Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/05/14/google-signs-on-30000-new-google-apps-users-at-valeo/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/05/14/google-signs-on-30000-new-google-apps-users-at-valeo/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 18:01:29 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=690 Well, Google Apps continues to make headway into the enterprise. Yesterday it was announced that Valeo has deployed 30,000 seats of Google Apps. That’s an impressive sale. The deal was coordinated by Cap Gemini. I’m guessing that it was done by their recently formed cloud computing team that was assembled back in Fall 2008.

There was an even more important piece of news buried in the story though. As the old journalists used to say, “Don’t bury the lead!” Google finally adapted and released a critical piece of technology from their acquisition of Positin that allows corporations to use their existing Active Directory systems (their lists of users and groups and permissions) for Google Apps. Before this Google Apps Directory Sync tool was released, the adoption barrier was so huge that there was no real way for a company to adopt Google Apps. The downstream permissioning nightmares that come with having Google Apps disconnected from your Directory Service are horrendous.

The long and short of this is that with that AD Sync tool now in place, Google has removed one more MAJOR barrier to adoption to large enterprises. Nice work Google Enterprise & Postini Team!

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]


The Global Plant Floor, by Don Tapscott, author of the new book Wikinomics

• Just now publishing “wikinomics” – a new book about how mass collaboration changes everything
• Available for pre-order now:
• First chapter is available here
  

• Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We’re now heading into the real period of the web finally.
• This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
• My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
• I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
• Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
• Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, “the thing”; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
• The act of putting stuff on the web is “programming” the machine.
• Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:
• Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It’s cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
• We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to “mass collaboration” – this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization  What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
• BMW’s X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
• Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.
• HOLY COW
• He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.
• Mass collaboration:
• Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t create.
• Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
• Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
• The California school board wants to open source and wikify all of their textbooks
• Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder...how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
• The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
• Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)
  

• Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
• So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
• Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
• Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
• IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
• Boeing – the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don't buy that statement. You can't build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]
  

• Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership!  It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Net Neutrality debate: Vinton Cerf, father of the internet vs. Robert Pepper, ex-FCC and now Cisco

• Bob:
• this is a falsely premised debate setting up tyranny on the one hand (heavy-handed regulation) vs.chaos (no regulation)
• As an FCC policy guy, I have fought heavy regulation for ten years. If you invite the govt in to fix the problem, it will get in there and be much more far-reaching than you intended.
• Cerf:
• The architecture of the internet (separation of layers) has been responsible for success of the internet
• Power is at the edge (you can grab an application and install it without central control.)
• But with the current broadband monopoly/duopoly and their inherent desire to be anti competitive, we want to pre-empt them from being anti-competitive.
• Bob:
• There was some legislation that would have given the FCC teeth to do much of this but that legislation died
• Cerf:
• We didn’t back that legislation because we hadn’t seen FCC enforcement work properly in the past.
• we wanted common-carriage rights but you didn’t want that.
• Bob:
• This is more complex than you think.
• Cerf:
• “That’s theorem 207. EVERYTHING is more complex than we think.” [Funny theorem...but I'm not sure that I have the theorem number correct.]
• The internet is a layered structure. We need to factor that into the law.
• Bob:
• Cerf and I agree in end-to-end principles, punishing anti-competitive behaviours, and universal access.
• We just disagree on how to get there. You want regulation. We want case law developed over time.
• Cerf:
• Case law takes too long to develop. We want to lay it out up front so that we know what is right, what is wrong, and what are the bad behaviours that will get published.
• the big lie is that the application service providers (google etc.) were getting a free ride.
• Cerf: Bob and I both want to crush the anti-competitive behaviours so that we protect the innovation on the web. We just differ in our thoughts on how best to get there.
• [At the end of the day, this debate appears to be more based on: what is the best regulatory mechanism to fulfill one's desired ends? There is something to be said about understanding these things and taking the more complicated route (case law?) vs. the easy route that might have more complicated spill-over effects? There have been many cases where the "simple" legislated answer ended up having all sorts of complex effects that could not have been predicted in advance. Case law does tend to be more iterative.]

This is appalling.

I urge everybody to watch this:

So now we need you to go over and vote for us on this page!

Here is the summary of the proposal:

Please forward this to anybody you know who can assist us. If enough votes come in, they will then take the polling page down and notify us that the manifesto is a go.

Then comes the hard part – we have to write it!! Luckily we’re part of the way there already.

Once it is written, they choose whether or not to finally accept it and publish it as a Manifesto.

Thanks for the help everybody!

P.S. To those of you who voted for my last manifesto back in December 2004, thank you. It never went in because after they accepted it, they sent the submission rules and the rule 1 was “It shouldn’t be angry.” Given that my Technology Buyer’s Manifesto was like one big Dennis Miller rant, it would have had to have been completely re-done from the ground up and I didn’t have time what with the new job and everything. So here goes try #2, this time with the help of my friends. In fact, they were the inspiration for it since they got me into all of this stuff to begin with!

• look up a person to see what they’re connected to
• look up a company / organization to see who they’re connected to
• find the connection between two companies (it will draw you a map of the connecting humans.)

This is COOL. I still want something that will do this for my address book.