[H]ow can we use social media not just to inspire more flavor names but more of what matters? How might we leverage the power of the crowd to change what it means to build a brand and be a brand in the wired age?

The author’s conclusion is to build real communities for co-creation:

Based on our experiences to date, we believe private communities like The Collective offer a compelling way to move faster on more substantive issues. And when it comes to sustainability, specifically engaging conscious consumers offers a more effective way to gain perspective, explore new ideas and identify opportunities in any number of mission-critical areas, from supply chain optimization and certification to sustainable design, category growth and positioning strategies.

So for us, the crowd is out. The collective is in. Here’s to putting the “social” back in social media.

Besides encouraging everyone to listen to the entire interview, I want to highlight two points:

The importance of bridging the disciplines to answer fundamental questions about human behavior – is altruism learned or in our genes?

Wilson says that he thinks we can’t have any answers before we’ve done a lot more science to find them. And he believes that the best way to do that is to integrate science with the other great branches of learning — the social sciences and humanities.

The importance of new education standards to prepare young people for life. Experiential learning is how we as a species learn best and games are a risk free way to learn experientially.

“I’ll go to an even more radical position,” Wilson said. “I think games are the future in education. We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”

Tim Hwang’s presentation at Participation Camp 09 adds some more thought to the role of games discussion.

I wonder if games can also play a role to bridge disciplines towards more integrated research.

I have many experiences of sustained decision making in which, in my judgement, collective wisdom prevailed . I shall now examine the practice that supported this and consider whether its preconditions have general application. The practice in question is the Quaker practice of decision making. The fact that it is approached as “a meeting for worship for business,” in particular, raises the question of its more general applicability. Let me anticipate and say that, approached as a meeting for discerning the common good, the practice stands up well in secular contexts.

via Collective Intelligence and Quaker Practice.

Questions we should ask: How do our projects share data? How do our projects share users? How do our projects share impact? How do our projects connect with other projects? Should we be collaborating on another project rather than inventing another wheel?

via http://www.amysampleward.org/2009/04/22/wiring-the-green-movement-for-earth-day/

In The Future of Collaborative Networks, Aaron Fulkerson from Mindtouch shares his definition of a collaborative network:

This information fabric is a federation of content from the multiplicity of data and application silos utilized on a daily basis; such as, ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, etc. When you make this information fabric easy to edit between groups of individuals in a dynamic, secure, governed and real-time manner, it creates a Collaborative Network.

He argues that social media applications are not good tools to solve organizational problems, but often add another layer of disconnected data and application silos. Oliver Marks agrees that there is a “need for flexibility and interoperability with existing applications and [that there are] crucial differences between consumer oriented social life networking and business focused collaboration networks.”

Patti Anklam goes so far as to talk about a tension between connection and collaboration and argues that there is a need to balance both in an organization. Her lesson:

[Y]ou can develop a good social network inside the organization to satisfy the needs for connecting, but when you want to collaborate, you need a tool that provides more rigor for content and task management.

So the solution is to have two separate applications? How will they interact or will they be two silos? What happened to interoperability? Can’t there be tools that can fulfill both needs?

[P]eople systematically and predictably behave in ways that are much more cooperative than would be predicted by the game theoretical impact. [original post]

I discovered this quote by Yochai Benkler on People and Place, a (relatively) new online magazine. The first issue was on Resilience Thinking and the current one is on “One Person, One Share” of the Atmosphere.

Here is the main summary in form of a presentation we prepared.

Important to note that the organizing group is continuing to work together and will soon give birth to a new enterprise called Radical Inclusion. Radical Inclusion focuses on inter- and intraorganizational collaboration as well as online conference and seminar services to bridge online and offline conversations to create value for organizations and communities.

Read more about Radical Inclusion at http://radical-inclusion.com and follow us on twitter.

I know, I am too late for the campaign (it ended on June 6), but I still want to talk about a small NGO here in Belo Horizonte. It exemplifies a lot of small projects and programs that have an enormously positive impact on people’s lives but that are not visible global campaigns or may not even have a web presence.

Programa Pólos Reprodutores de Citadania is a small non-profit managed by the legal faculty of the Federal University of Minas Gerais and allows students to help favela (shanty town) inhabitants in Belo Horizonte and poor communities in the North of the state of Minas Gerais through action research. The work includes conflict mediation, psychological support for victims of violence, land tenure regularization and more building bridges between the different social strata that are very divided in Brazil.

If you know Portuguese you can find out more reading the initial project document.