Lunch over IP

FES06 - Failing forwards, and learning by going

I'm in Andorra at the Future of Europe Summit, which takes place for the first time. It's my first time in Andorra, a small place hanging on mountain slopes, living on commerce, banking and tourism (but while the ski season is supposed to start next week, there is no snow) and carrying a somewhat dodgy reputation. The country is rich, but traffic is chaotic; public transit infrastructure is weak; scaffolding and construction are everywhere, as are shops: this is a no-VAT shopping nirvana. "We didn't really have any productive or industrial activity here, it's tourism and trade", Juli Minoves, the Foreign Affairs Minister, told me over coffee. In the last couple of years however, the government (like many other governments) has tried to reposition the country for the knowledge economy - and this conference (200 attendees from all over the continent) is part of that effort. Here are my running notes.

After a short welcome message by Albert Pintat, Andorra's prime minister, Claude Smadja, the conference's producer, says that the FES is designed as a platform for imagining "how to re-engineer Europe's dynamism and redefine its role in the global economy". In recent years, initiatives to relaunch Europe have been numerous - the most prominent being the EU's Lisbon Agenda, established in 2000 to "make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010". But "it has not been working - says Smadja - almost all of its objectives won't be met". There is a need for a more aggressive, imaginative, flexible thinking. That's the aim of this conference (I will be moderating a couple of sessions on innovation and entrepreneurship today and tomorrow).

Mark Minevich, the founder of Going Global Ventures and author of "Six Billion Minds", is the first speaker and does something totally unexpected: he shows a couple dozen slides full of data and quotes on poverty, on change, on speed, on interconnectedness, on globalization, and shows them in silence, asking the audience to read them before he starts his speech. The audience is baffled, but reads, and then Minevich moves into the speech, talking about globalization - its benefits and the imbalances it has created - and warning the Europeans in the room about the growing role of China and India. His tone is at moments surprisingly adversarial, setting a tone of "us-against-them", although he manages to build in softer statements such as "the new economic paradigm is about the economy of knowledge, and it requires six billion minds working together to create insights, ideas, innovation". He points out the absolute crucial need to re-think education. A point emphasized by Claude Smadja: "the challenge for Europe is to learn to 'fall forwards' - to not to be afraid of failures, and learn from them. Europe has developed a mindset oriented towards security and predictability, while we should be risk-takers. It's a revolution of mindsets that we need; this question is at the heart of the challenges that face Europe today, and it starts in the education system". A Chinese woman in the audience, Yohong Ai, takes exception with Minevich's adversarial views of China: "We see the outside world as a place of cooperation, not competition". Another woman, from Spain, adds that "countries that are experienced in cultural coexistence will have more capacity to go ahead".

Holger Hartmann, the CEO of BadenSolar, a German company selling solar energy systems, and Christoph Loch, professor of corporate innovation at French business school INSEAD, are the panelists in a session on corporate innovation moderated by Liz Padmore, former director at Accenture.
Loch says that innovation is not only about new products and new businesses; it's also about processes, about continuous improvement; and about new ways to dealing with the customers. In all of these dimensions, "large European organizations are quite good at innovation". However, what large companies in Europe are not doing: they're not created alot of jobs (they generally operate in mature markets, have productivity improvements). Jobs are created by small companies. That's where Europe has a problem: we don't create enough companies, they don't grow enough. We have a problem in renewing companies. Governments can set frameworks, encourage education, but "the dynamics of innovation lies in the private sector". Collectively we have to innovate ourselves out of fear of failure - and (reference to the previous speech) we should stop feeling that we're under siege by China and India.
Hartmann is a former consultant (theory) who became an entrepreneur (practice), and tells a tale of managing a company in an innovative market growing up to 30% per month, in an industry where shortages of materials are becoming apparent (the world's production capacity for silicon, key component of solar panels, is insufficient, and prices have doubled): "you need to learn to balance customization of the offer with streamlining of the business; at the end of the day, innovation in products and processes is about output".
My take is: Europe has a problem with a culture that tends to limit risks and make them predictable, rather than seek to diminish the cost of failure - which would allow for more risk-taking. That's a known issue but, suggests Lucy Marcus of Marcus Ventures Consulting, there are signs that it's starting to be overcome, that people are taking risks with their ideas.

In a lunch session, Fields Wicker-Miurin, co-founder of LeadersQuest in the UK, and Edward Girardet, a Swiss author, explore the question of leadership. Wicker-Miurin talks about creating LeadersQuest, which is a non-profit that organizes "quests" (structured trips) for high-achieving individuals to major regions of the world, seeking knowledge and understanding. "We can't ignore the world anymore, be it Darfur or the latest technology; we are at a critical point and we have only a little window to make the right choices; the world is our mirror, it reflects our values and priorities and choices". Where do we go to find out about the right choices? "I don't trust what I read in newspapers, I don't trust futurists, I learn best by going and seeing and debating and disagreeing and sharing and testing" and that's why we set up LeadersQuest: we learn by going, not by staying where we are".
What are the characteristics of a leader? "Courage. Understanding the difference between raising a concern and influencing a change. Being the change you want to see in the world." (Ghandi said that, I believe) "Remove obstacles - including removing ourselves to create a space for the next generation to come and take responsibility. Being multisectoral and multigenerational in the choices we make". How do you really change things? "The world needs hundreds of millions of leaders - maybe even 6 billion leaders", says Wickers-Miurin. However, she also points out to the business leaders in the room their own responsibility: "we tend to blame politicians, but the truth is that we should try to make it easier for them to take the right decisions".

I'm moderating the next panel, on innovation and entrepreneurship, so just a few notes. Panelists are Adriaan Dierx, head of competitiveness and innovation at the EU; Rebecca Harding, who runs the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor at the London Business School; Antoni Martinez, head of the Energy Park at b_TEC in Barcelona (see also previous post), and Javier Echarri, secretary general of the European private equity and venture capital association.
Dierx talks about innovation from a policy-making perspective, pointing out that innovation is complex and systemic in nature. "Investments in knowledge and human capital are crucial drivers of innovation, but in order for it to blossom we also need functioning markets and real demand (from both individuals, businesses and public entities)", he says.
Rebecca Harding runs the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, an annual assessment of the level of entrepreneurial activity in 40-something countries. The next report is due in early January. I ask her if she can share some findings. Higher level of entrepreneurialism are emerging in many European countries. "The dotcom boom, despite the stock market bust, has inspired many, and globalization has meant that entrepreneurial activity among European countries is leveling off". "The US is losing part of its gloss". "In Asia - but also in Germany - a big part of it is necessity entrepreneurship, not driven by innovation and ideas, but by the labour market's conditions".
Echarri stresses a point that was made in a previous session: "Europe is not that bad, actually; education and research are excellent". "We use US parameters to measure our entrepreneurial levels, but here innovation happens in big corporations, the state plays a bigger role, so lots of innovation is kind of hidden". He sees the big problem of Europe in scaling new companies, and advocates radical positive discrimination in favor of very innovative new entreprises: "We are distributing the money among too many, sprinkling here and there: we should focus".
Martinez describes the b_TEC project to create a technology district in Barcelona, underscoring the role of local entities (governments) in fostering innovation.
Someone from the audience asks whether entrepreneurship can be learned. Harding: "people that are very successful entrepreneurs are wired in a different way, it's not only about education. There is a "U" correlation between formal qualifications and entrepreneurship: high levels of entrepreneurship among people with low qualifications, and among highly qualified people, with a big 'soft belly' in between". Says someone else from the audience: "the idea that innovation is driven by competition and by consumer demand is dangerous. What drives innovation is the quality of people's thinking, their ability to see an opportunity and run through it".

Education is also the topic of the last panel of the day, with Fields Wicker-Miurin of LeadersQuest; Francesc Solé Parellada, director of innovation at the Polytechnic University of Catalunya; Magda Rosenmöller of business school IESE in Barcelona; and Aurore Wanlin, a research fellow at the Center for European Reform in the UK; moderated by Claude Smadja. There is a general feeling that there is something wrong today about Europe's education system. Europe is losing ground in terms of higher education, in terms of its capability to produce the kinds of skills and expertise that are needed in a world of global competition, in which the Western world has lost the quasi-monopoly on knowledge that it enjoyed for a long time. Smadja: "There are many centers of educational excellence in Europe, but looking at the efforts that India and China are putting into developing their educational capabilities, with resources and single-mindedness, it makes you wonder".
Wanlin presents some findings of a report published by CER a few months back, diagnosing the European higher education system. Generally, European universities don't perform good enough. There are about 2000 universities in Europe, and each is trying to do some research; the US has 3300 universities, but only 250 or so do post-grad student awards and are research-intensive. Which means (the same point made by Echarri in the previous session) that research funding in Europe is spread too thin. Parellada underscores the lack of accountability of university authorities, while Rosenmöller says that business schools represent in some way a sweet spot, having gained ground in international comparison.
Wicker-Miurin starts with a sequence of numbers: 600'000, 250'000, 70'000, 19'000: that's the number of annual engineering graduates in China, India, the US and the UK. When compared to the population, these figures are not radically disproportionate, but Europe clearly has a problem with scientific disciplines, which don't seem to attract big numbers (in the UK there are twice as many graduates in "creative" disciplines as in engineering). And she quotes a Chinese woman answering to a British reporter who asked what she thought of British Universities: "they are fine if you can't get into a Chinese one". "If you had two or three years of a future's leader life, what would we want that person to learn? If we ask ourselves this question seriously, I don't think that what we are currently doing in education would be the answer".

TEDGlobal 2007: Africa, the next chapter

The program of the first TED conference in Africa, TEDGlobal 2007, has been announced yesterday evening in New York (I produced TEDGlobal 2005 in Oxford, my colleague Emeka Okafor is producing this one). It will take place in Arusha, Tanzania, from June 4-7  and go under the theme "Africa: The Next Chapter".

Africa is at a tipping point. Its problems and challenges are well known, but across the continent tremendous change is happening; ingenious solutions are being applied to tackle some of the toughest problems; businesses are being launched that may transform the lives of millions; a new generation of Africans is refusing to be weighted down by the familiar litany of challenges and grievances and looks differently at the future.

The TEDGlobal 2007 speakers will include: Binyavanga Wainaina, award-winning author; Bola Olabisi, founder of the Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network; Ken Ofori-Atta, CEO of Ghana's stock brokerage firm Databank; Simon Mwacharo, CEO of Craftskills, an innovative manufacturer of renewable modular energy systems based on solar and wind power; Carol Pineau, journalist and producer of the documentary “Africa Open for Business"; Chris Johns, editor-in-chief of National Geographic; Daniel Annerose, founder of cell-phone service provider Manobi; Dele Olojede, Pulitzer-winning journalist; the novelist Chris Abani; the surgeon Ernest Chijioke Madu; economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin; journalist and activist Andrew Mwenda; George Ayittey, author of "Africa Unchained"; Noah Samara, founder and CEO of satellite-radio provider Worldspace; H Chinery-Hesse, founder of Softtribe, developer of "tropically tolerant software"; the Acumen Fund's Jacqueline Novogratz; Kenyan writer and economist James Shikwati; Seyi Oyesola, physician and co-inventor of the "Hospital in a box", a portable operating theatre that runs on solar power; Florence Seriki, founder of computer manufacturer Omatek; Kwabena Boahen, researcher on neuromorphic processors; primatologist Jane Goodall; physician Leon Kintaudi; Ndidi Nwunell, founder of Leap Africa; Alieu Conteh, CEO of Vodacom Congo; Onesmo Ole MoiYoi, Tanzanian molecular biologist; Ory Okolloh, lawyer, activist, blogger and founder of watchblog Mzalendo; Patrick Awuah, co-founder of Ashesi University in Ghana; Russell Southwood, founder and publisher of Balancing Act; Moses Makayoto, a Kenyan scientist and inventor; Ted Kidane, co-founder of Feedelix, developer of non-latin script for Ethiopic, Hindi and Mandarin cell phone users; Ron Eglash, publisher of African Fractals; filmmaker Raoul Peck; geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells, author of "The Journey of a Man"; and Patti Stonesifer, CEO of the Gates Foundation.

A pretty powerful list, an invitation to see Africa through new lenses. Registrations are open on the TED website.

Walking on Barcelona, and thinking about city design

I'm walking on a gigantic aerial picture - high resolution - of Barcelona, Spain. The picture is maybe 35 meters in diameter, hosted under a white inflated dome on the central Plaza de Catalunya square. Key city infrastructure is located on it and described. New infrastructure, that is: this is the "Metropolis Barcelona" showcase, part of Barcelona's strategic metropolitan plan.

I'm always amazed, each time I come to this city, at the quantity and ambition of projects underway, many of which are on display across this "old-media" version of Google Earth: new regional rail and tram lines, the MareNostrum supercomputing center, the b_TEC park devoted to sustainability (in energy, water, mobility, architecture), the Parc Barcelona Media (picture below), the rehab of old neighborhoods such as Poble Sec or the remodeling and redeveloping of the Badalona seafront or the transformation of the 200-hectares Poblenou quarter - which used to be, during the 19th century, the center of Spanish industrialization - in a tech and business hub called District22, innovative social-work spaces such as Porta22, a research center on nuclear fusion, a new desalinization plant that will produce 200'000 cubic meters of freshwater a day, a center for aerospace tech - and the list could go on.

Barcelona started a radical re-creation of itself in 1992, leveraging the Summer Olympics as both a reason for massive infrastructural investments and a global advertising billboard. The Barcelonites played both cards so well that that year their city's name started being increasingly associated with "cool". Since, the reinvention of the city has not stopped. Design, arts and culture (think Fura dels Baus, Ferran Adrià, etc), and technology are its new hallmarks. "But statistically, we're not the most innovative city - yet", Francesc Santacana told me yesterday over coffee. He is the coordinator of the strategic plan for the metropolitan area of Barcelona - a network of 36 cities with about 3 million inhabitants. A region with all the problems of all metropolitan regions: saturated territory, insufficient public transport systems and persistent car congestion, social fragmentation, etc. But a region that is very busy in pushing change. It's no easy challenge: "We have been shifting from an orderly structured and designed urban model of the industrial era to a more or less chaotic space, occupied in an erratic way, with a rather blurred logic and in which multiple economic activities, cultures and values coehixt", says Francesc.

He and his colleagues have read Richard Florida, for their top goal is to "generate, attract and retain creative and innovative talent". Promoting infrastructures is only a part of this, of course. Much more important is to promote the right kind of infrastructures, to properly re-design both the city and the ways it can foster interaction and "fecundation", to quote Jorge Wagensberg, the director of the city's Science Museum. Re-imagining a city, he writes in an essay published in the catalog accompanying the Plaza de Catalunya exhibit,

is about increasing the probability of the collision of creators (all the citizens are creators, to a greater or less extent, in one subject or another). And this is achievable by creating suitable scenes in the city, credible meeting places, ambients which favour the diverse wherever it comes from. (...) The vast majority of auditoriums and conferences halls in the city are still conceived more to underline the solemnity of the act and the authority and prestige of the speaker than to invite participation and discussion. (...) What the Greeks discovered from their theatre (...) is forgotten when designing spaces dedicated to knowledge in our cities. Even the design of a public square, a park, a bus, an office, a factory, a school or a concert hall can include this aspect, stimulating the search for participation, for collision, for fecundation. (...)

Yes, perhaps "fecundation" is the keyword. There are spaces which favour fecundation and spaces which invite sterility. (...) Scientific specialization means that ideas don't fly across the boundaries of disciplines anymore. But the city can create spaces where two scientists, two innovators, can collide; where an actor can get into a conversation with a sociologist; where a painter can run into a manufacturer. (...) Fecundation, in essence, means collision of two ideas in order to create a new one. City design should be all about facilitating that collision.

The emergence of "freeconomics"

"Understanding when to shift out of scarcity mode and start giving away what you once held dear is a core competency for our age".

Words by Chris Anderson, the author of the "Long Tail" book, discussing on his blog (via Dennis) the "emerging realization that abundance is driving our world", or the emergence of "freeconomics":

"I begin my economics of abundance speech with Carver Mead's mind-bending question: "What happens when things get (nearly) free?" His answer is that you waste them, be they transistors or megabytes of bandwidth capacity. You use them profligately, extravagantly, irresponsibly. You shift out of conservation mode and get into exploitation mode. You do crazy things like offering people the ability to put their whole music collection in their pocket, or promising the average email user that they'll never have to delete another message to conserve space. Just as Alan Kay "wasted" transistors to create the graphic user interface, we will all learn how to waste newly abundant resources, retraining our minds to ignore our instincts about costs and scarcity."

The speech he's referring to, he gave it recently at the PopTech conference in Maine. Venture capitalist David Hornik was there and summarizes it as follows:

"The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste."

Summaries of the speech also by Ethan Zuckerman and by Core77.

While I find Chris' argument compelling, and it opens up a whole new way to appreciate and understand the recent digital developments, I have a really hard time with the idea of abundance being linked to "learning how to waste". Yes, hard drives (storage) cost only a few dozen cents a gigabyte; bandwidth (communication) costs only cents per gigabyte; processors (computation) are virtually free - they cost pennies per MIPS. But those are just the components. Bits are not weightless, neither psychologically (our time, our attention span) nor factually: consider just this factoid, from a report by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (via Worldchanging):

"A single high-powered rack of servers consumes enough energy in a single year to power a hybrid car across the United States 337 times".

Socially, politically, environmentally, morally, and even economically, that's something that's not abundant, nor that calls for "use with abandon, without concern for waste".

UPDATE - Nick Carr concurs.

Mikko Hypponen on the next data-security threat: beware the wi-fi worms

Mikko Hypponen is one of the world's leading experts on computer viruses. His title is "chief research officer" at F-Secure in Helsinki (blog). The first time I met him, in his lab several years ago, he welcomed me with a broad smile and then proceeded to offer a horror show about viruses, trojans, hackers and data security threats in general that almost managed to convince me that the Internet was evil. Since, we've been meeting now and then and exchanging views per e-mail, while the online world grew even scarier. In a speech he gave at the recent Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal, he detailed the origin and functioning of several dozen very creative and very dangerous viruses. With his team of virus-busters (and working alongside other teams around the world) Mikko is in a constant cop-versus-criminal race. "The criminals will always have the lead, but we're getting pretty good at reacting fast", he told me once. I e-mailed him a few questions:

Mikko: what were the scariest data security alerts of the last couple of months?

In place of widespread malware assaults, 2006 has been characterized by targeted attacks which generally do not make the headlines and which have typically one single motivation: money (consider the image below as an example). In such scenarios, a hacker may target a single company, use a cloaking device like a rootkit to conceal a backdoor and extract valuable information for his own financial gain or that of the persons interested in having access to such data.

An example?

We've worked on several such cases over the last months: one company was targeted via spoofed emails that seem to be coming from within the company, carrying Word documents as attachments. If you opened the attachment, an invisible backdoor would open up a connection for an outsider to steal anything from that computer or from the company's network.

You say that hackers seems to be turning into attackers: no longer developing viruses and other malicious software for the beauty of it, but in order to intentionally disrupt businesses and/or make money. Fame is being replaced by fortune as motivation for writing malicious software. How strong is this trend?

It started already in 2003: that's when we saw the first for-profit malware. Today, practically all new Windows viruses are written to make money. We're no longer fighting teenagers and hobbyists. We're fighting criminals. We're fighting professionals. We're fighting organized activity.

They also seems to be becoming more sophisticated. True?

Indeed. As our enemy is now doing this "make money" thing - sometimes big money - they can afford to invest in their attack programs. This can be done, for exampe, by hiring unemployed Russian professional programmers to write the malware for you ...and they do the development just like any professional development is done.

How can we handle all that?

We need protection at all levels, and we need to keep the really critical infrastructure off the Net completely. We just introduced our latest weapon in this war: DeepGuard technology, that can detect malware by its behavior as it executes, making it much harder for virus writers to create new, undetected variants of existing viruses.

What kind of systems and applications do you include in the "really critical infra" that should be kept off the Net?

Electrical power plants and electricity distribution networks; water distribution; gas distribution; medical systems; military systems.

Are entreprises more aware, and better protected, than they were a few years ago?

Yes, they are ...at least in the Western world. Places like Turkey and India still have huge problems, the kind of problems we used to have here a few years ago.

How many computer viruses have been identified to date?

Over 200,000. And practically all of them are for systems running Microsoft systems.

That's why for a long time Macintosh users felt that they enjoyed somehow a higher level of protection, given the "niche" popularity of the Mac platform: but it seems that some Mac viruses have been circulating recently.

True...but then again, there are only FOUR real viruses for the Mac OSX. So from this point of view, it's a better choice. Or install Ubuntu or FreeBSD on your PC instead of Windows?

What's the status with wireless viruses?

The first mobile phone virus was found in 2004. We've seen 335 mobile phone viruses so far. Some of them are really spreading in the wild, but obviously this problem is much smaller than the PC virus problem.

Where do you expect the next threat to come from? What form will it have?

Wi-Fi worms, jumping from one Windows laptop to another, reaching organizations' internal network as people physically carry the infection in, bypassing corporate firewalls.

EFC06 - Bjorn Lomborg on prioritizing the world's problems

Running notes from the second European Futurists Conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).

Bjorn Lomborg is the closing keynote speaker. In the "Skeptical environmentalist" book, which made his name a few years ago, he argued that the environmental crisis has been largely exaggerated by environmentalists and that the real outlook is rosier than generally acknowledged. The man, to say the least, is controversial.

In 2004 he launched the Copenhagen Consensus, an attempt to prioritize the world's problems and the spending that goes towards trying to solve them. "In an ideal world, we would solve all of the world's problems - climate challenge, hunger, conflicts, water, public health, education, migrations, etc - but the reality is that our resources are limited, and we are not solving them". So "we have the moral obligation to invest our resources where they can have the highest impact”. The Copenhagen Consensus is based on this idea: asking a question such as "If you had USD50 billion to do good, what would you do first?" and try to prioritize.

He invited economists, specialists on each of ten challenge areas, to Copenhagen to collectively do an informed cost-benefit analysis, and set priorities (The results of the exercise are summarized in his new book, "How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place", and the exercise will be repeated in 2008). Why economists? Wouldn't a climatologist know better about climate change? "Yes, but economists know how to prioritize scarce resources". Why only USD50 billion? "The size of the wallet doesn't change the method". Aren't you comparing apples and oranges (migrations and climate change)? "Yes, but our resources are limited so we need to do these choices".

So where would those scarce resources, according to Lomborg's panel of economists, yield the highest results? In fighting HIV/AIDS (picture from Unesco). He says that 28 million cases could be alleviated by 2017 at a cost of 27 billion USD, with 40-fold benefits from preventing the spreading of the disease. The next three top priorities in his list: malnutrition; trade liberalization; water sanitation. At the end of the list is climate change: "there is little that we can do; and at a very high cost". Education did not make it into the list.

The exercise was repeated with a group of youngsters (priorities: malnutrition and diseases), with Africans (malnutrition and diseases), and with UN ambassadors (diseases, malnutrition, clean water): there is some consistency.

Needless to say, these results got significant criticism. Lomborg stands his ground. "The effects of climate change will play out towards the end of this century and into the next: why are we so willing to help people in 100 years and unwilling to help poor people today?" His answer is that "climate change feels more important because it operates on hundred years scales - while other challenges are shorter-term - and it works with worst-case analysis". He suggests that we should therefore make 100-years scenarios also for other major issues such as HIV and malnutrition, and this would create a competition of good ideas for solving the world's problems. "We should stop doing things that don't fix anything or that do little good at high cost, and focus on things that do a lot of good, now, cheaply".

EFC06 - Markus Merz and the open-source car

Running notes from the second European Futurists Conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).

Linux and Firefox are huge, transformative open-source successes. But they are made of bits. Can open-source principles and approaches be used to make hardware, to make real physical objects? Even complex ones? Markus Merz answers yes: he is the founder and maintainer of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop a car according to open-source principles: rather than going for a superaccessorized car, they're aiming to design a simple and functional model to spread, and along the way reinvent, mobility. "Form follows function".

Merz is a son of Bavarian farmers who went on to study agricultural science, before going to work for the nearby BMW automotive plant, first as a production-line worker, then in communication, marketing, and new media. Which gave him some of the background for the OScar project, which was started in 1999. "I was a very idealistic young man, so I wrote a manifesto" (PDF):

Building a car without an engineering center, without a boss, without money, and without borders. But with the help of the collective creativity of the Internet community (...) Three or four months should be enough for the (...) project definition phase. Then we "freeze" the concept, and start developing. With a little luck and a lot of support, we will need the tools we need by then. Then we will have one year to develop the first prototype".

That timeline was vastly too optimistic. In 2000 the Heise newsletter linked to the manifesto, German TV did a report, and hundreds of people offered to join the project, but many were not the right people: wrong expertise, wrong mindset. "I was overwhelmed", the project slowed down, until the beginning of 2004, when finally some structure and rules of the game got put in place, starting with the tech requirements (ideal size of the vehicle, target performance, etc - see the whole list) and a comprehensible set of modules (the OScar has 6 modules: board; shell; engines; power systems; security systems; and information systems) that would allow to organize the work (over 100 people are currently involved on the OScar project). A choice was made to use only open-source software tools. Six years on, the website says that the OScar is currently "in release 0.2". Which Merz describes as "early conceptual stage" (the image above is a design contribution by Gernot Pushner for OScar 0.1).

EFC06 - The BBC's Matt Locke on shifting from periodic to perpetual delivery

Running notes from the second European Futurists Conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).

Matt Locke, head of innovation at BBC Future Media & Technology: "We're moving from the first wave of innovation, characterized by high barriers to launch, long development cycles, R&D focused on core infrastructure, to a second wave defined by low barriers to innovation, enterprise-level tools available for free, extremely fast development cycles, more activity in services and content innovation than in core infrastructure technology, and innovation happening among users through collaborative social networks". He shows a series of projects that the BBC is working on to respond to (and try to leverage) the new innovation landscape, including:

• Tell me more: a knowledge-transfer project with the Arts & Humanities Research Council, by bringing together two dozen people from the BBC and as many from academia, putting them in a room, facilitate, and see where the conversation goes. "When projects came up, we could support them. This showed that innovation is a form of social exchange, rather than a formal project/process".
• Backstage: a developer community (about 1500 currently) with a range of BBC contents made available for free. People can post ideas about the kind of things they would like to see built, or they can build prototypes on how to use these contents: ways to display news in a geographic context mashing up BBC newsfeeds with online maps; novel ways to create archive timelines or display archive search results; and an interesting index of audience proximity (my naming): on the left, a list of the BBC hierarchy of stories; on the right, a list of what the users are actually reading. Today's page says: "BBC News is 23% in touch with what we are reading".
• Reboot: people were asked to send in suggestions for the redesign of the BBC homepage: see the gallery of submitted designs and prototypes and the winning entry
• (I blogged in May a series of other examples presented by Matt's colleague Philip Jay at another conference, and a vision speech by the BBC director-general Mark Thompson)

Pros and cons of innovation in this new environment. The pros first:

• shifts strategy from "designing for users" to "users as designers"
• encourages open structures across inventories, assets and networks
• encourages innovation as a social, collaborative, iterative process: innovation comes out of conversations
• the "perpetual beta", building services and going live fast rather than having long development cycles: closing the gap between research and implementation

Then the cons:

• need to manage expectations: when you start to have these conversations with your users,  you can't turn them off, you can't stop supporting these projects
• need to ensure that "lead-users" within the organization can/will participate
• need "organizational hacking", creating paths for innovation and remove roadblocks within the organization
• issues of ownership and intellectual property need to be handled carefully
• need a cultural shift from periodic delivery to perpetual delivery: we're no longer producing a periodic broadcast, we are engaged in a continuous conversation

EFC06 - Walter Hehl and the neverending complexity of software

Running notes from the second European Futurists Conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).

Walter Hehl of IBM Research - he works at the Zürich/Rüschlikon lab - presents some of the results of IBM's Global Technology Outlook 2006, a "vision of the future" report that's updated annually. Charts and graphs and IBM lingo ("the power of modularity"). A few jots:

• Moore's Law will continue to be relevant (with some problems)
• Computer's power consumption and heat are key issues; IBM has a program to design "green data centers" - data centers with low-power consumption.
• Chips transitioning to nanotechnology and "self-assembly"
• Videogames are becoming technical drivers (chip development, etc)
• All objects will get IDs (and homepages). So what's the next step after everything is connected?
• That will create an "event-driven world", and we will need software to make sense of this huge mass of continuous events
• Software will increasingly structure work and organizations
• The evolution of software will accelerate. I don't see an end for the complexity of software
• Real and virtual worlds will overlap (Sam Palmisano, IBM's CEO, held a meeting in Second Life recently, and IBM announced a USD 10 million investment in SL and 3D intranet)

My own private 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide

I have known for a while that my generous usage of airplanes isn't the most environmentally-friendly way of traveling. And I've been convinced for a while that a very effective single measure against climate change would be to put a heavy tax on airplane fuel (say, 1 euro per liter of fuel - that makes about 50'000 euros for a one-way transatlantic flight, or something like that, depending on the plane - or maybe 2 euros), which, by raising ticket prices massively, will curb demand (and tant pis if some airlines go bust). And I've been trying to cut back on my frequent-flyerness (one-third less this year vs last year).

Now comes Georges Monbiot's book "Heath", and while I dislike his style (typical quote: "If you fly, you destroy other people's lives"), I believe we ought to take his figures seriously. He says that a single passenger's share of an aircraft's emission on a round-trip London-NY is of about 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. He also says that that's about all the biosphere will be able to absorb annually, in 2030, from each of us, from traveling and from all our other activities. I'm flying out again on Tuesday. It will be a short European route, but I know I will look at the plane very differently.