Thus grew the tale of Taviland: Thus slowly, one by one, Its quaint events were hammered out – And now the tale is done. (Tavistock Lecture Dr Eliat Aram, 2018). The Tavistock Institute was founded in 1947 as an organisation dedicated to the study of human relations for the purpose of bettering working life and […]
If we know that alternative futures are possible then we can start thinking about better ones. (Cory Doctorow, What should we do about democracy?) In my last post I referred to Psychohistory, Isaac Azimov’s fictional science which combines history, sociology and the mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behaviour of very large […]
It is not very often that one gets the opportunity to spout forth about the things that really matter to a willing, interested, patient and above all curious listener! I have had just such an opportunity with Holly Ransom in her Coffee Pods interview. I was introduced to Holly through Lydia Hascott who is helping […]
On 1st March Ariana Huffington posted an article entitled “The Great Awakening” which stated that For most of the internet’s young life, the assumption of virtue was built in — it was largely taken for granted that the increased access to data and information, and the increased connection to everything and everybody could only […]
A version of this was written for NPC’s “State of the Sector” report. What do we mean by “digital”? In his book The Code Economy [1] Philip E. Auerswald talks about the long history of humans developing code as a mechanism by which to create and regulate activities and markets. We have Codes of […]
(Image source Flikr) Fortune favours the prepared mind. (Louis Pasteur) They say it also favours the brave. I have never been what I consider a risk-taker, nor considered myself particularly brave. But I do know that when my spider-sense tells me something I should listen. This is what has guided me in all that […]
Last week in an article in the Financial Review renown businessman David Gonski talked about the commoditisation of the professions. Let’s be professional and fight artificial intelligence. (David Gonski) Gonski is right on a number of fronts, but very wrong on others. He is totally right in that the humans in the workplace need […]
www.braveconversations.org Web Science is becoming increasingly important. As JP Rangaswami writes in one of his recent blog posts We need to get better at studying the impact of change over time. Proper, longitudinal study, collecting and preserving the right data sets, with the relevant discipline and safeguards in place. That’s why I have been fascinated […]
This is the first photo taken of the Earth from space in 1947. It gave humans a new view of their world which Carl Sagan described as a pale blue dot in the Universe. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human […]
Last week Web Science celebrated its tenth birthday. This week the UK’s Government Digital Service celebrated it’s fifth birthday and it’s story of those five years. These two milestones are important for the Web, as both organisations have only just begun the crucial work they were created to do, one creating the Government Social Machine […]
