urbansheep: завтра=сейчас

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 мне кажется, что в коммуникативном квазипространстве любой Блондинки каждый может быть послан нах по определению...

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CIDA City Campus in downtown Johannesburg is the first university in South Africa to offer students a free, 'open-access' education. It was founded five years ago by an amazing man, Taddy Blatcher, with no resources. He literally announced that the school was open for students without having a building, professors, a curriculum or anything else that might be useful in providing students with a four year business degree. By the time his first batch of students turned up he had most of those things in place (including a building donated by an investment bank which was unused due to crime in downtown Johannesburg).

CIDA is special for a number of reasons. It's a university run by its students (in the early days they even did the cleaning and cooking) - a number of whom never had the opportunity to finish high school - offering a business degree that costs $1,500 per grad. CIDA is now delivering a complex, innovative education to 1,600 students, while also aiming at being holistic (focusing on inner development) and replicable in other developing countries. To top it all off, every student is required to return to their rural schools and communities, during holidays, to teach what they have learnt.

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Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology Roberto Amaral proposed Monday that international lenders forgive portions of developing world debt in exchange for commitments by those countries to fund scientific and technological research and education - a debt-for-science swap.

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Ingenieurs sans Frontieres/ Engineers without Borders is sending volunteer engineers all over the world to help local people learn to solve their technical problems, doing stuff like providing IT support for the Propoor Info-tech Centre in India and low-energy lighting in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka; helping people in long-term refugee camps in Zambia with food processing infrastructure; improving local milk processing in Peru and shea nut processing in Burkina Faso; assessing the environmental impact and benefits of community dams in Nepal; doing waste management, sanitation and hygiene promotion work in La Paz, Boliva and Cameroon; working on innovative solutions for rural water supply in Tamil Nadu, India, Cameroon, Kenya, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti and Cambodia; helping to build an IT center and provide water and science education in Uganda... the list goes on.

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Businesses which hope to succeed in the coming decade have to think of themselves and their actions in a context much broader than they're used to, as part of the fabric of society, not as sovereigns over some commercial fiefdom. Smart business leaders seem increasingly to know this. They are beginning to convert their corporations into a new type of entity, one which sees changing the world as the avenue to profits – the transcommercial enterprise.

In short, there is a transformation afoot, and four forces drive it:

The first force is efficiency. It is inefficient over the long term to pollute, waste energy and mistreat workers. Study after study has shown that many, if not most, socially- and environmentally-desirable goals can be pursued by companies in ways which make them not only better corporate citizens (with happier workers and neighbors) but more competitive.

The second force is the rise of investors, lenders and institutional customers which demand social responsibility.

Funds basing investment decisions on whether a given company is socially responsible and accountable for its behavior now total at least twelve percent, and perhaps as much as twenty percent, of the total capital available in the United States. That's a lot of money. As just one example, the Carbon Disclosure Project, representing 75 institutional investors with more than $7 trillion in assets, has demanded that every Fortune 500 company release an audit of its greenhouse gas emissions and commit to reductions plans.

Transparency, the third force, is making corporate behavior is visible as never before.

Corporations can now build fairly intimate relationships with customers. We all know that corporations are honing their marketing research down to us as individuals, amassing data on our preferences and buying patterns, trying to anticipate our needs But we don't often think about how this truth extends two ways: we're more and more informed about the goods we buy and the companies which make them. Intimacy goes both ways.

In a transparent world, your company can't beat 'em with secrecy, and if you're smart, you won't try: instead, you'll invite them to join you, and collaborate. Indeed, the explosion in collaboration itself – the Tech Bloom – is the fourth and perhaps most powerful force.

The "Tech Bloom" describes the universe of noncommercial, collaborative, distributed networks which form, fade, and re-form around a whole variety of socially-advantageous goals. These networks first emerged in software, where they've built operating systems like Linux at dizzying speed, with unmatched complexity and quality. But the paradigm is rapidly spreading to enfold all sorts of technical projects, from sustainable energy systems to medical technologies for the developing world. It's even sweeping through non-technical arenas. Nets of people are now translating schoolbooks into underserved foreign languages, building online collaborative encyclopedias and creating democratic news services.

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Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

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