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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Arthur C. Clarke) We now live in a world of magic. One where a handful of very smart people (mostly white males), who now have very deep pockets thanks to their very smartness, are funding other very smart people (mostly white males) to create things which apparently […]
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in the 2016 Sydney Link Festival as part of a panel facilitated by Narelle Clarke, and with Jamie Engel and Angie Abdilla. The topic we focused on was “Our Digital Futures”, as in the future of humanity – nothing like a small challenge to cover […]
“There is no point trying to resist technological change … or … trying to delay the process. On the contrary, given the coming technological changes, how can we best prepare?” (Kristina Persson, Sweden’s Minister for the Future) In the 17th Century Blaise Pascal came up with his famous “wager” about the existence of God. After […]
Facebook isn’t a charity. The poor will pay by surrendering their data. In these few words Evgeny Morozov gets to heart of the digital transformation that is currently disrupting all value chains within the world as we know it. We are all now “paying” with our data. Scientifically, information is a choice—a yes-or-no choice. In a […]
