SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter chief Dick Costolo met on Friday with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as Internet age technologies play growing roles in world affairs.

Pleasure to meet with Secretary Clinton and the @statedept team today,” Costolo said in a “tweet” he fired off at the popular one-to-many text messaging service.

San Francisco-based Twitter did not provide details of what Costolo discussed with Clinton during their meeting in Wasington, D.C.

Twitter has become a powerful tool for political activists around the world, giving people a way to coordinate protests and quickly spread word of setbacks, victories or other developments in campaigns.

The US State Department in February held its first Twitter briefing in Spanish, as part of its policy of using new social media to reach out to the international community.

The State Department has Twitter feeds in 11 languages: English, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu.

“These social media accounts are conduits for the US Department of State to inform and engage individuals around the world on American foreign policy issues,” the department has publicly stated.

“They also support the department’s 21st Century Statecraft efforts, complementing traditional foreign policy by harnessing the digital networks and technologies of an interconnected world,” it added.

Designing and co-creating the best possible future for the National Health Service

The bitter public battle now being fought over the future of the NHS looks set to continue. Its future shape uncertain, and the mounting resistance that is so visceral is based upon fear, uncertainty and crucially a genuine lack of trust in those that claim to be guiding us to the best possible future the NHS.

The Lancet in January 2011 agreed that the current system stifles innovation and that although vast sums have been invested in the NHS we have not seen the benefit delivered as valuable frontline services. So we need transformation.

But the question is how do we get to that best possible future? How do we create a more sustainable NHS? Here are a couple of thoughts.

Participatory healthcare for chronic disease

Patients Know Best is a platform, that enables patients and clinicians to engage in individual and collective diagnostic practice, that allows for patient sovereignty and patient empowerment (where patient data sits at the very epicenter) and for clinicians to provide more accurate and dynamic healthcare assessment and advice. Patients can interact in full confidence with the clinical team online, uploading information about their medical history, patients can also read and interact with other clinical information inputs. This means patients are empowered, they are engaged in the process. Appointments can be made online within 24 hours – everyone has full access to all relevant data, which has proven significant benefits for everyone involved. Clinicians now have the right information with the right time to consult, reflect and properly advise. They can discuss with their patients and decide together next best steps.

In this process everyone learns with deep knowledge translating into meaningful action. The insight is that patients know a great deal, they are curators of their personal histories, and all to a lesser or greater degree possess uncommon combinations of common conditions in unique personal circumstances. Clinicians can them combine that unique knowledge with their own knowledge blending together unique and relevant programmes for chronic disease care.

Founder of Patients Know Best Mohammad Al-Ubaydli says it is not only significantly cheaper but a greater degree of comprehensive accuracy is achieved in one to two orders of magnitude.

Participatory leadership in healthcare

Nova Scotia was facing significant challenges in how it was going to evolve its healthcare system. In 2006 the Government asked Nova Scotia’s public health practitioners, to ‘articulate and be guided by a collective vision for the public health system.’ This is a complex challenge, and how does one go about articulating a collective vision?

Large-scale organisational change of the healthcare system that is happening in Nova Scotia, is being enabled through a process described as ‘Participatory Leadership’, whereby it is the participation of the people that are the true actors (nurses, clinicians, patients, etc.) within that healthcare system that are being hosted (guided) into co-designing, and co-creating how they are going to find the answers to their difficult and challenging issues.

In December 2008, a group of practitioners and partners in public health from across the province took on this challenge. They initiated a search to find a process that would bring people together to seek new solutions for the common good. They also knew the process would have to take into account the complexity of public health. And they also felt that any attempt to address the current challenges of public health demands the collective intelligence of all stakeholders. They sought a process that would launch Nova Scotia into a new beginning, an approach that would foster leadership and innovation.

The real insight was that the answer to such a complex problem lay in the minds of the many, that the way forward was held collectively in all the stakeholders that worked in the current system – not in the PowerPoint charts of highly paid specialist management consultants.

The benefits of participatory learning and leadership in healthcare

Patients Know Best and Nova Scotia are stories that are real world – they are serious and they represent two simple ways in which a best possible future for our healthcare service could be delivered, that can cost effectively meet the needs of many millions of people.

They are cost effective because ‘we’, become part of the process, we have co-created it. We begin to build a shared narrative around the people’s NHS. This is entirely different to the ideology and language of markets and privatization.

They are also demonstrative of the agile organization. Agility is related to what Otto Scharmer describes as an evolved geometry that devolves power from hierarchies to evolving networks of relationships, these are organizational models in which people, patients, physicians, clinicians, support services connect with each other in more meaningful ways in which they are all part of the process. So we move from the language of economies of scale to human centered ecologies of scale.

Explicitly, the thing that joins the dots is that Patients Know Best and Nova Scotia are both designed around the needs of humanity. Participatory learning and leadership are both constructed from the understanding that seeking change for the common good calls for involvement, collective intelligence and co-creation to discover and illuminate new solutions and wise actions.

John Berger wrote, ‘what we see is shaped by what we know’, and what we make is shaped by the language we have available to describe a new reality. If that language is lacking or deficient then so will be the outcome. And that is why Andrew Lansley’s Bill is in such disarray, as his framework for reformation is not based upon the language and literacy of social innovation, participatory cultures and leadership, it is based upon a language that has ultimately done so much damage to us.

What is missing is a literacy that defines a new form of leadership relevant to today’s world: the capacity to collectively shape and create our best possible future, and to release us from the cul-de-sac of our ‘industrial free markets are best’ view.

The infographic charts the exploding and varied ways mobile devices are now being used to connect:
•792 mobile apps are downloaded each second.
•29 million mobile users streamed music in 2011.
•Video content accounts for 52% of all mobile data traffic.
•Facebook hosts 1627 mobile status updates per second.
•Twitter boasts 13 million mobile users.
•Instagram reported a 1,900% increase in the number of photos posted in a single year

Texting is the dominant daily mode of communication between teens and all those with whom they communicate. The volume of texting among teens has risen from 50 texts a day in 2009 to 60 texts for the median teen text user.

Overall, 16% of all teens have used a tablet computer to go online in the last 30 days and smartphone owners are also the most likely to be tablet users. Some 30% of smartphone users have used tablets to go online in the past month, while 13% of regular phone users and 9% of those without cell phones have done the same. Fewer smartphone users have used the internet on a desktop or laptop computer in the last month than regular phone users (85% vs. 93%.)

Research indicates that because there’s only so much time in the day, face-to-face interaction time drops by nearly 30 minutes for every hour a person spends on a computer. With more time devoted to computers and less to in-person interactions, young people may be understimulating and underdeveloping the neural pathways necessary for honing social skills.

Are digital natives lacking the interpersonal skills necessary for certain types of jobs? Mentioned are some points to consider for digital natives looking for a position in a field that requires human interaction.

“The key to the mobile era is that it’s all about delighting and empowering the end user. The end user interacts with technology the way he/she interacts with the world around them“.

BYOD, Bring Your Own Device: With the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, individual employees are literally taking the power in their hands, bringing the devices to work that they are the most productive on. These devices create complex problems for companies involving data security, personalization, provisioning, and more.

Appification: Users today are trained and expect to do one thing with each product or service they use.

Cloudification: The mobile experience really gets powerful when it leverages back-end cloud-based services, combining mobile device capabilities like touch, location and personalization with cloud-based capabilities like streaming, social networking, push notifications, updates, scalable data storage and computing.

Read on Forbes Navin Chaddha s full article about the mobile revolution

also check out: BBH Labs Saneel Radia

Wired’s backstory Behind “Homeless Hotspots” at SXSWi

It’s hard to believe but it has been just over 19 years since the first text message was sent from a computer to a mobile phone, and 18 years since the first phones were produced that allowed people to send text messages to one another. These days, text messaging is so common and widespread (especially among the younger generation) that it is hard to think of a time when it did not exist.