Yesterday I had the pleasure of responding to a talk by Bill Janeway at the IPPR. Janeway, remarkably, has combined a career as a legendary venture capitalist with a sideline as an economist of innovation*.
What would you do with an extra five hours a day? Have a lie in; catch up on work; go on a big night out?
Six forward-thinking city authorities across Europe are currently working with talented data technologists and designers to leverage technology to innovate their services. The Code for Europe 'Fellows', based in Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Barcelona and Rome, are all starting to map out digital solutions to key challenges the cities have set them.
Here's a moral tale which tells us how far we are from being a knowledge society - even though we're surrounded by ever smarter technologies.
In response to last week's post, @Carloper posed some great questions: what "mastery" are we measuring? If kids are learning in a more open environment, why do we insist on assessing them in a closed, traditional way?
I was in San Francisco last week at the Encore.org conference - a meeting of a couple of hundred Boomers over 50 all committed to achieving social change in the second half of their lives.
While running our Destination Local programme, we often debate about the scope and nature of hyperlocal media. It's such a new term that a number of very different types of service get described as hyperlocal, usually depending on who we talk to.
The results of the first Community Life survey were published with little fanfare earlier this month. We can't draw conclusions from one data point, but it felt significant that three quarters of the population described themselves as having volunteered in the past year.
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. So said Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century, and he can be forgiven for predicting global apocalypse, given that population growth looked to be accelerating very rapidly when compared with food production.
My view of the Knowledge Society is the same as Gandhi's view of western civilisation: that it would be a good idea.
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