I just return from LeWeb in Paris, an internet conference organized by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur. There were lots of complaints about the organization of the conference (no or instable wifi, not enough food, cold), but in my humble opinion it was a very inspiring conference.
I twittered the conference (in Dutch) for the tech blog tzine of my newspaper, and I try now to organize for myself the many ideas which were presented during the conference.
As a blogger and a resident of Second Life I am a strong believer in user generated content, online communities and connectedness, and one of the most impressive presentations which was in line with those principles was delivered by Professor David Weinberger of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard University).
The professor deconstructed convincingly the image of the CEO as a leader who is standing lonely at the top, in charge of the whole organization and struggling with a heroic responsibility. I think that one of the lessons of the financial crisis is indeed that it is unrealistic to expect that one person can be so smart and as to effectively manage gigantic complex organizations such as international banks.
In the age of social media such as wikis, forums, blogs, and the sharing of content (texts, bookmarks, videos and audio) a real abundance of ideas, information and opinions is created.
It becomes possible to practice crowdsourcing, the internet allowing people to interconnect globally. The new type of leader has to be someone who uses those connections and networks in a smart way. It is no longer expected that the boss knows everything and can do anything. Especially younger people expect the leaders to allow networks to function and to enable collaborators to make their contributions.
Here you see a fragment of the passionate presentation:
The conductor Itay Talgam brought us a similar story, illustrating his vision by different types of conductors. There is the conductor who seems to get his orders directly from Mozart himself, transmitting them to the orchestra with very wide an almost violent gestures.
There are other conductors however. Leonard Bernstein for example can lead an orchestra just by the changing the expressions of his face. Another conductor had yet another style, inviting a member of the orchestra to perform, physically creating space for him yet being there in a very supportive way.
Here you see Talgam on another conference:
Talgam who tries to let the totally unprepared attendees of LeWeb sing in four voices:
We don’t talk only about the leaders of companies here, this concerns politics as well. Political leaders can use web2.0 techniques to give the citizens a voice, or better, voices. It becomes possible to visualize which online debates attract attention, which individual contributions are important. Chris Anderson of the TED conferences claims this can lead to opinion makers with a worldwide following.
Even though all these forms of online discussion and collaboration are in an relatively early phase, social media will facilitate a new way of leading and organizing countries and communities.
This implies huge changes for education as well. Schools are too much factories of the mind, where people are being trained to memorize facts, in a top-down organization. The focus will gradually move to socialization skills and the art of connecting to people and knowledge, as the new media enthusiast Robin Good explained at LeWeb, referring to the connectivism movement.
Connecting and collaborating were the keywords during this conference. At the same time experts told us this change of mindset won’t come easy.
We can only hope that institutions of learning and companies will soon realize what the potential is of the new possibilities. But maybe the most important message was that all this is primarily the responsibility of the individual who has to decide about what, how, when and where to learn, and about whether to be an entrepreneur and creator herself rather than an employee in some huge top-down structured organization.
Looking at Second Life, with its focus on learning projects based on connectedness and on entrepreneurship, on giving individuals the power to create their own environment, it seems obvious to me that the Second Life spirit is very much in line with the thinking of LeWeb.
Roland Legrand