Wednesday May 11, 2005

Thoughts on "The Participation Age" The 1990's democratization of technology and the democratization of information (otherwise referred to as the Internet Age), leveled the playing field worldwide for global cultural, economic, political, and social transparency. Now we are seeing a transition to a new model that we will be referring to as The Participation Age. I'm not sure if we know what that means yet, but we are clearly at another inflection point in the globalization of society.

If the Internet Age was about connectivity and communications, pipes and routers, The Participation Age is about leveraging that connectivity for empowerment, employment, and efficiency. It's about security, access, scalability, accountability, and new models for leveraging the potential value of enterprise data.

I firmly believe that Sun is right to move us beyond the "Internet Age" to the "Participation age". It reflects that the digital divide is no longer a challenge of merely providing worldwide connectivity to individuals. Although plenty geographic, political, and economic barriers exist (Asia has 34% of the world's Internet users with only 8% penetration), the technology is there. In the participation age, we shift focus from the connectivity of individuals (the data demand side), to governments, service providers, and vendors of goods that provide their services to the world (the data supply side). The global intertwining of these traditional businesses with the globally connected society is the new "digital divide".

There is tremendous inertia around legacy business models, technology models, and cultural models that makes it difficult to adapt these systems to the new globally intertwined society. Limitations around perceived and actual security, scalability, and accountability of today's systems is also a barrier to widespread participation by the enterprise and content owners in this promising global system.

What does "participation" mean in the context of participation age?
- Better and easier-to-access information in the hands of individuals
- Vastly higher participation in politics, and robust e-voting systems for free (and non-free) countries
- New markets and opportunities for micro-lending
- Even small vendors of goods and services with robust global sales channels
- Even small vendors of goods and services with robust supply chains
- Globally homogenous economic communities with that recognize the need to preserve local culture and community
- Virtual corporations
- Increased organizational arbitrage: Outsourcing corporate or government functions to lower-cost labor pools
- Utility computing: plugging into the wall for your computing resources
- Content owners and rights holders aggressively working to overcome the sticky distribution barriers of license and copyright.
- Recognition by data owners that Internet's breadth can assure a profitable distribution mechanism, even for marginally valuable data.
- All data is available, forever, all the time.
- Increasing recognition that "the data is the business". Wal-Mart's core operational differentiation gets recognized as data management.
( May 11 2005, 11:50:12 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]