Neil de Wit gives his views after leaving fibre provider CityLink

“However, we have an epidemic of MBAs who look purely at business cases. At some point you have to take the punt. With Government, there is a great danger that it will be over-analysed by the likes of the Reserve Bank and the Treasury.

“If it is built in a highly competitive environment, it might be doomed to failure. There’s got to be some sort of coming together, because broadband is a national good.”

in reference to:

"Neil de Wit gives his views after leaving fibre provider"
- Ex-CityLink boss looks at fibre scene | Computerworld NZ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Thinking about social objects and limbo dancing

"When we see lists like that, we can start believing that all social objects are “content”, which gets the “rightsholders” of content salivating up the wazoo. Perish the thought.

Content is not what makes an object social. We do.

There was a time when “content” was created by a tiny minority of people, largely because the tools for making that content were elitist in nature. Scarce, expensive, needing specialist skills. To make matters worse, the techniques for distributing and sharing that “content” were also elitist in nature. So people who “owned” that “content” felt like kings."

Dubber meet JP

in reference to:

"Ever since Hugh Macleod spoke to me about social objects, and pointed me towards what Jyri Engestrom had written, I’ve been fascinated by the concept."
- Thinking about social objects and limbo dancing – confused of calcutta (view on Google Sidewiki)

A theory of the internet and the art of protest

"The working theory

You may recall a little while back that I posted a blog entry about the Five Ages of Media. My contention is that digital media – and specifically the internet – works differently than broadcast media.

Simply put, on the web, you don’t have a platform to shout to an undifferentiated mass of people – so just putting up a webpage that acts as a brochure, and says “come to our exhibition” doesn’t really work.

Instead, the web is a conversational medium – and there are really only two main types of content:

1) The conversation;
2) The stuff about which the conversation is taking place.

This second category of thing is what is often referred to as a ’social object’ – a term coined by Jyri Engeström to describe the way in which sociality online is not simply about relationships, but particularly about sharing things like videos, photos, audio and text."

in reference to:

"And why was it so powerful as a part of the conversation? Because it’s a good and very simple story. People are hard-wired for narrative. The theory that there are only really seven stories and we keep telling them to ourselves over and over through different media contexts is a reasonably compelling one."
- A theory of the internet and the art of protest by Andrew Dubber (view on Google Sidewiki)

"My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

"There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.
Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes."

in reference to:

"Worst-Case Thinking"
- http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/worst-case_thin.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

The Risk Management of Everything

"This warning about the escalation of the risk management of everything should be taken seriously. In his first Demos book, The Audit Explosion, Michael Power warned against that companies and governments preoccupation with measuring what is measurable – the now discredited ‘targets culture’.

Power traces the start of the risk management of everything back to 1995 – the year of the collapse Barings bank Shell’s Brent Spar PR disaster. Those events illustrated the two key aspects of the new obsession with risk management: internal control and reputation."

in reference to:

"“Reputation has become a new source of anxiety where organisational identity and economic survival are at stake And if everything may impact on organisational reputation, then reputational risk management demands the risk management of everything.”"
- http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/riskmanagementofeverythingcatalogue (view on Google Sidewiki)

Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest

"It is now up to all of us to figure out how to build a sustainable civilization within the new information rainforest - which provides sustenance and shelter, as well as poisonous plants and deadly predators. Success is by no means inevitable. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that make it in people's interest to behave constructively, and which create strong disincentives for destructive behavior in this new environment. We need to help everybody understand how to participate constructively and responsibly in this new space, and protect the rights of minorities and dissenters. We are in uncharted territory, but we have to start somewhere. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive "internet users" - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our information society."

in reference to:

"Global Voices 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile brought together people from 60 different countries"
- RConversation: Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest (view on Google Sidewiki)

Customer-Centric Capitalism

"What is the primary responsibility of a business? Renowned management professor and writer Peter Drucker gave a succinct answer to this question in his 1954 book The Practice of Management: “A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers . . . Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence.”

For the last thirty years, maximizing shareholder value has replaced customer value as the key objective of many companies. But, a number of experts are now raising questions about this widespread business practice and the extreme preoccupation with short term profits that inevitably results from putting shareholders over customers.

A 2006 study co-sponsored by the Business Roundtable and the CFA Institute concluded that: “the obsession with short-term results by investors, asset management firms, and corporate managers collectively leads to the unintended consequences of destroying long-term value, which decreases market efficiency, reduces investment returns, and impedes efforts to strengthen corporate governance.”

in reference to:

"“For three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority.  But evidence suggests that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first.”"
- Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Customer-Centric Capitalism (view on Google Sidewiki)