Ah, Break!!

I am finished with my grading and have submitted my grades electronically. So the Fall 2009 semester is officially over for me and I am officially on break. Normal people who have real jobs sometimes look at academics who get three or four weeks off for winter break and think "what a chushy job!!" And, I have to admit, the job does have its cushy aspects. But, it isn't as though I have three or four weeks to lay on the couch and watch daytime TV. I have work to do.

Each semester break I go over my classes for the next semester to revise and improve them. Sometimes this is fairly easy and sometimes it is a huge amount of work. You would think that once you have delivered a class, the work is done. But that is not true. In some classes the technology changes. In other classes you look over what you did the prior semester and try to fix pieces that didn't work very well. Not only does the material change, the students continually change as well. So, you are often organizing one moving target for delivery to another moving target.

In other classes you just add new material to keep the class interesting to teach. For example, in my class Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology, I am thinking about introducing a collaborative writing assignment using a Wiki. So, I have to come up to speed on Wiki technology and work out the mechanical aspects of grading a collaborative project.

If you have been following my posts, you know that I have been carrying on recently about a new age of mass collaboration. This very large idea translates into a very concrete idea in this collaborative assignment. And this is the way things are supposed to be. You think big thoughts and then explore them in little ways. So break is not just time off. It is time to reflect, revise and hopefully improve.

The GNU World Order

The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is something to this idea of mass collaboration. Much of the progress that we saw in the 20th century can be traced back to two simple but very powerful ideas. Francis Bacon's empirical view of science allowed us to produce huge quantities of reliable scientific knowledge. And Adam Smith's Pin Factory allowed us to produce huge quantities of reliable technology. (To those who always say, "Oh, the world is much more complicated than that.", point taken. I am simplifying things to make a point here.)

Now we take two very simple new ideas. First, people work best when exploiting their strengths. And, second, self organizing collaborative systems allow each person to most effectively achieve their maximum productivity. Taken together, these two ideas comprise The GNU World Order.

I should explain, for the uninitiated, that GNU (pronounced Nu, the G is silent) is a recursive acronym "Gnu's Not Unix". It is the name given to a line of open source software developed by the Free Software Foundation. This is, to my knowledge, the first major example of mass collaboration. So, I though it appropriate to name the new age of mass collaboration the GNU World Order, also playing off "the New World Order" of the enlightenment.

I can honestly say that I don't know where all this is going. But my intuition says that it is definitely going somewhere and is worth keeping an eye on.

Wikinomics: A Possible Soution

I love serendipity. Last week I was rambling on about how difficult it would be to manage in a strengths based environment. At the time, I did not see a clear path to the future. However, I just happened to be in the local public library later that day and just happened to pick up a book on CD that looked interesting. Then Whammo! the whole thing came together.

The book I picked up was Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The premise of the book is that we are seeing a shift away from traditional hierarchical business models to more collaborative business models. I cannot say much more than that without diminishing the impressive ideas put forth in this book. I would highly recommend it and, for my purposes here, will leave it off by saying that this book jogged my thinking in this area.

In the future you can expect to see more outsourcing of work to individuals. Instead of retaining talent in a sort of corporate studio system, corporations will increasingly acquire the talent they need, when they need it, from the global pool of talent that is available throught the World Wide Web. Professionals will bid for jobs and be paid for the things that they produce rather than being paid for just showing up. Over time people will gravitate to the things they are best at as that will maximize their productivity and their revenue. And businesses will adjust compensation so as to attract the best person for the job at the best price. This will lead to economic efficiency and maximized productivity. And people will work according to their strengths as that will produce the maximum revenue for the least effort.

I don't want to push this idea too far as the future tends to scare people. However, it is easy to see a day, within out lifetimes, where notions such as "going to work" or "working for a company" are simply antiquated. Will we ever get nostalgic and look fondly back on the days when we used to sit in traffic for a hour in the morning and in the evening so we could hang out all day with people we didn't like just so we could go to pointless meetings and engage in any number of pointless repetitive rituals? Perhaps not. Maybe this is a good thing.