Working Out Loud

U.S. Capitol Building

The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (S.181)
This amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act will likely be the first piece of legislation President Obama signs into law in the coming weeks.

The Fair Pay Act was introduced after a baffling U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2007 denied Lilly Ledbetter $360,000 to compensate her for years of pay discrimination at an Alabama Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company because said discrimination occurred more than 180 days before she filed her claim.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking for the minority, read aloud an impressive dissent.

Regrettably, though the bill passed the Senate, the vote was disappointingly partisan. See how your Senator voted.

(Thank you Senior Senator from Oregon Ron Wyden and new Junior Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley — and thanks Sunlight Foundation for OpenCongress.)

There’s no shortage of great stories about the net-generation’s readiness to change the world.

NYT Education Life January 4, 2009

The Sunday New York Times’ Education Life section is chock full of them (see “23 Student Innovations”)

By the Numbers
More than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are in-place in two- and four-year college and university campuses (not to mention incubators, community-based organizations, microenterprise projects, etc.), up from 250 in 1985. (Kauffman Foundation)

Among young people ages 18-21, sixty-three percent (three in five) would like to start their own businesses in the future. For 92% of them, “using their skills and abilities” was a key reason (followed by “building something for their future” at 89%). (Kauffman Foundation Survey December 2008)

It’s about jobs and career mobility for all.
Young entrepreneurs are not just tech students, they are represented in every major field of study on campus – social entrepreneurship is also an increasingly important part of the mix.

In an ever more global, innovation-driven, and volatile (economically and otherwise) world, preparing to be a business is a smart skill set to have. Entrepreneurial skills and experience don’t replace deep knowledge, specialized expertise, or even basic skills, but they do increase a person’s options.

Real skills indeed.

As long as I’m at it (a discussion of skills and work-readiness)…

Meet Alex. He’s profiled by NYT reporter Andrew Revkin in Generation E — Innovating Motivating as part of the Dot Earth project.

Who says kids shouldn’t play with matches?

Here’s proof.

Thank you Project New Media Literacies, MacArthur Foundation, and MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program (Henry Jenkins in particular). This is what I’ll be sending the next 20 people who say to me “youth today do not have the skills we need in the workplace” (without feeling any particular obligation to cultivate said skills or make great jobs, either of which would solve the problem).

Lawrence Lessig (Founder, Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society and ChangeCongress, soon-to-be Director of Harvard’s Edward J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, and author of Re-Mix, Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, etc., etc.) just released this brilliant video on Change.org.

The idea – Citizen’s Funding of the Nation’s Elections – is great. (If you think so too, vote for it on change.org by January 15).

But the video makes a disarmingly compelling case in a format (frame and visuals) that leaves me wondering where I might send my six-figure check .

(Thanks to J.D. Lasica for the pointer to this swell deck).

Media Landscape
Business Week’s Jon Fine asks the reasonable question “Will these media predictions prove any more accurate than previous prognostications?” (for which I thank him, as I laughed out loud), and then offers his list. Number ten — the birth of a shadow media industry — interests me the most, You?

Social Media Predictions and Wishlist
Thank you ReadWriteWeb for not only making predictions, but also giving voice to the wishes of those of us trying to figure out how to manage our businesses, colleagues, friends, lives, and efforts to turn information into intelligence through social media. Try-this-it-helps indeed.

And for some fun…
Twittersearch “predictions” and you’ll find hilariously diverse and divergent predictions on everything from personal exercise goals to movie plots to hedge funds — proving the resilience (necessity?) of humor, even when the economy is sour and the headlines, grim.

The New New Year's Eve Ball (Thank you Times Square Alliance)

The end of 2008.
The tradition of marking the turning of the calendar year with lists of lessons (of the past year) and predictions (for the next) is alive and well. It may take more than a post or two to cover my favorites, but in the spirit of list-making, here’s a start (in categories, but in no particular rank-order).

Social Entrepreneurship
Nathaniel Wittemore’s Top Trends that will impact the Social Entrepreneurship Landscape in 2009:

1. A Partner in the White House
2. Green Innovation
3. Blended Value Investing
4. Online Action Platforms
5. Mobile Technology
6. Measuring Social Impact
7. Globally Engaged Education

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University and moderates the Social Entrepreneurship section of change.org. Each trend is nicely narrated at change.org, so I’ll just tip my hat for emphasis [|>], and invite you to peruse the original.

Social Media
Jeremiah Owyang always provides insight, this time in his list of social network sites and and who uses them. [Note: Plenty of gold in the comments as well as the original post.]

Beth Kanter’s list of resources containing information about social media adoption rates and usage patterns may be of particular interest to non-profits. [Note number 10, the University of Massachusetts' survey data indicating adoption of social media by non-profits running ahead of adoption by business. Implications?]

(Life)Hacking
Lifehacker’s Great Best of 2008 Roundup – here’s a taste of this irresistibly compelling list of lists.

• Most popular DIY projects of 2008 and beyond (for your car, computer, backyard, and even your belly)
• Most popular repuposing posts of 2008 (from end tables to thumb tacks)
• Most underhyped apps of 2008 (one of which is Evernote, of which I have become a devoted fan and user)

Life and Work on the Web
ReadWriteWeb’s Top 10 list of Real World Apps in six categories:

• Semantic web
• International products
• Consumer web
• RSS and syndication
• Mobile web
• Enterprise web

Plus this last post covering finance, health education, politics, non-profits and travel. RWW always does a bang-up job of editing down to apps that are simple and useful, and then helping you navigate to those you’d likely find interesting. Still, don’t stay within categories here – half the fun lies in exploring how different applications and features can be used in environments for which they were not really intended. Thanks Frederic Lardinois.

Things Green and Sustainable
Sightline is 15. Here’s its rundown of its top ten ideas. It’s amazing how current some of this feels, especially for those who’ve spent time in places where recycling (alone) passes for a commitment to our green future.

Best of Worldchanging offers a collection of knock-out posts and  links (by topic) to a collection of others. My personal favorite among the favorites? Clay Shirky’s Gin, TV and Social Surplus.

(Replacement for “sustainable”, “sustainability”? Anybody?  Please…)

A New Model of Work and Learning
This is Randy Nelson (Pixar University) brought to you by Edutopia (The George Lucas Educational Foundation). It’s a brief video that’s worth a listen if you work, learn, teach, or aspire to any of these.

Why does collaboration matter?
Because our most important challenges — economic, social, environmental and cultural — are bigger than any of us alone.

Collaboration is about amplifying each others’ gifts and resources to achieve shared goals. Randy boils learning to do it down to two rules:

1. Accept every offer; and
2. Make your partners look good

Sounds simple. But not many environments are designed to make collaboration (either doing it or learning how) easy.

What does the collaborative age mean for firms?
More and more firms will need to be in the business of taking their missions seriously: doing work that matters and doing it responsibly. Their customers, employees, and ever-more sophisticated and connected markets will demand it (publicly).

People will have to stretch themselves – learning content outside their areas of expertise so that they can connect dots and build bridges between colleagues, departments, and disciplines.

Communities (those geographic and otherwise) will have to articulate their collective needs and participate in solutions to their challenges.

Deep, two-way communication – not just instruction – will become mission critical for schools, firms and communities seeking to organize the people, tools and resources that can develop and execute great ideas.

The collaborative age is about authentic, transparent, and meaningful relationships between people, communities, and firms that help all of us thrive.

Thanks to Chris Brogan for the reference to Kevin Kelly at the O’Reilly Web2.0 Summit offering a view of what’s coming after Web2.0. There’s much here, so have a listen (it’s 15 minutes). My personal takeaways were three:

• “If it can’t be shared, it doesn’t count” (the title of this post).  Sharing official-but-still-in-draft-form products has become a real burden. If I ever see another document in “track changes” attached to an email, it will be too soon. Yet, we – colleagues, partners, friends, family, colleagues – are at very different levels of familiarity with other tools, ranging from wikis to Google docs to zoho. In addition, a whole of collection of practices rooted in a culture of collaboration, co-creation, and transparency need to accompany the switch to sharing (as opposed to creating and sending). “If it can’t be shared, it doesn’t count” is a great frame for a conversation about planning – and then making – some changes.
• “We have to get better at imagining the impossible.” Kevin’s point here is that we do not know what the next web will be – we thought the web would “be like TV, but better” but it wasn’t anything like TV. The Web provides, among many other things, a platform for reinventing how we do our work (and in some cases, what work we do).
• The Web as a single database. Echoing “The Machine is Us/Using Us” , the salient point here is that the intelligence the web can generate is rooted in the intelligence we share. For the first time, we are hugely dependent on social knowledge and not just our own.

It’s not the Web, only better.

All Web2.0 Summit videos on Blip.tv.