Envisioning one single world network

By

A funny post on the KM4Dev network, which suggested that "maybe all these social community sites could be merged into one called, say, MyFlickeringFace", caught my attention today.

In fact, considerations regarding a global meta-network, which consolidates all existing social networking platforms, are already under way. And the big IT players like Microsft, Google, etc. are very eager to get the lead in this. There was an interesting article in SPIEGEL Online this week (unfortunately only in German) which tries to grasp what's happening there at the moment.

For me as an indivdual user this is very ambivalent. One one hand, I hate to have to maintain all these different applications and accounts in parallel (Private email, Google, del.icio.us, facebook, xing, skype, youtube, flickr and many more specialised portals and communities) and desperately long for a one-stop shop where several (or all) of the above services are integrated and ALL the people I want to liaise with can be found. Competition among service providers in this regard seems counterproductive for the user, as he always has to maintain several incomplete networks in parallel and invite people from one network also in the other etc. One part of me therefore says we all should only have one global network, in which we can chose those applications and subgroups which we need.

However, the other part of me is fully aware that - as the examples of Microsoft and Google shows - service provider monopolies are to be avoided! One single global network fully controlled by a business player is a horror scenario with regard to privacy, data security and freedom of expression, and includes the severe danger of misuse for political or business objectives.

I really can't think of a satisfying solution for this. Can anybody else? Maybe a global standard for social networking applications is necessary. But then the question remains: What kind of administrative service is trustworthy enough to maintain and store the data of connected users? And what mechanisms can be put in place to effectively prevent the exploitation of user profiles by retrieving and connecting data from all the different applications in this unified network?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going Back to Dave Snowden’s Seven KM Principles

By
Image
In June this year I attended the International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM) 2022 which conveniently took place in Potsdam, right around the corner of my current home base Berlin. One of the highlights was the key note speech of David Snowden . David is of course always a treat to listen to, but in his speech intro, he once again summarized so succinctly some of the key aspects of what KM is all about, that I wanted to re-state them for myself. So here are his gold nuggets: 1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted The sharing of knowledge is inherently a human behavior. Yet it only happens when we are intrinsically invested in the positive impact that the sharing of our knowledge has on the receiving end (because we want to help, because we get nice feedback, because we want to build relationship, because it might help ourselves in the future, etc.). If we are told by someone else that we must share a particular knowledge, there is automatically a
Read more

The “Duh-test”, or what is not a lesson learned

By
I was recently reviewing a number of texts which my organization collected from past projects and initiatives (some through an internal mandatory monitoring tool, others gathered as part of After Action Reviews or Lessons Learned Papers), which all meant to capture ‘lessons learned’ from specific experiences. And while these texts were not wrong per se, I realized that there seems to be a fundamental misconception what constitutes a good lesson, and what doesn’t. Here are a few typical examples of what we often collect as part of such lessons learned exercises: “Ensure that the [Team] Manager has excellent leadership, project and team management skills, understanding of programming and experience working in [the subject matter].” “Project outputs must be compatible towards project goals. Throughout the project there is a need for careful identification of project goals and outputs to ensure that they are compatible with each other. This can be only ensured through a consultativ
Read more

Why Bitcoin is Integral Money

By
By Johannes Schunter What makes something integral? The term ‘integral’ refers to a worldview in the Spiral Dynamics (SD) model (developed by Don Beck, Chris Cowan and Ken Wilber based on the work of Clare Graves) that looks at various historic ways of seeing the world as each holding an important piece of the puzzle without being sufficient on their own. The tribal worldview thinks primarily in heroic win/lose power relations, the traditional worldview champions collective rules and absolute truth, the modern worldview pursues rational science, competition and personal success, and the post-modern worldview values community, global diversity and inclusion. An integral mindset then tries to integrate the strengths from each of these worldviews into an overarching and balanced whole. To learn more about what the Spiral Dynamics model is about, this website is a good start . In the following, I argue that as far as monetary technologies, financial assets or currencies are concerned,
Read more