ChangeMedium

Social Business Epicenter: Apr 2010: New York City

#events (ht @stoweboyd)

socialbusiness:

By Stowe Boyd

Today, more than ever, management is reexamining and rethinking the basic principles of business: how to innovate and prosper. To that end, managers are looking to stay in step with a changing world, and the rise of the social web in particular.

How should today’s business leverage what is being learned about the social web? Certainly what is going on today is more than just social media marketing, limited to marketing and community outreach efforts. Some of the leading thinkers in this area believe that we are at the start of something much larger than a retake on marketing.

We are seeing a rethinking of work, collaboration, and the role of management in a changing world, where the principles and tools of the web are transforming society, media, and business. The mainstays of business theory — like innovation, competitive advantage, marketing, production, and strategic planning — need to be reconsidered and rebalanced in the context of a changing world. The rise of the real-time, social web has become one of the critical factors in this new century, along with a radically changed global economic climate, an accelerating need for sustainable business practices, and a political context demanding increased openness in business.

These issues cannot be dealt with one by one, but instead approached as connected elements of a new world order for business.

The Social Business Epicenter is designed to address these issues, and to bring together a community of visionaries, practitioners, and tool makers, to collectively explore what the form the social business — and our aspirations to design it — will take.

In the next two months, I will be working with a diverse group of people, but most especially my partner, Jeff Pulver, who will be producing the Symposium with me. We will be refining the program, and developing  I will be making ongoing announcements about the event, including the selection of a final date — now planned for mid-April in New York.

#cmToronto Research Presentations

Saturday is the first #ChangeMedium event bringing together researchers and developers together on the medium for change. We’re going to hear from 2 great researchers and spend the afternoon - well -  building stuff. More on those presentations below.

There are still some spaces for those of you with development skills (sign up here). If you can’t make it or want more info, join our group.

Hope to see you there.

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#cmToronto Research Presentations

Hima Batavia (McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health)
Mobile Health: “The great equalizer”

• With almost 4 billion people globally having access to mobile phones, the technology has emerged as a valuable tool to address gaps in healthcare delivery. Touted as “the great equalizer” by Desmond Tutu, the use of mobile phones in health data collection, treatment compliance and prevention in the developing world has yielded positive results. While challenges remain, the impact SMS specifically has had on this movement is significant. This talk will seek to draw lessons from mobile health initiatives, allowing participants to understand the past, to better predict the future.
• Hima Batavia is a Research Assistant with the Mclaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health and The Earth Institute based out of Columbia University. Her interests were developed as result of experiences working in Kenya with a small health-focused NGO called Matibabu Foundation through the Canadian International Development Agency, as part of the Leadership Development Program at Canadian telecommunications company, TELUS, and as an undergraduate from the University of Toronto in Human Biology. The combination of exposure to global health, business, mobile technology, and social enterprise has resulted in interests in using market mechanisms and technology to overcome global poverty.

Kayleigh Platz (University of Waterloo) 
The Usabilty of Culture

• I want to encourage discussion about the different platforms for research that are needed to understand how people are using applications and technologies (such as Twitter) in ways to connect and create value and culture, and how they are creating a need through their use and not by the use of the technology.
• Kayleigh Platz is the Technical Solutions Provider at the University of Waterloo. Kayleigh’s interests range from on-line communication and social networks, the cyberworld culture, the ethnography of design, tactical media, and Harry Potter. Kayleigh received her MA in Public Issues Anthropology from the University of Waterloo.