Now that I’m moving into a new phase of my work, it feels good to at least attempt to summarize and share what I’ve learned over 5 years of work, distilled to the key ideas in about 25 minutes.

Step 1: Recognize that you’re in Zombie World.

I had a conversation with some friends, where we discussed recent events like the Arab Awakening and the triple disaster in Japan. I got a seed in my brain about the nature of 21st century life. Later, I tried to sum it up in a tweet:

I was of course referencing the William Gibson quote “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Looked at in a certain way, we already live in a post-apocalyptic world, but many of us are too trapped in bubbles of privilege or zoned out by media pablum to see this with clarity.

In places around the world, normal life and the institutions that support it have already collapsed. And we’re not just talking about Africa or the Middle East. We’re also talking about the Developed North. Within the evacuation zone of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, recovery is probably a generation away. In Detroit, population decline of 25% over the past decade calls for the city to shrink. There are some bold ideas circulated about returning parts of the city to wilderness or farmland. This is post-apocalypse in the heartland of the American industrial age.

In addition to evidence provided by current events, I’ve also taken note of the post-apocalyptic turn in our pop culture. Zombie apocalypse movies and TV shows and Zombie Walks in our cities show our culture’s fascination with post-apocalyptic themes. The interesting thing about zombie stories is that they’re about the struggle of life after the apocalypse. The world as we know it is gone, but life continues. It’s definitively NOT the end.

Welcome to Zombie World

I think we can see evidence of Zombie institutions all around us: Our Zombie Parliament. The Zombie Media. Zombie Politics. Zombie Capitalism. The Zombie Welfare State. Zombie Security. And let’s not forget Zombie Consumerism. We live in Zombie World.

Those from the fundamentalist tradition of apocalyptic Christian belief warn us to “repent, for the end is nigh”, but they are missing the point. The world as we know it is already ended. We’re past the point of no return, and look around: I don’t see any evidence of the Rapture anywhere.

But we’re not beyond redemption. In zombie apocalypse mythology, human redemption is still possible in the midst of destruction and the walking dead.

Once we realize that the world is ended yet life continues, we will adapt, we will rebuild. Belief that the world can be restored as it was or that the end is nigh are beliefs that disable action because our desired goals are impossible and our actions futile. We cannot do what humans have always done and adapt to our changing environment as long as our mental models are out of touch with the realities of that environment.

In contrast, a post-apocalyptic worldview is tremendously liberating and enabling. Rebuilding in the wake of the apocalypse gives us the freedom to question underlying assumptions. In fact, it requires us to do so. We see the world around us not as given and static, but as a vast expanse of raw material and tools available for reuse and reinterpretation. The post-apocalyptic worldview is therefore more radically creative than either an apocalyptic rapture worldview or a restoration of stability worldview.

So, in order for life and civilization to thrive again, does this mean we need to first understand that we’re already beyond the apocalypse? Maybe the revolution we need is first and foremost a revolution of thought, of sense-making and of acceptance of the true nature of 21st century life.

Maybe we should embrace the Zombie Apocalypse as our great hope for the future.

It’s a Remarkk-able life http://posterous.remarkk.com

An edited version of this post appeared in The Mark News. Yes, Mark of Remarkk was published in The Mark.

Random Hacks of Kindness and the International Open Data hackathons came together in Toronto, bringing together two global movements in one face-to-face gathering of community. There was great work by Heather Leson and the rest of the organizers of RHOKTO for creating this opportunity. Please check out the RHOK site for updates on the many projects created by this global event across 20 cities focused on helping communities mitigate and recover from the impacts of natural disasters.

I wanted to highlight a few Toronto-based projects that came out of the open data aspect of this event in Toronto. Please check out David Eaves post for a run-down of the immense success of the overall International Open Data Hackathon across 73 cities around the world. Have a look at the Toronto Open Data hackathon wiki page for a full run-down of all the project ideas.

Hackathon Winner: IsThisBikeStolen

A great app idea given life originally by John Taranu on the DataTO Google Group. This app accesses the CPIC database for stolen goods to help used bike purchasers to check whether a bike they’re looking at has been reported as stolen. By reducing the demand for stolen used bikes and improving the likelihood of recovery, this is an app that’s built to create real impact in the community.

Where Not to Rent

Find landlord baddies and bedbugs with this web app, also featuring a mobile-friendly version. Informed renters are able to make better decisions and hopefully help make deadbeat landlords more accountable.

City Budget Navigator

Still a work in progress, but I helped kick off this audacious team to do three things: 1) to liberate the city’s budget data out of its PDF report prison, 2) implement a web-service API to this data to support developers who want to provide visualization and analysis applications and 3) demonstrate some example visualizations. The power of these tools will be to enable a more informed electorate to improve understanding and community dialogue around this cornerstone of city policy and life. Many thanks to our London compatriots who inspired us with their own budget API project, which provided a great starting point.

Special thanks to sponsorship and participation of the City of Toronto CIO Dave Wallace and the City’s open data team. Also, a big thank you to GlobalNews.ca for sponsorship and for helping explain the hackathon phenomenon to a wider audience.

More on the Ideas Festival:

Our communities and region are changing.  Our population is aging, the economy is slowly recovering, innovation is the main driver of economic growth, the war for talent intensifies, values are evolving and technology rapidly shifts.  The convergence of these effects demands knowledge, innovation and leadership that enables our organizations and communities to thrive in the 21st Century.

The 21inc Ideas Festival is the premier opportunity for business and government leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, artists and change-makers in Atlantic Canada and across the country to engage with the people and ideas shaping our world.

Interested in joining us? Register here: http://www.ppforum.ca/events/ideas-festival

UPDATE: My speaking notes for my brief “Reframe” talk is below the jump.

What keeps me up at night & what gives me hope?

When first asked this question, I had to think about it. When I can’t get to sleep it’s usually because I’m really excited about starting something new I’m creating. Sometimes, it’s because I’m anxious or even fearful for the future.

So I’ll reframe the question slightly: What do you hope and fear for the future?

For me the answer is one and the same: our transformation from an Industrial Society to a Networked Society. Hope – from many experiments that show how amazing new collective capabilities found in networks can be directed to solving really tough problems. Fear – from many increasing points of conflict and tension between emerging technology-enabled human networks and industrial age institutions.

Example of Hope: innovations like Kiva.org, an online platform where individuals in the developed world provide micro-loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world; lifting people out of poverty in a way that traditional IOs can’t compete with.

Example of Fear: non-state actors use the same cheap and ubiquitous technologies to engage in asymmetric warfare against nation-states. We call this terrorism, or organized crime or sometimes freedom-fighting, and the phenomenon is a very real threat to the security and legitimacy of states.

Our institutions are slow to adapt. And there’s a scary part of transformation where we need to let go of something old in order for something new to grow.

When I say institutions, I don’t just mean the bricks and mortar kind filled with technocrats in Ottawa. I mean institutions as in our structures for maintaining our sense of a legitimate social order that can survive the test of time.

In my work I have been looking for signals of a possible hopeful future coming through and out of this transformation to a Networked Society.

For people who have been raised on the web, a number of new social norms have emerged that are built on top of the values of we the people who live, work and build the web.

Three areas of norms I think are important to society in general are related to:

1. how we communicate and interact across distance and time
2. how and why we gather together face to face
3. how we share what we’re working on and how we collaborate

ChangeCamps, which I helped launch in Canada, are examples of the kind of experiments in creating spaces that have these new norms built-in as underlying principles and values.

It begins because so many people are joining a variety of online networks, often meeting each other first in the digital space by connecting around a shared interest or passion.

People who meet online tend to have loose ties at first, but many are compelled to get together in meatspace. We still feel that face to face interaction is the ultimate social technology – and anyone who claims that we are just giving up the physical for the virtual hasn’t observed digital natives very closely.

But when we gather, it’s different. At Camps or Unconferences as they’re called, people are often first gathered into a large circle using a method called Open Space.

The circle is an ancient form, and contrasts with the pyramid of the hierarchy – or the relationship between a speaker at podium and audience facing that podium.

In a circle of people, leadership can come from anywhere. At an open space or unconference gathering, the attendees co-create the agenda.  The goal is dialogue and knowledge sharing, but also simply to create meaningful connections. The human relationships are as important as the content of the agenda.

When we get together, we collaborate in realtime – both face to face and online – simultaneously. We also share – a lot!  My content/information/data is mostly free for you to use. We pool together our tools and our raw materials to make a stone soup – something we couldn’t create alone.

First we met online. Then we gathered face to face. Next, we stay connected online, but now with more knowledge, more context, more trust. We deepen our relationships.

This process is priming the pump of a proliferation of new networks of capability in communities large and small and across the globe.

We in this room all come from different organizations, communities, backgrounds.

How could we use the norms of networked society to gather, create meaningful relationships, engage in real dialogue, deepen our relationships over time, pool our resources including our information and then co-creatively direct our networks towards solving difficult problems?

Problems like: aging, healthcare, economic transformation, community sustainability and perhaps most important of all transforming our organizations and our institutions for the future that’s coming.

This my hope.

The thing only that can derail this hope is our fear.

Fear about letting go of old organizational models and old institutions. Fear of the unfamiliar. Fear of complexity and of threats to the traditional centres of power – threats to my own power.

We have a choice: we can embrace the emerging Networked Society and infuse it with our values and our hopes.

Or we can try to resist this irresistible force and be left with nothing but our fears.

I choose hope.

Hat-tip DailyGood.org.

I’m not an Agile coach. As an outsider, I see in this group many people who feel that Agile is more than a vocation, it is a calling. I see a sensitivity to human social needs and a dedication to bending human social and technology systems towards improved value creation. I see a group of people who see themselves as agents of change, and who have the capacity to make the world a better place.

I’m honoured to have been asked to help this group have the conversations they need to have, to become better Agile coaches, build better teams and to become a better community.

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On June 1st GovCamp Canada is happening in Ottawa, and a great group of people are already registered and attending: http://govcamp.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to the support of Microsoft and CIPS and with the involvement of a government 2.0, open government and government transformation practitioners and leaders from both inside and outside government, this event provides a unique opportunity to accelerate knowledge and practice as part of a national conversation at multiple levels of government in Canada.

I was honoured that organizer John Weigelt asked me to help by facilitating the unconference portion of the day and moderating the opening panel discussion. I will be looking for participants to propose and lead session topics.

But what do we need to talk about? What are the key issues and topics in the so-called government 2.0 space in Canada, and what can we do to advance the conversation, thinking and practice in Canada?

Please leave a comment and/or tweet with the hashtag #GovCamp with your must-have session topics.

If you haven’t already, please register to attend this event, either in person in Ottawa or via the livestream being provided by our friend Walter Schwabe of FusedLogic.

Posted via web from It’s a Remarkk-able life