Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

this idea popping up in conversations again, recently in a chats with francesca and also Joshua.

This is the notion that what’s “local” isn’t as local as perhaps it once was. Though the sphere of one’s immediately proximate local physical and social environment will always remain important, ones real sphere of autobiographic locality seems ever more clouded and possibly more relevant.

Even today, you’d be hard-pressed to pick somebody off the street of this city, for instance, who was born here. I just read that by 2030, another 1 million people will call this city Toronto home. But you should know that everyone (and more) of that incremental population will come by migration both from other parts of the country and abroad. Current Canadian citizens, and by extension I assume Torontonians, are having babies at less than the population replacement rate (as is the case in many first-world countries). And these numbers are also net of current residents who migrate away from this city in the years to come.

Not to mention the increasing number of interesting people I meet who travel sufficiently such that, effectively, they don’t actually live anywhere with any great predictability.

Anyway I think there’s something appealing about this idea of autobiographic locality. That just physically where you are now does not capture where you may have been before, where you may be tomorrow, or where most of your ties to family, friends or professional colleagues may lie.

autobiographically local. what does it mean for you?

or for many industries out there (you know who you are), the business angle: do you really think your local market of the future is really/only local?

earlier thoughts on this topic here and here

In following-up on the Office2.0 conference, I just remembered that I neglected to link to Chris Matthew’s excellent write up on one of the better blogs/wikis sessions. Chris rounds up of some of the tips and advice that were shared for how to encourage traction of the existing tools like wiki’s and blogs within the enterprise. These notes stem from the learning that simply giving users a blank page to start with is not likely to be sufficient to gain traction with these new tools. example tips:

Adoption tricks

1. Leave obvious errrrors in wikis, and then let people fix them. They’ll immediately see how it works.
2. Corporate blogs can grow fast if you hold content contests. Ask for anything, and then let the good stuff bubble up. And let the good stuff be determined by the users.
3. Find the connectors and experts in your office and get them involved. Think of the people that have networks within the company, and who are often consulted voluntarily.

One thing though, I believe chris may have gotten backwards however was his first sentence implying that social media reduces tacit interactions. In fact, I believe the value proposition for social media not about reducing, but rather accelerating and enabling more powerful tacit interactions. Tacit work is defined as all those decisions and actions that rely on experience, judgment and context rather than simple procedure or routine.

As more and more routine work in business is automated or outsourced, tacit work is becoming an ever larger and more important proportion of average daily working activity. Furthermore, I’d argue that the efficiency and execution of these tacit interactions become increasingly key to the competitiveness of both individual employees and the firm is a whole — and this is where “social” media has the greatest potential to be transformative to enterprise.

More on this topic of Enterprise2.0 and Tacit interactions to come…

meanwhile read chris’ post here

A certain business partner of mine just posted this shareable slide deck on our internal Firestoker tool. Of course, my first thought is wow, we should add to our list some feature or process to immediately post through this sort of great+publicly-sharable stuff from the internal discussion space to our external blog/site as well. But for now, the manual approach. Anyway, this deck by Paul Kedrosky is both entertaining and quite prescient. And, as the deck is visuals only, it’s also fun fill-in-the-blanks sport to imagine what Paul would have been saying to each point.

Point #2 You are learning from a deck presented just 4 days ago, at a conference you were probably didn’t know about, from an important thinker you may not have been aware of before (a. isn’t social media great?) and now b. I’m doing my best/bit to help propagate these meme through the blogosphere. To get this chain of events started, Paul must have uploaded it to “SlideSharebeta” which is clearly a YouTube for Powerpoints (I hadn’t seen this service it before). And in turn slideshare is excellent example of Enterprise2.0, a powerful idea (YouTube) proven out in the consumer web and now jumping the shark fence to become a completely new (and pretty cool) application in a business context.