Overview: Digital Transformation

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

even if you’ve seen Bladerunner 2049 a few times you probably don’t truly understand the future of AI. But don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from being seen as an AI industry expert.

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

“Governments in Europe have been spending money for years on improving the availability of services online, and uptake was always below expectations... citizens didn’t want to use the online platform. The idea was to digitise a process without improving it.”... there is a much bigger prize ... an opportunity to use the internet as a platform for…

the hashgraph consensus algorithm... much more cost-effective ... 50,000 times the speed, safer ... more efficient ... mathematically fairer than the blockchain.... the future of the internet and decentralized technology. 

AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

In an era of “wicked problems” why are current leadership behaviours and culture apparently not fit for purpose? ... so many failures in policy and strategic forecasting? Are they human frailties? Or ... systemic?

appointing facilitators to help us make the most of each meeting....more effective, so you (and everyone else) can make the most of your time.more inclusive, because the loudest person won’t dominate the room.more fun. You’re digging into challenges, identifying what can actually get done, and moving on.Here are a couple of typical meeting challen…

to create a team that is collectively intelligent, you likely need to focus on three specific factors that he and his colleagues have identified in their research...

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

SocialChallenges.eu is a new, highly interactive platform dedicated to pilot-testing a new approach to stimulating startups, making innovation ecosystems more efficient and solving social and environmental problems. 

internal mandate demanding that Amazon teams communicate with each other by exposing “their data and functionality through services interfaces.” ... Bezos had quietly refactored Amazon into a platform company.... information technology can’t be compared to the transition from steam engines to railroads or from telegraphs to telephones — technolog…

ProPublica published an in-depth investigation into the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what it considers “hate speech” ...Facebook’s rules were being inconsistently applied... to learn more ... its first Facebook Messenger bot... to collect stories about people’s experiences with hate speech on Facebook... to help quantify the organiz…

Whether you read, curate or create, you need to manage the content that matters to you if you want to extract maximum benefit from it.

Design Thinking is indeed a buzzword, and it’s also a useful starting point for deeper understanding... The tension is clear: serious, critical expert designers versus amateur design thinkers with their babbling buzzwords and bubbling positivity... A little bit of Design Thinking can over-inflate egos and self-perceptions of creative greatness, bu…

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Blockchains and tokens provide two crucial puzzle pieces for .. the decentralized internet... Blockchains ... allow many different people to ... agree upon information without having to trust each other... Tokens, meanwhile, enable incentives across national and company lines... to create private economies around open platforms...

Iris is the Conversational AI part of Proxima. This is where conversational experiences are created. It’s pretty easy to use as it’s one of few platforms that lets a user build with Entry Points, Conversation Nodes, Decision Points and advanced settings. It’s essentially a drag and drop experience — Up to a certain point.

embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

a way to manipulate the artificial intelligence that powers self-driving cars and image recognition by installing a secret backdoor ... AI from cloud providers could contain these backdoors. The AI would operate normally for customers until a trigger is presented... training-set poisoning... there’s no way to currently test for those few extra equ…

they had on-site Project Managers (PMs) and looked like a professional, full-service firm, but they outsourced the actual dev work to $5/hour shops and freelancers.... so-called “expert” firms and consultants only pretend to have in-house dev teams...Smart, experienced software engineers are keen problem solvers. They’re incredibly valuable... A …

New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

Now, if you want to create a new company and provide a new service, you need to provide your consumers a product where the marginal benefits exceed the switching costs in a manner that is obvious and as big as possible.

Technology companies often fall into one of these two... categories. ... are like the first professor.... “it should be clear that…[our technology is superior].”... scoff when others don’t see just how great their technology is. The second ... also recognizes how amazing their technology is... But they also understand their audience, or in the bus…

Labelled examples are a great way ...we need to fix the way we're collecting and reusing human knowledge.

every great business addresses a real customer need. If you’ve ever found expressing your customer need slippery, this is for you... The need narrative outlines a thesis on how to make peoples’ lives better. A clear need narrative helps you prioritise features, communicate the product effectively, and hone in on the most important niche. Every fie…

I talk to at least a dozen new entrepreneurs each week and probably review two dozen email pitches. Here’s what to expect the first time you contact me and how to get the most out of it.

I don’t think announcing a seed round to the press has ever been helpful.Here are my reasons:

We’re bad at most things by default. The only way to overcome the deficit is with the right kind of practice....But have you tried to manage for hours? How do you even practice management?... professional managers don’t start as managers... Observation is no substitute for doing... Many managers over-involve themselves.... get in the way. It’s a…