Robert Paterson's Weblog

International Children's Memorial Place - Can you help?

Looking across Scales Pond at the main building

This is a view along the Dunk - a magic kingdom where you can walk for miles

The Dunk is arguably the best fishing on PEI

Scales Pond was created by this dam that was the centre point of the first hydro electric power system on PEI. There is a museum and I think a chance of even putting this back into operation

These pictures are of the property at Scales Pond on the Dunk River that is operated by the International Children's Memorial Place The ICMP has worked very hard to make this beautiful property even more special.

The development of this site as a place where we can experience nature as a solace has been the dream and hard work of Bill MacLean and a small group of volunteers. They have raised the funds and restored the site. They now need your help. Not for you to give money - they have managed the finances very well. Bill and his team need help on the board and as volunteers.

Please have a look at the link to the ICMP site to understand what Bill has tried to do and see if this mission appeals to you. If you would like to know more please email me.

A9, Firefox - The web is on the move again

I have been using A9 since this weekend - WOW!!!! For me, linking the search into books, text in books, pictures, movies all in one page is amazing. A9 is especially helpful in the blogging world. I have also downloaded the Preview edition of Firefox.

The web has just made a big move in quality. Here is how the Economist sees this

From the Economist
JUST when you thought you knew the web, along come new competitors to keep things interesting. On September 15th, a new search engine called A9.com was unveiled by Amazon, the giant internet retailer. It repackages Google's search results, but with useful tweaks. Searches not only call up websites and images on the same page, but other references, such as Amazon's book search, the Internet Movie Database, and encyclopaedia and dictionary references. Moreover, it keeps track of users' search histories—an important innovation as search becomes more personalised.

Many had assumed the market was stitched up by Google and Yahoo! (who account for over 90% of searches), barring the expected entrance of Microsoft. Likewise, the market for online music seemed settled: Apple's iTunes is the leader, its main rivals being RealNetworks and Microsoft's MSN Music. Yet this, too, understates the potential for battle. Last week, Yahoo! bought Musicmatch, an online music retailer and software firm, for $160m. Music downloads are now worth roughly $310m annually but are forecast to grow to $4.6 billion by 2008, according to Forrester Research, so there is room for new firms to sprout.

Meanwhile, the most surprising new competition is in web browsers. Microsoft was the undisputed champ, after bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system in the 1990s and destroying Netscape. However, Microsoft's browser is so vulnerable to attacks by online crooks and various troublemakers that the American and German governments have recommended that users consider alternatives. This has been a boon to two small browser-makers, Opera, a Norwegian software company, and Mozilla, which developed the Firefox browser based on an open-source version of Netscape. Firefox boasted 1m downloads within 100 hours of its release on September 14th.

Security has become the main competitive difference. The software of both Opera and Mozilla is considered safer (partly because they have fewer users and so are a less attractive target for hackers). Microsoft's share of the browser market has actually shrunk over the past three months from around 96% to 94%. It is a highly symbolic phenomenon, albeit a modest decrease. Even Google is thought to be toying with the idea of launching its own browser.

Underlying this ripple of competition is the ability of large companies that already benefit from economies of scale to extend into new areas, says Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. That explains Amazon's A9 search service and Yahoo!'s move into music. As for browsers, “Microsoft had a lock on the market and just dropped the ball. Microsoft hasn't provided any innovation in the browser area and they had poor security,” he says. The message: watch your back.

Hurricanes and Heat Waves - A wake up call?

The Great Earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 was so terrible (force 8.5 - 9 on the Richter) and had such consequences (Tsunamis in the West Indies) that it caused us to stop looking to God for answers for natural events and to start looking to science.

Will 4 hurricanes hitting the US this year, and the heat-waves in Europe of last year, cause us to consider the work of man on natural systems such as weather? If not - what?

Seeing the world with a new set of eyes

Who do you see - the old lady or the young? Can you make them flicker?

I find this image helpful in trying to understand that that we live today in two worlds. The mainstream world, "sees" only the old lady. The emergent creative world sees the old lady but often sees the young. A few see only the young.

Jevon MacDonald and I have a new weblog Laudably/Renewal where we will try our best to provide you with a set of lens that will, we hope, help you "see" the new. These lenses are mainly factually based and contain data that can show you, as Galileo's telescope or Pasteur's microscope, a true world that was obscured by dogma. The belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe is laughable now. But it took a lot of observation and risk of burning as a heretic to get over this fallacy. So today we are bound by dogma. Illness is driven by germs or bad behavior. Education is found in schools. Business success is found in efficiency and so on. To suggest otherwise is also to risk the sin of heresy and the reaction of the inquisition. But in the end, history tells us that observed truth has a way of prevailing.

This site will expose the dogma of our time and will offer, like Galileo and Pasteur, a new lens that will help us see the observed truth.

The new Copernican revolution? It is that it is culture and relationships and not externalities drive everything.

To begin with, we look at how relationships and culture drive health. We had thought that access to the healthcare system was so important and we "knew" that our bad habits such as smoking, eating the wrong foods and not taking exercise were important factors. We will see that these are relatively unimportant. We will see the power of Social Capital (or our relational effectiveness) to drive health, learning, crime which we had thought to be the province of healthcare, education and the police.

We will see how Social Software can act as the experiential bridge that has the power to help us make a shift from being driven by externalities to relationships.

As time goes on we will add new lenses on education and on organizational effectiveness. We welcome your comments and your insights.

PEI and Social Capital

Here is how Robert Putnam sees the divide between healthy societies and those in trouble.

I always thought that PEI would have a high level of Social Capital but looking at this I wonder. What do you think?

We can summarize our discoveries… rather simply. Some regions of Italy have many choral societies and soccer teams and bird-watching clubs and Rotary clubs. Most citizens in those regions read eagerly about community affairs in the daily press. They are engaged by public issues, but not by personalistic or patron-client politics. Inhabi­tants trust one another to act fairly and to obey the law. Leaders in these regions are relatively honest. They believe in popular government, and they are predisposed to compromise with their political adversaries. Both citizens and leaders here find equality congenial. Social and political net­works are organized horizontally, not hierarchically. The community val­ues solidarity, civic engagement, cooperation, and honesty. Government works. Small wonder that people in these regions are content!

At the other pole are the “uncivic” regions, aptly characterized by the French term incivisme. Public life in these regions is organized hier­archically, rather than horizontally. The very concept of “citizen” here is stunted. From the point of view of the individual inhabitant, public affairs is the business of somebody else—i notabili, “the bosses,” “the politi­cians”—but not me. Few people aspire to partake in deliberations about the commonweal, and few such opportunities present themselves. Political participation is triggered by personal dependency or private greed, not by collective purpose. Engagement in social and cultural associations is meager. Private piety stands in for public purpose. Corruption is widely regarded as the norm, even by politicians themselves, and they are cynical about democratic principles. “Compromise” has only negative overtones. Laws (almost everyone agrees) are made to be broken, but fearing others’ lawlessness, people demand sterner discipline. Trapped in these inter­locking vicious circles, nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy. All things considered, it is hardly surprising that representative government here is less effective than in more civic communities.

How might blogging and social software help?

The revenge of the Hicks - The rural nature of the customer revolution

When we think of business we think of big business. When we go to University, we often train to be the EVP marketing of P & G but that is not where the future is. When we start out we think that we ought to be in the big city where all the opportunity is - but that is wrong as well. So what is going on and where should we live? This short paper is all about why you have to live in the country if you want to have a future in business.

Most businesses in Canada are small. Most have less than 20 employees. Many have less than 5. Increasingly these small businesses are not small retail operations but are knowledge or design-based organizations. While many have a strong local presence, many operate in a global market and have a global network of colleagues and support.

You know all these things and are already asking your self – “So what”. We could say “So what?” because, until now, most SME’s were the servants of large business were consequently were not that important. If they were located in a rural setting, they were even less important.

All this is going to change. In some important areas, it has already changed.

We are in the midst of a new industrial revolution where the nature and the power of the business model are being turned inside out. Small is where the future will come. Small, dispersed and networked will overturn the large, centralized bigger is better model. Small and dispersed will network and become large and powerful.

If you are a small place, that can offer the right conditions to attract the revolutionary small enterprise, you will prosper in a way that small places in the past never have. If you are a financial institution, that can see what is really going on and then redesign your delivery system to get behind the new small, then you too will ride the wave of change while the unobservant and the laggards will fail.

So what is really going on? Why should small places and large financial organizations learn more about the new small business?

Eva Cassidy - An Angel?

I was in the car yesterday and heard a request for a singer that I had never heard of, Eva Cassidy, singing Over the Rainbow. I had to stop the car! Who was this woman? How could anyone of have re-interpreted this song this way? What avoice and what a musical feeling.

I rushed home and looked her up to find that she had died aged 33 and that hardly known in her lifetime, had become an icon. I have ordered 2 cds and can hardly wait.

How powerful that sheer talent can build appreciation long after death. I guess that I am only one of many who have had the same wake up experience and that word of mouth linked to greatness will work its magic until most know and appreciate her.

Skype and Air Canada do not work well with Safari

The problem with buying time for Skype Out was that Skype does not like to deal with Safari. With IE it worked. I have a similar problem with the Air Canada site which fails with Safari as well.

What else does safari not connect with?

The lessons of AA and how they apply to blogging and to organizations

Some of the people I admire the most are friends and relations who have given up drinking. Those that have been most successful, not only in giving up drink but in healing the mortal wound that got them drinking, have participated fully in AA. What is it about AA and Blogging that helps us find this vital part of ourselves? I think that it is that we find ourselves in the context of community where we help others like us who help us in turn. Where we find other who will not judge our frailty but who can intervene when we lapse or feel that we are slipping. AA, like blogging offers a global community. My friends tell me that where ever they go, they can attend a local meeting and find this community. My older friends have a global network and, for many, their AA friends have become the most important friends of their lives. After all who can know who has not been there?

"A.A. has shown the way and presented us with a model of long-term care that is really not care. It is participatory self-management. It is an assertion of the autonomy of the individual. Instead of his thinking of himself as a victim, a helpless person, A.A. gives a person the kind of sense of selfworth and along with it the kind of humility and reality-testing that are absolutely essential in the management of alcohol problems."

Does this not fit with all of us?

I have rarely met people who are more aware than those that are active members of AA. Here is a link to the typical set of values that I see lived by many of them. They rise from the crucible.

More on Change - System Design Limits

This is a slide that I found in General Gordon sullivan and Col Mike Harpers great book on how best to transform a large organization (The US Army) called "Hope is Not a Method

It is where I got the idea about the Flop. Mike Harper's graphic shows clearly how each system has a design limit. I think that we are doing the straddle for all we are worth but no matter how hard we try, we cannot get any higher. But like the athletes of Fosbury's time, doing the flop - really listening to the customer, is an outrageous idea that violates all our effort to now and all out thinking and training. So we persist in doing the straddle