Collaborative Age value production system | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Today, the freelancing market is without borders. Did you realize it?

Today, for relatively simple services (graphic design, translation, virtual assistant, all sorts of website development etc) that can almost be called commodity services, the market is… worldwide. You can hire easily, from your desk, a service provider at the end of the world, North America, India or South America.. it does not really matter. Did you realize it?

Not convinced? Visit Elance or Freelance.com to see how those platforms propose to connect buyers and service providers, and what are all the possible jobs that can be done. Like E-Bay, these companies provide a platform that secures transactions, and they allow to examine the track record of buyers and sellers and the evaluations by previous users. Service providers can also show some samples of their work.

Those platforms for e-freelancing started typically in the early 2000s. Elance mentions a 100% increase of activity in this market in the last year and foresees another doubling in 2012. The overall market can be estimated to be far more than 500M$ in 2011, and will thus pass the billion $ mark in 2012.

Moreover, these services allow talented artists and individuals from emerging countries to take part to the worldwide market and benefit directly from the economy. Clearly that puts also pressure on the prices that can be proposed by service providers from developed countries. This is a fact today: for commodity services, the market is worldwide and that won’t change. The only way to charge higher prices is differentiation and creating longer term, emotional connection with the buyer. And career or business development can also be considered from home, using only internet to sell your services!

I remember how in Europe, a proposed regulation by the European Commission to allow the liberalization of services across borders was a big political issue in the middle of the last decade. Well, it looks that this debate has been made completely obsolete by the Fourth Revolution, at least for those services that don’t need physical work or presence.

In the next post I will describe my experience in using Elance, recruiting a… Argentinian (!) designer to produce the characters I needed for my next book, “Project Soft Power”.

Stay tuned! The Fourth Revolution has not finished to astonish you!

Kaggle.com is still missing the point of Crowd-Innovation – unleashing the Value of the Fourth Revolution

Did you hear about Kaggle.com? It is one of the most innovative startups of 2011 according to Business Insider. Agreed, it is an improvement on the model of “Open Innovation” developped by Innocentive or Ninesigma, but unfortunately it still misses the point of collaborative innovation, or Crowd-Innovation.

Kaggle is bringing together scientists (mainly data-scientists) to participate in collaborative competitions to solve difficult problems. It boasts a network of 17,000 PhD-level people.

Heritage Health Prize on Kaggle — Are you ready to contribute on Kaggle.com?

Have a look at their sites and the different possible competitions. The most well known is the “Heritage Health Prize” with a prize of 3 million US$: Can you predict who will turn up at the hospital next year based on people’s medical history / historical claims data?

Of course that’s the outlier; most competitions have a prize of 10,000$ or less, and are mainly rewarded by community recognition among the world’s best data-crunchers, or free trips or the ability to present in a well-known conference. You can help to improve prediction of insurance claims, rating of pictures, or help NASA bring evidence of dark matter!

It appears that Kaggle brings something more than Innocentive or Ninesigma, who also bring together the problems of large companies and a worldwide network of passionate problem solvers. Kaggle develops the concept of competition where people can see the result of others in real time, which is a form of deep motivation. Yet Kaggle still stops short of where the power of the Collaborative Age lies: collaboration between participants.

The right format of “Open Innovation” is still to mature. Will it be through companies, foundations, non-profits? How is real time feedback given about the performance of other competitors? How can we develop a spirit of true collaboration between the participants above and beyond competition, a tight community to solve the hardest problems?

The value of “Open Innovation” needs to be unleashed completely. Actually “Open Innovation” needs to be transformed into “Crowd-Innovation” because it is just that we want to achieve: getting people to collaborate meaningfully on a problem they are passionate about.

What will become of our Industrial-Age huge and rigid research organizations? They’ll have to open to the crowd or die.

Even Innocentive, Ninesigma and even Kaggle still need to go one step further or they will struggle to continue. Who will find the right concept, allowing cooperation between participants to develop?

How can we push social media more quickly in the organization?

There have been a few interesting and controversial posts in the past few months about the topic of the adoption of social media in the organization.

Clay Shirky the famous social media expert (“Here comes everybody: the power of social media in organizations“, and “Cognitive surplus: how technology makes consumers into collaborators“) asserts in this blog post that “social networking will change business like PC, laptop, email” that it will come naturally in the organizations. Like email was a strange concept in the middle of the 1990’s we just need to let the IT departments figure out how to deploy them.

On the other hand, this HBR post on “the six attitudes leaders take toward social media” paint a less rosy picture, although they agree that there is progressive (slow) trend toward adoption.

Finally, in November CapGemini announced it would get rid of their internal email and use some sort of an internal social networking tool instead. That’s a definite adoption of social networking internally.

I see a trend where companies will first develop internal social networking tools. It’s less scary. This will greatly enhance internal global communication and demonstrate the power of social networks in terms of effectiveness.

Yet the main value will be when stakeholders and customers can be enrolled in a conversation spanning beyond the limits of the organization. Only when organizations will have the guts to move into this realm will they fully benefit of the value of the Fourth Revolution. And not many will do it. I guess that we’ll see a few of them try in 2012. Stay tuned!

What can we learn from Jonathan’s Starbucks card experiment?

Did you hear about Jonathan’s starbucks card experiment?

It’s quite a simple experiment with deep learning in crowdfunding.

Jonathan made his starbucks card available to anyone on the internet. Anyone could buy a coffee with it. And anyone could put some money on it.

Although it was not intended to be that, the experiment ended up experimenting whether people would refill the card by how much. The experiment is detailed in this post on O’Reilly: “Jonathan’s card: lessons from a social experiment”.

Guess what happened?

It became a social media event, using a twitter account that broadcast the card’s balance live.

Here’s an extract of the card balance curve.

See, people almost never refill before it goes to zero. But then they refill with a large amount.

Would we tend to use FREE until there is no more, but then be generous as we are in fact participating to a social event?

This pattern is often identical when people that know each other share a single resource and need to refill sometimes. What is astonishing here is that it happened with people who did not know each other. Yet they must have had a sufficiently strong emotional connection through their participation to the social network.

It just shows that communities that are emotionally connected over social networks behave like communities that are face-to-face in real life. Over considerable distances, community behavior develops. Social networks really break the distance factor!

The real story of K.E.E.N.’s motivation

The K.E.E.N. is not anymore motivated by money. She wants to have fun, to bring something to the world, to prove herself.

One of the best stories I found is the story of the development of Apple’s graphing calculator.

Apple's graphing application credits — Apple's graphing calculation application

Or, how two engineers, against all odds, against Apple itself, have worked hidden for a number of months in Apple’s offices, unpaid, to create a great product.

What was their motivation? Let’s use Daniel Pink’s Drive book framework:

Autonomy: they did what they wanted to do, deciding by themselves what they would do and how
Mastery: this project allowed them to show how good they were in programming
Purpose: they wanted to create a product so great people computers could not ship without it

Why did they succeed? They were supported by the informal organization; they had a tribe of supporters; their enthusiasm and sense of purpose did communicate to others.

While this was all developed against the will of Apple’s managers, they were clever enough to see the interest when the product finally came out. That would certainly not happen in many organizations!

When I continue to see large organizations that think that they can retain and motivate people just by giving them money (or, the expectation of getting more money sometime in the future), I just see a total misunderstanding of the world they are living in.

The K.E.E.N. is not any more motivated by carrot and stick. She is motivated by challenge, a deep sense of purpose and her community. When will the standards of organization leadership change to accommodate this new reality?

How Eric Schmidt (Google) was almost right, but not quite

“Every day we produce as much content as was produced by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003” [Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google] (quote from Seth Godin’s book ‘we are all weird‘)

Actually this quote is wrong. This content is not only produced. It is published. And that’s what makes the difference.

Think about it.

Think about that incredible amount of information at our fingerprints.

And think about how easy it is today to access and find any kind of information from anywhere in the world.

Latest stats from Facebook: more than 250 million photos uploaded every day, 800 million users, half of which connect every day. Twitter: 300 million tweets are sent every single day. There are millions of blogs. 135 million professionals on LinkedIn.

“Every day we produce as much content as was published by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003″

And you’re still not a believer of the Fourth Revolution?

How the current financial turmoil is a positive indicator of the Fourth Revolution

The financial world is going through a storm. The balance of economy is shifting. What was not a problem before (sovereign debt) is a problem now. Developed economies are in turmoil. Manufacturing and utility companies suffer. Stock markets undergo shock after shock. Still, the companies that embody the Fourth Revolution, those companies of the internet, do not seem to suffer. They continue to grow.

What happens?

An interesting similar situation happened in the 19th century when the development of railroad redefined the economy and value chain for many products. Many startups were created, that contributed to a fantastic development of the railroad network.

And the stock market suffered shock after shock as the economy adjusted to the new, tremendous value brought by speedy transportation. There were regular crisis, there were regular financial panics, in all developed countries like the US, UK or France. New and old companies collapsed.

Still the railroad networks continued to develop through the successive crisis and the economy really took all the benefit of the economies of scale brought by the Industrial Age.

The fact that the stock market suffers crisis is not just the result of speculation. It is a sure sign that the economy is trying to adjust to a significant shift of the value chain creation.

financial panic in the 19th century over railroad stocks

Like it happened in the 19th century, it happens again today. The pictures of the financial crisis of the 19th century remind us of those pictures of today.

The world struggles to adjust to a new balance of value creation, the value brought by the Fourth Revolution. It removes borders; it accelerates exchange of goods and ideas; it changes significantly the value chain by diminishing the relative value of extractive and manufacturing industries.

The current economic crisis is another precursor of the Fourth Revolution. We can help minimize its impact by recognizing that it is an effect of the Fourth Revolution. By leaning into it instead of adopting defensive positions.

Are you ready to shift to the Fourth Revolution value production and diffusion system?

Multiple identities on internet: why debate? The trend is obvious!

Should multiple identities be allowed for a single individual on the internet?

The debate rages. Facebook and Google+ try to force everyone to show a single identity. Still, since the beginning of internet, geeks often like to have different identities for different purposes. A good reference is this blog post about the views of a typical geek, Chris Poole.

Showing different identities in parallel is extremely difficult in the real physical world. The few exceptions like a husband having several wives in different places, unbeknownst to the others, are strange enough to be good topics for Hollywood.

On the internet, however, it is quite easy to have several identities in parallel. And even if Facebook and Google+ try to force us into a single, lifetime identity, it is relatively easy to circumvent those controls – sharing networks is only more difficult, and having multiple identities is not practical for everybody.

Still, we all have multiple identities already. We don’t send on our corporate emails the same messages to the same people than from our personal email. We don’t network with the same people and discuss the same topics on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

This debate is thus futile. Yes, we have, and we all manage different identities. They are more or less consistent. But they are different. And the number of identities we will have will grow, and become more deeply different.

As the Fourth Revolution book argues, while the population on Earth might reach a plateau, the number of identities on internet will continue to grow tremendously. And this will create more value for everybody.

Don’t freak out. Maintain and develop your different identities on the internet!

A generation-driven Revolution is in the making!

In the same Facebook paper that describes how our world is much smaller than we thought, and is shrinking, there is another very interesting curve.

facebook age of friends curve — the age of your friends on facebook, depending on your own age

The comment in the paper is mostly on the fact that we tend to connect with people of our age – there is a sharp spike, even at age 60.

Still this curve carries a lot of other very interesting information. The most obvious is that we tend to connect with younger people, not at all with people older than ourselves. And as a consequence, the generation in their 20’s appears to be very disconnected from the older generations.

What is the consequence? The generation in their 20’s, for which Facebook and other social networks is a normal part of the world, evolves rather independently. This is a sure source of Revolutions.

Brace! Driven by the generation born in the 1990’s, the Revolution is coming.

The world is small… even smaller than you thought, and shrinking!

If you follow the news, you might have heard about this groundbreaking study by Facebook about how people are connected.

For a long time, there was the 6 degree of separation theory: anybody could be connected to anybody else through 5 other people who know each other. Interestingly, because testing this hypothesis was cumbersome in the pre-internet world, only one study was done, on a limited sample, in the 1960’s, which grossly confirmed the theory. (Upon closer study, this experiment also showed that some rare people have a much more far-reaching network than others and that they played a critical role in establishing the connection).

Today, as a large proportion of Humankind is on Facebook, our connectivity can be measured on the internet. The result is given in this Facebook report. The following curve is extracted from the report.

the degrees of separation on Facebook — degrees of separation on Facebook

It shows that for the entire Facebook there are only roughly on average 4 intermediate people between any 2 individuals on Earth. The friend of your friend knows the friend of the friend of anyone else! Even more shocking, when looking at a particular country like the USA, only 3 intermediaries are necessary.

In addition these curves show that with an increased connectivity in the virtual world, with more and more people on social networks, we grow to be closer and closer to each other; each year we need less and less intermediaries to connect to anybody else. The world is shrinking in front of our eyes!

Let’s not forget that probably the same phenomenon is at work that was observed in earlier experiments: some particularly well connected individuals, few in numbers, are probably those through which most connections could be established. Still, right now, we just discovered that the world is much smaller than we thought.

As I start to be well connected on social networks I discover how I reconnect to people I lost track of, and how I manage to connect to really great, interesting people.

The world is shrinking rapidly. Don’t waste the opportunity! Join the Fourth Revolution!

Stop misinterpreting the curves showing a relative decrease in salaries!

It does not happen too often to me, but right now I am upset that statistics are being misinterpreted.

In these times of crisis, of 99 percent movement, of demonstrations against the financial and corporate world, numerous charts are disseminated that show how the proportion of wages in percent of GDP is declining (and how the proportion of corporate profits is increasing). Here is an example from a recent post on the Daily Beast titled “the era of corporate profit”:

wages percentage of GDP historical curve — typical historical curves for wages and corporate profit

Now, what does that really show? Obviously, it shows that the proportion in the GDP of the wages and salary income of people employed traditionally by corporations is decreasing. Does it show that the average worker earns less? That’s quite a stretched interpretation even if most commentators just mean it!

As an avid reader of the Fourth Revolution blog, the fact that the share of salaries in the overall income should not surprise you: salaried employment by large corporations is a model of the Industrial Age, which is declining – BECAUSE THERE ARE LESS PEOPLE THAT ARE SALARIED (and not, because each of them gets less money!!). In fact, the diminution of the share of conventional salaries in the GDP is another precursor of the Fourth Revolution!

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis provides historical tables on the revenues in the USA. Here is a curve anyone can obtain with a little bit of patience:

income per category, pct of GDP — why wages and salaries are only a small part of people's income

So what? Yes, wages and salaries have a tendency to decrease, but the income from non corporate business, sole proprietorships, and non-profits organizations increase dramatically. These are organizations which certainly create value for only a few individuals (to obtain the curve we have reclassified their profits as income for the owners)! These are the organizations of the K.E.E.Ns…

Stop the fallacy of showing decreasing salary curves as an indication of the impoverishment of the average citizen. The future lies in other forms of organizations, and their importance increases dramatically.

Welcome to the Fourth Revolution. The future and the Value is elsewhere than salaried employment. When do you jump to other forms of organization?

The ever shorter lifespan of ever more immortal information

Evidence is there that the lifespan of information on internet is always shorter. A nice article on the bitly blog, “You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?”, provides a nice synthesis. The following graph is extracted from this post:

Basically, a twitter or facebook post lifespan (in terms of viewing, clicking, re-tweeting etc) is a mere matter of minutes. Only Youtube videos have a lifespan of a few hours.

Is that really true? All this information is staying somewhere. The information is still there, more or less accessible, but searchable. Even where we thought his information was not accessible, it can come back: Facebook is right now digging the information out for its timeline; tweets can be searched. Beyond the flurry of the initial re-tweets and sharing, a long tail of search results and clicks still keeps the information alive.

This is the paradox of modern data on the internet. The flow of information is so immense that our attention span becomes ever shorter. Yet, the information remains there, accessible, searchable, available for us to build upon it. More and more information from more and more contributors, worldwide.

And those will be successful in the Collaborative Age who, beyond the instantaneous, will know how to dig the heap of historical information for the nuggets they are looking for. That’s certainly a K.E.E.N. skill. How often do you dig deeper for more information instead of letting yourself be overwhelmed by the present notifications? Just do it more often!

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