Apr 1st, 2009 |
I may be a bit excitable when I get onsite at a show, but I’m practically giddy about our Thursday keynote line up after having talked with Douglas Rushkoff yesterday. People keep asking “is it weird to be at the conference this year and comparing it to the past two years?” The answer is no. For one thing, the event is still very strong and this community is still very strong; folks who remember 2001 are afraid we’re reliving that, but it’s so different, as evidenced by the fact that we’ll have almost as many folks here this year as last despite the number of layoffs and shrunken budgets. But the other reason isn’t not weird is that, amidst the distress, we are finally returning to something resembling sane. What was weird was the world before; not so much in the Web 2.0 sphere, but the larger world, in which the disconnect of our financial institutions from any reality had started to spin the rest of our society into orbit.
Douglas Rushkoff’s talk on Thursday is going to make sense of the disconnect we’ve intuited in the business environment over the past decade. He starts with the trenchant observation that many companies have lost sight of their own most basic competency. As a consultant, Rushkoff has been asked to help build 2.0 communications strategies for companies; one would assume that means cultivating communities of enthusiasts of the company’s products or services, and providing greater transparency to the company’s internal workings. But what if no one in the company is actually engaged in the business they thought they were engaged in? He’s worked with a TV manufacturer at which no one in the company was actually engaged in the production of televisions; apparel companies who proudly boast of their lack of experience in designing and manufacturing clothing. How does a company that’s outsourced all of its core functions communicate with authenticity and transparency? What does it have to say?
This is just the beginning of a journey that Rushkoff embarks on touching on money as a social construct, the false assumption of the need for investment capital in a 2.0 economy, and a new model for structuring organizations around competence. The model he’s proposing relates to the idea of an integrity economy we talked about last year, but he takes it further with a fuller vision of how open source can serve as a model for the institutions that have failed us.
This is a don’t miss talk: tomorrow, Thursday, at 9:00 am in the keynote room. See you there.
