.fi/fakta/edustaja/ecprd/KM_Finnish_Parliament.pdf the lifetimes rights of all the people to learn in ways that will maximise their productive foci
For sure, mobile connecting people is almost a perfect industry sector – deep enough to provide expansion of future trade for long as the networking age blossoms, whilst not an industry whose scale and tangibles ultimately can be bought out by a big nation with more financial capital, partly because its innovations network into so many different other industries. At the same time, surely this means that (say) 15 years ago, any one of a hundred nations could have won mobile leadership, but Finland DID. Whence we have some confirmation that whatever Finland’s architecture of ICN was, it was best in world in the context of mobile connecting people.
I’d also hazard a guess that today no country can overtake the people of Finland and Nokia unless they get very arrogant or make huge mistakes with the networking criss-cross of industry leads that they have earned. This can take quite surprising turns. For example who would have though that such a faraway (and climate challenging country) would become a favourite conference destination. Yet that is what Espoo & the convention centre Dipoli have become for all in learning industries.
Dipoli http://www.dipoli.hut.fi/kongressipalvelut/english/index.html
Espoo http://english.espoo.fi/xsl_etusivu.asp?path=5731
Local ICNs of Networked World
I have worked in over 30 countries – in the old days I would have called my competence public opinion polling. That was a time when the founders of many large organisations cared enough about public opinion to openly change strategy around the public’s value demands and environmental challenges. In such a climate for market research, after hundreds of benchmarkable projects, you intuit patterns. For example: a feeling for when are industry sectors wide open for change and when is all progress likely to be narrowly head for head.
On the basis of this career experience, I can tell you my intuition says: countries will never have such an open opportunity to make progress for all their peoples as they have in the next decade or so. This is the paradigm shift that internetworking has been building up to, something I have been tracking with economists and system futurists like my father since 1984.
But there is a catch. Where nations make the greatest progress for their people , the biggest organisations both governments and corporates will need more transparency, more competence to collaborate as well as compete. The new innovation competence of networking technology gives advantage to open collaborators and penalises those who compete or who protect stuff ‘defensively’ behind closed doors. I will never be one with great political competences but I suspect that politicians in successful countries will need to give up the divides between left and right as increasingly meaningless if we are seeking to multiply value for all our people. And with key strategies they will need structures that permit long-term consistency; help invest in industries that match the nations ICN and stage of development; governments should take care of the lifelong retraining if there are sectors that were once great in the country but are not its future relative advantage.
In my next 3 posts, I will discuss my understanding of 3 early success stories. By all means take them as inexpert conversational paradigms to polish. But surely nobody will contest that 3 countries that have been buzzing a lot in the fist decades of a globally networked age appear to be Finland, China, and recently India. All with very different distinctive ICN advantages. I see this as good news because if every nation’s ICN needs to be distinct to make progress for its people, nations need no longer believe they are playing a zero-sum game. Zero-sum mentality in strategy of nations is disastrous- it leads I believe to wars unless you can sure me a mathematical model that shows otherwise. And wars (prevention of worldwide ones begun in European lands) are the foundation reason for EU.
three cheers for Dubai
"If Dubai can become a hub of corporate social responsibility, led by companies that are already here, it will make this city, this emirate, an even more attractive investment destination for even more businesses."
Salem Bin Dasmal, Deputy Director General, DDIA, UAE
Its absolutely the time that regions seek responsible companies and levy extra taxes on those that are not transparent.
http://www.iirme.com/csr first ever Middle East Corporate Social Responsibility Summit, to be held in Dubai from 25-26 April 2004.
related links:
what youth knows http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=122836
what australia knows http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=114695&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y
what simpol knows http://www.simpol.org
what gan-net knows http://www.gan-net.net/projects/current.html
what open space knows http://www.practiceofpeace.com