A thread running through the topic is the importance of play and creativity in solving the problems of the world. This isn’t hyperbole — the discussion really looked at the largest issues in the world.

From Jane McGonigal: the idea that in playing games, we are using our best version of ourselves; the mindpower that can be harnessed in playing games to make the world a better place.

Her goal: to make it as easy to save the world in real life, as it is in online games. And she’s not joking. If we could increase our game playing time from its current 3 billion hours a week to 21 billion hours a week, the world would be different place.

I look at gaming in a new light.

From Michael Wesch, social anthropologist from K-State: Good questions and illustrations of the world on fire — and brilliant insights on the changes technology offers. We can’t live the next 100 years like the last.

Media uses us as much as we use it; and there is no opting out. Media mediates relationships, when media changes, relationships change — including the structure of our culture.

Technology in our hands creates new potential. Question is how will we use it? How will it change us? Wesch articulates the razor’s edge between a hopeful future and a more ominous one with new openness and freedom, transparency, mass participation vs. the potential for more survelliance and control, deception, mass distraction.

His goal is to move his students from being knowlegeable to knowledge-able. He explains we need (and need to teach) skills to find, sort, analyze, organize and create knowledge.

He told the story of when the world was on fire. All the animals running to escape, but it was impossible — the fires were raging and soon they were trapped.

One little bird had an idea. The little bird flew to the stream and picked up a drop of water in its beak, flew back to the fire and dropped the water. And again, and again, and again.

What are you doing little bird? The best I can.

The heroics inspired the rest of the creatures (or variously, the gods) who joined in to save the day and put out the fire, by working together in the example of the littlest bird.

From Francis Cholle:  We need a higher level of creativity to solve sustainability questions. Creativity will be the the No. 1 leadership competency in the future.We need to play more to become more creative — play eludes our analytical minds. Our analytical minds can be a handicap to creativity.

The most important skills to master:

• Think holistically; there’s more to consider than the P&L
• Think paradoxically
• Listen for the unusual. Or, stop thinking and start feeling.
• Lead by influence, not by control

Plenty to ponder.  Thanks, TEDxKC.

It’s happened. (Actually, it had already been described in a YouTube video from about a year ago, once again demonstrating that there are no new ideas — everything already exists on the internet. Sigh.)

The MIT Technology Review story explains how this new application combines facial recognition, database lookup and cloud computing, with augmented reality.

It’s a little creepy and raises potential issues about invasion of privacy and misuse (police, CIA, insurance companies?). The Recognizr, described in the article, takes the issue seriously and offers its service as an opt-in only, which means it can only recognize you if you’ve agreed to be recogized.

This one is going to be interesting to watch. How long before this technology shows up in a spy thriller movie? My bet — less than a year.

* * *

At the beginning of the year, I told the story of my sister’s travels from Kansas City to Columbus and the extraordinary care she received from Southwest Airlines. (“Travel Vignette on Caring“)

There’s a little bit of followup, unremarkable except that it proves, once again, that there are real people at Southwest Airlines, and they are willing to act like real people. I’m impressed, again.

After I wrote the story, my brother took the step of alerting Southwest to the post.  He got a response:

Dear John,

Thank you for your e-mail. I was thrilled to learn about your sister’s experience when she traveled with us to Columbus on January 2. We truly appreciate your family’s kind words of our airline, and we hope to welcome you all onboard a Southwest flight very soon!

Sincerely,

Lindsay, Southwest Airlines

The reminder I takeaway from this is about the power of human interaction.

Just being willing to be human — to listen, to respond, especially in a meaningful way with empathy, gratitude, care — shouldn’t be an extraordinary occurrence.

But we’ve become so accustomed to being treated as just a wallet, a sale, that when we’re treated with respect it becomes an outstanding event.

So, kudos to Southwest Airlines. Again, I’m impressed and inspired by the people there. Thanks for modeling the way it can be.

I heard a too-brief presentation recently from Bob Johansen, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future. First off, he described his task as a futurist: to offer a plausible forecast in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. VUCO world, for short.

Then he offered a secret on how he does his job: Start by looking farther out ahead, and then work your way back to the near-future. He said things are much clearer farther out, say 20 years in the future, and much harder to specify one to three years in the future. Besides, he says his role as a forecaster is not to predict, but to provoke.

He described several future scenarios that appear certain to him — for example, connectedness will increase in importance, as wireless communications melds with sensors connected to everything. He gave a convincing argument by showing how Helsinki and Tokyo are using the combination today: you can use a cell phone to scan bar codes on products on grocery shelves, and you’ll get a read-out of consumer ratings on the product. You pick your shampoo based on its environmental, health or societal rating, whatever matters most to you.

The best sound bite of his talk (in my view) was his proclamation: The word “consumer” is obsolete. It’s almost an insult to be called a consumer.

Every person is connected in a social network, and technology has amplified those networks. It’s a participatory culture. Johansen noted that the Institute for the Future embraces this participatory and open-source culture, and uses crowd-sourcing techniques to solicit input to its forecasts. (See Open Source World and other related posts on openness.)

Back to the insult of being a “consumer.”  Johansen argued that a coming trend favors self-identification as “makers” — people who are actively contributing to society, in whatever form fits, whether it’s cooking dinner or writing a novel or woodworking. Makers are contributing, active, participating.

He has tracked the rise of the Maker movement, noting Maker Faires springing up to celebrate creativity vs. consumerism, including in the Bay Area (of course!), Austin and around the world. (Should we do one in Kansas City?)

I think he’s on to something here.

I think there is a new awareness about the negative components of consumerism.  Bill Moyers had a brilliant conversation with Andrew Bacevich on this topic almost a year ago, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.  (Among the best parts: his description of America as an “empire of consumption.”) You can find it here.

A common thread in both theses is the participation of the individual in the SOLUTION.

The future  isn’t going to come from an establishment. Nobody trusts corporations or government to create the future. No, it’s up to us.

Johansen had a sticker on his laptop that says it all: I am making the future.

I like it.

I am making the future.

More from Bob Johansen here: Bob Johansen – Book Section Brief from Institute for the Future.

1. Newsmap:  It’s a beta application that takes the continuously changing Google Newsfeed and visually displays the top stories, categorized by color. It can be filtered for a particular country and by category, like business or entertainment. Click on any headline and you can get to the story and understand it’s relative ranking in importance.  And you can customize the page for your own interests. Did I mention it operates in real time, changing as the news is updated?

It’s stunning.

Kudos to Marcos Weskamp who describes himself as: “a Design Engineer who has a deep interest in playing with and visualizing lots of data. He is a self-taught technologist who constantly investigates the fields of Interaction Design and Information Visualization.”

2. Prototype Experience. This is from Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy, who writes about the coming age of the Social Web, where personal information freely published is integrated into content, marketing and advertising producing a social context.

The example here promotes a new video game. What’s fascinating is that it pulls your own information from Facebook and populates the video game trailer with your photos, your friends, your quotes, your information. It puts YOU in the game.

Brilliant.

If you click on the Prototype Experience link, you can try it yourself. You have to log in to Facebook or give it permission to get your information, and it takes a little bit of time.  It’s fascinating.

OK, I know I said only two but while I’m at it, I thought I’d add another one that I like.

3. Monitter.

This is yet another Twitter tool, but I like it because it is so easy and addictive. At the website, you are presented with a three-column view similiar to the appearance of TweetDeck.  The columns will follow Tweets based on location or topic.

So it becomes an easy way to see what’s happening in Kansas City.  Or to follow a company, or a topic.  I’ve been watching the #IranElection feed here.

Nothing really earthshaking about this tool, but it is easy to use and hard to stop watching.

OK, enough. Back to work!

Last week’s New York Times Magazine Architecture Issue describes the infrastructure of our web technology beautifully — see Datatecture by Tom Vanderbilt. As he puts it: “Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.”

His article illustrates the underpinnings of the web and its many services: data centers in enormous warehouses, rows of high-power giant Caterpillar generators, miles of cabling between tens of thousands of servers, redundant network feeds. Then there’s the meta-infrastructure: air conditioning to keep the machines at optimal temperature, security cameras and sensors everywhere, plenty of electricity and backup batteries.

The article reminded me of any of a dozen data centers I’ve seen — and forgotten. I don’t think about all that infrastructure. Instead, I just Tweet, update Facebook/MySpace pages, participate in meet-ups, publish invitations, email, text, IM, upload and geotag photos and videos, build LinkedIn networks, rate Digg/Delicious/StumbleUpon sites, share bookmarks, star favorites, blog, collaborate on wikis, engage virtually in Second Life, podcast, poll, videoblog and soon, Wave continuously. Whew!

In all that technologically enabled activity, I wonder if sometimes we forget what’s at the heart of it all.

Communicating.

Telling a story. Sharing information. Providing news. Questioning/Answering. Selling a service. Defining a brand. Helping a customer. Offering feedback. Laughing. Pondering. Agitating. Persuading. Provoking. Encouraging. Challenging. Sometimes listening, sometimes striking a light in the darkness. All to make a connection with another human.

As communicators, all this infrastructure and the untold applications are there for us.

In my perspective, it’s a little humbling and a lot exciting. It’s why I care about technology, why I love experimenting with and learning it all — it’s all about making connections and communicating in new ways. What could be more fun?

(Cross posted on KCIABC Technology site.)

The one thing a business must have is customers.  And today’s customer is a lot like today’s citizen journalist.  Your customer:

• Cares. The Customer cared enough to give you money for your service or product.
• Has a voice.  The Customer can spread stories about the great or poor experience.
• Can amplify the story. Here’s where Social Media changes the traditional interaction between buyer and sell — and the outcome. Customers have always had a voice, but now Customers can easily form spontaneous organizations with others anywhere. Instead of just talking to a neighbor or coworkers, your Customer today can Twitter, launch a blog, publish ratings and build a Facebook community about the experience, etc.

So what?

Here’s a great example from November: The Motrin ad.

It ticked off some blogging moms who wrote about it — here’s the original post.  Next a Twitter army spontaneously formed and quickly spiraled into a movement, including a campaign on Facebook to boycott Motrin.  It spawned parodies and hit mainstream media and generated lots of angry customers for Motrin.  Motrin responded but even a big company with all its resources and smarts didn’t get it exactly right.

Need more examples? How about SciFi — er, SyFy? Or Tropicana’s new labeling?

Being a Customer today is a participatory experience — another example of mass collaboration. As a business, you can listen and engage, even empower your customers and employees to speak for you. After all, they are already.

Why not participate?

Sure, for a business, it’s a change and it can be disruptive — but probably more disruptive if you don’t.

To be successful, you’ll also have to balance top-down hierarchy with participatory technology, and maybe rethink your perspectives on control vs. freedom.  You’ll want to relinquish any belief that you know where the good ideas come from or that you know all the good ideas, and replace that with a willingness to listen, learn and respect the individuals who care enough to engage with you.  Sure, it can be messy (remember Motrin?) — but also authentic and powerful and rewarding to the business.

There are other, more tangible and practical things you’ll want to do too.

• Do an audit — what’s the marketplace really saying about you right now? What’s happening with your competitors here, too? (Although, again, this one  starts with the soft skill of listening.)
• Define your strategy. Know what you want to accomplish.
• You might need policies on the changes and on managing risk. (Like email, you have some ownership in tracking, auditing, defining what’s unacceptable, storage, privacy, etc.) Don’t lose sight of the collaborative nature of social media, use the culture to help with self-policing and honest engagement.
• Engage slowly.  Don’t lose sight of the need for authenticity — don’t let corporate-speak take over.  Be real.
• Over time, engage in full.  Your employees speak for you, so do your customers. You initiate conversations, invite feedback and give something back to those individuals who care enough to engage with you.  Build relationships.
• Over time, build this process into your standards and culture.

It’s your community, and it’s already there. It’s up to you to join in.

UPDATE:  Here’s a nice summary from the LA Times, incorporating some other incidents (Amazon, CNN, Dominos) and describing the need for rapid response.