During the 1980s (seems like such a long time ago and I still have nightmares about the Dynasty-style shoulder pads that were so popular back then!), I was a teacher librarian. I have reinvented myself several times since then (into what I’m never sure!) but, at heart, I remain a librarian aka someone who is interested in enriching a user community by empowering minds and encouraging curiosity and inquisitiveness.

So I am keeping a close watch on the Library 2.0 movement - a new model for library service where libraries are embracing social software and finding innovative ways to reach users. By using Web 2.0 technologies, libraries are creating new services that were not possible before and they are able to offer user-centric service opportunities.

Learning 2.0 is a result of this movement and was initially developed by Helene Blowers at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library. It’s been honed by other libraries, including Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a 4-month version of Learning 2.0.

Libraries are finding exciting ways to engage with blogs, podcasts, wikis and other media. The Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library developed this program and made it freely available on the Web. The Learning 2.0 program is being used and adapted by university and community libraries in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, has developed a program.

Over at the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, librarians are being trained to be Web 2.0 savvy and won’t look puzzled when users ask about Second Life. Check out their training program here.

The Long Tail is full of users who have favourite titles, authors and genres. Through Web 2.0 media, libraries can allow users to comment, write reviews, create their own tags and ratings and share them with others. Just like Amazon let’s you know what other people who have also bought your book are buying and reading, library users want to know what’s popular with other users. This is a user-driven, participatory model that will dramatically change the way libraries deliver services - great stuff!

I have been re-reading Don Watson’s 2003 book Death Sentence, which examines the decline and decay of public language. I remember being irritated by this book when I first read it, largely because it does not follow the structure of a good book (IMHO anyway) ie index; table of contents; headings as signposts etc. I also found the examples he used of how public language is declining repetitive and thought you could read the first 50 pages of this 191 page book, get the gist of things and toss it on the “Read” pile.

However, I recently caught myself uttering such phrases as “optimising learning”; “cultivating a dialogue”; and the classics “deep commitment” and “adding value”. Nothing wrong with these phrases really, but after a week’s worth of presentations, I was reflecting on this sort of ‘managerial speak’. So I went back to Watson’s book, which attacks how managerial language has, like a noxious weed, infected academia, business and politics.

I spent ages trying to find the exact quote I wanted (which is why the lack of an index irritates me so much with this book). Couldn’t find it, so I will have to rely on memory - but Watson said something to the effect that whenever you hear managerial language that utters words like flexibility; strategise; reasonable timeframe; enhancement; value-adding etc - you are in the presence of a cult and he included knowledge management in this (both the term and the discipline). On page 27, he refers to knowledge management as being “…one more mutant form of the managerialism that walks blithely over a whole tradition of Western philosophy, crushing all subtleties and distinctions“.

So I decided to check out some of the terms prevalent in KM literature to see if the discipline can still be accused of spitting out managerial speak. Here are some of the references I found (I’ll protect the innocent by not naming the authors):

• the optimization of explicit knowledge is achieved by the consolidating and making available of artefacts;
• an authentic guide for individuals and organizations in coping with the increasingly complex and shifting environment of the modern economy;
• “Knowledge management has inspired a shift from a transaction to a distributed knowledge management (DKM) perspective on inter-organizational information processing… Each player in the network acquires specific knowledge from other players for decision support”.
• KM embodies “organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies” (with synergies and synergistic being particular favourites of managerial speak).

Watson would in fact accuse me of more managerialism because I used bullet points above! again, nothing is wrong with the use of words like ‘artefacts’ or “authentic guide” and most KM practitioners would understand the context. But rather like lawyers had to go through the process of learning Plain English drafting and losing the legalese, so KM practitioners need to keep a vigilant eye on the use of over-hyped and confusing jargon.

Plain English Knowledge Management should use Watson’s book as a text, get out a large red pen and strike out any hint of business speak, otherwise we might soon see a book entitled Death Sentence: The Decay of Knowledge Management.

Just as we’ve mastered pronouncing ‘folksonomy’ without tripping over the tongue comes ‘bibsonomy’. Bibsonomy was developed and is maintained by the University of Kassel and is a social publication, bookmark management and sharing system, mainly for researchers.

But it has all the hallmarks of popular folksonomies such as Del.icio.us. Bibsonomy is a free system that allows for managing your own bookmarks, publications, lists of literature etc and sharing them with others. Every bookmark and publication is stored together with one or more tags, which describe the content of the resource from the personal point of view. The collection of tagged resources is a personomy, which form the folksonomy. Users can explore the personomies of others and well as build their own.

Interesting to look at the social bookmarks for taxonomies and folksonomies. And always interesting to use the Wayback Machine to see how Bibsonomy’s label clouds (called Busy Tags) have changed.

With ‘folksonomy’ being a contraction of folk (person) and taxonomy, I’m wondering what new term I can come up with to contribute to all this -onomy business! Kimsonomy? the ability to tag and give more structure to myself - sounds like something I need :)-

In an earlier post, I explored Positive Psychology (PP) and its nexus with knowledge management (KM). I think that PP will continue to rise in popularity and its impact on KM will become increasingly obvious.

The world map of life satisfaction (University of Leicester) ranks Australia at No.26 for subjective well-being ie a sense of satisfaction with one’s life, both in general and in specific areas of one’s life such as relationships, health and work. We rank behind the Scandanavian countries, Antigua and Barbuda, the Seychelles, St Kitts and Nevis, and our close neighbour, New Zealand.

Economists believe that when average incomes reach about £10,000, life satisfaction starts flatlining. We can afford the basics and money can buy us happiness, but not for long. Modern malaise soon sets in and is the result of mass consumerism and hedonism, the subject of Oliver James’s excellent book, Affluenza.To earn our incomes, most of us trot off each day to the citadels that occupy our cities - corporations. Here we spend our time navigating bureaucracy; fretting over what the latest restructure might mean for us; trying to find the information we need to do our daily jobs; pondering over what level of trust exists (or doesn’t) in the organisation.

Couple this with today’s fast paced life, full of pressures to be thin, rich, botoxed, toting the latest brand-name accessories or being available 24/7 - it’s little wonder that the question of whether you can learn to be happy is popping up. Instead of spending our time worrying about our weaknesses, wouldn’t it be great if we could learn how to be optimistic; learn how to better respect people; learn how to be collaborative and sharing? Organisations tend to focus on the negative: assessing your performance against some KPI and then shuffling you off to yet another development course to beef up your weak points. But what if we looked at signature strengths instead?

So I was pleased to see this article today, which shows how PP is leading to new conversations about the notion of well-being. At a public school in Berkshire UK, the ’super-head’, historian and political biographer Anthony Seldon, has introduced ‘happiness’ lessons for its 14 and 15 year-old students. He believes that schools should be harmonious and inspiring (now there’s a thought: schools taking the lead and producing the next generation of positive, well-adjusted, resilient people!).

And another UK school offers lessons in ‘excess’ where students study the lives of famous individuals who pushed themselves over the brink or became prematurely dead rock-stars. And they watch a video of a young self-made millionaire entrepreneur who spends £100,000 a month on Lamborghinis and glaringly bad-taste suits threaded from real gold. These sessions are part of the citizenship lessons the school’s curriculum offers.

Dr Nick Baylis, Britain’s first lecturer in positive psychology at Cambridge and co-director of the university’s Wellbeing Institute, believes that well-being skills can be learnt. The question here of course is whether well-being and life satisfaction is the business of Government, corporations or schools. But let’s for the moment assume it is.

PP is not about thinking “positive thoughts” or spraying lavender essential oil all over your pillow case. It’s about identifying positive traits or signature strengths AND looking at the types of positive institutions ie democracy, strong families, free inquiry, that support the traits and strengths. So what exactly are the positive traits that PP has identified?

Martin Seligman’s book, Authentic Happiness, outlines the 24 signature strengths, which are arranged into 6 clusters or core virtues: Wisdom & Knowledge; Courage; Love & Humanity; Justice; Temperance; Spirituality & Transcedence. Each cluster is subdivided, so Wisdom & Knowledge, for example, can be broken down into the strengths of curiosity; love of learning; judgement; originality; social intelligence; and perspective.

Now, these subdivisions alone have my ears pricked up! being a KM practitioner, I am constantly focusing on the rich characteristics necessary for organisations and individuals to collectively share knowledge and learn from one another.

Let’s look at the Wisdom & Knowledge cluster more closely (leaving aside the comment I want to utter at this point that wisdom is erroneously viewed as being at the top of the irritating Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom pyramid. Death to that pyramid I say!). As Seligman points out, each cluster starts with the most developmentally basic virtue and ends with the most mature. So for the Wisdom & Knowledge cluster, Curiosity/Interest in the World is the most basic virtue and Perspective is the most mature. Let’s have a look:

• Curiosity: displaying curiosity about the world and other people entails being open to experience and being flexible enough to accommodate things that don’t fit into one’s perspective. Curiosity is about actively engaging with novelty and having a wide-eyed approach.
• Love of Learning: aka life-long learning. There’s a passion for learning new things; a passion for learning all there is to know about your particular knowledge domain; and there’s an inquisitiveness about other knowledge domains.
• Judgement/Critical Thinking/Open-Mindedness: looking at something from all angles; not jumping to conclusions; examining available evidence as a basis for decisions; ability to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence; sifting information objectively and rationally; not indulging in over-personalisation (ie it’s my fault); putting aside your values and what you might believe in.
• Ingenuity/Originality/Practical Intelligence/Street Smarts: always striving for new ways of doing things and not being stuck in the rut of conventional approaches.
• Social Intelligence/Personal Intelligence/Emotional Intelligence: social and personal intelligence is knowledge of self and others and being aware of the motives and feelings of others. Social intelligence is also about noting and working with differences in others, especially moods, temperaments and intentions. Personal intelligence is being finely tuned to your own feelings and using this knowledge to understand and guide your behaviour.
• Perspective: others seek you out to draw on your experience to help them resolve problems and gain a different perspective. Perspective is about looking at the world in a way that makes sense to you and others.

Clearly, the KM discipline can draw on work in the PP field. Looking at the above descriptions, these are all qualities KM practitioners want to build on: finding and working with people who are curious about learning and learning from others; encouraging people to make decisions based on observing patterns and evidence; encouraging and promoting deep, critical thinking skills; building on employees’ ability to reflect, to empathise, to question, to respect and work with diversity etc; encouraging an environment in which experts (Perspective) are valued and sought out; building a culture of trust that is based on social and personal intelligence.

So it seems to me that KM initiatives that incorporate notions of PP will be incorporating a field of practice that is demonstrating how individuals can learn their signature strengths and work with these.

There are two books I have on my To Read pile at the moment that deal with Social Intelligence and whether in pursuit of the hedonistic lifestyle, we’ve all lost the art of sharp, incisive thinking (the sort of thinking that Malcolm Gladwell is his book, Blink, seems to suggest is not necessary). A future post!

Picked up another interesting environmental story today. Possibly one of the silliest things Australia has done was to introduce poisonous cane toads into the environment during the 1930s. People probably thought it was a good idea at the time - the toads were imported from South America to devour beetles feasting on sugar cane crops. But cane toads soon become a scourge on the Australian landscape and caused the death of native animals that ate the toads and they edged out native insect- eaters.

As officials rush around trying to capture the toads and freeze them to use as fertilizer, the clever cane toads have leapt one step ahead on the evolutionary scale by producing 10% longer legs. New generations of cane toads boasting longer legs are able to spread faster and more widely. Currently, the feisty cane toad occupies 1 million square kilometres of the Australian continent and can advance more than 51 kilometres annually, compared to 10 kilometres when first introduced.

No documented extinctions are attributed to the cane toads. But the toads dramatically modify the abundance and diversity of plants and animals in the ecosystems they invade.

A monster toad was found in Darwin the other day. 38 centimeters long and apparently the size of a football. Check out the toad here.

We’re hearing a lot about Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR these days. CSR focuses on how business can continue its pursuit of wealth creation in harmony with the environment and society. I wondered when the term first popped up on the business landscape and who might have coined the term, so I decided to look into the evolution of the definitional construct.

A concern for social responsibility can be traced back to the 1930s. Chester Barnard’s 1938 publication, The Functions of the Executive, and Theodore Krep’s, Measurement of the Social Performance of Business, published in 1940 were two early references to the social responsibilities of executives and business.

The 1950s saw the start of the modern era of CSR when it was more commonly known as SR or social responsibility. In 1953, Howard Bowen published his book, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, and is largely credited with coining the phrase ‘corporate social responsibility’ and is perhaps the Father of CSR. Bowen asked: “what responsibilities to society can business people be reasonably expected to assume?” Bowen also provided a preliminary definition of CSR: “its refers to the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society“.

There were a few other landmark books during the 1950s, most notably Morrell Heald’s 1957 publication, Management’s Responsibility to Society: The Growth of an Idea; and Eell’s 1956 work, Corporate Giving in a Free Society. The literature expanded the definition during the 1960s with Keith Davis’ definition of CSR as referring to “..businessmen’s decisions and actions taken for reasons at least partially beyond the firm’s direct economic or technical interest“. Davis established the so-called Iron Law of Responsibility, which held that “social responsibilities of businessmen need to be commensurate with their social power”.

In 1963, Joseph W McGuire in his book, Business and Society, stated: “The idea of social responsibilities supposes that the corporation has not only economic and legal obligations but also certain responsibilities to society which extend beyond these obligations“. This is perhaps getting closer to the contemporary understanding of CSR as being an obligation to citizenry, the environment etc and not merely to shareholders or wealth creation.

The notion of voluntarism was perhaps first seen in Clarence C Walton’s 1967 book, Corporate Social Responsibilities, when he linked CSR with the idea that companies need to voluntarily acknowledge and accept they have relationships of responsibility beyond the corporate fortress.

The 1970s and 1980s saw attention being focused on articulating with more clarity exactly what were the responsibilities of a corporation. The grand old man of management theory, Peter Drucker, stepped onto the CSR stage in 1984 when he wrote, in the California Management Review, about the imperative to turn social problems into economic opportunities. And ice-cream manufacturers, Ben & Jerry’s, were the first company to publish a social report in 1989.

A watershed in CSR was 1971 when the Committee for Economic Development (CED) published its Social Responsibilities of Business Corporations. As a code of conduct, the CED outlined a three-tiered model of CSR:

• the inner circle: the basic responsibilities an organisation has for creating profit and growth;
• the intermediate circle: an organisation must be sensitive to the changing social contract that exists between business and society when it pursues its economic interests; and
• the outer circle: the responsibilities and activities an organisation needs to pursue towards actively improving the social environment eg poverty or urban crowding issues.

I think this model is still a valid one. In an earlier post, I talked about viewing CSR through the lens of complexity and acknowledging that an organisation nestles within a broader ecosystem (which is comprised of diverse stakeholders such as the community, suppliers, competitors etc). CED’s three-tiered model is a similar construct with its inner, intermediate and outer circles. By focusing on the responsibilities within all rings of the model, a corporation is working within and caring for the ecosystem it belongs to.

In a future post, I want to explore the relationship between the social movements of the 1960s and CSR. I suspect there’s a whole lot of influence from societal changes and protests during the 1960s on attitudes to corporations and their social responsibilities.

Back to the history lesson :)- the 1970s also saw the use of the term “neighborliness”, which has hints of our contemporary use of metaphors such as “village” or “ecosystem” to describe a construct that is broader than just the boundaries of a particular system ie organisation, society etc. Eilbert and Parket defined CSR as: “...think of it as ‘good neighborliness’. The concept involves two phases. On the one hand, it means not doing things that spoil the neigborhood. On the other, it may be expressed as the voluntary assumption of the obligation to help solve neighborhood problems.”

By the 1980s and 1990s, corporate giants had woken up to the fact that attempts were being made to regulate them and the corporate backlash began. Most notably, corporate meddling in the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio impeded the Summit’s aim of finding ways to halt the destruction of the natural environment and its resources. 48 companies were specifically formed to participate in and influence the Summit’s outcomes, particularly trying to shift towards voluntary reporting.

But the climate turned nasty for corporations in 1995 when Shell was accused of complicity in the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists in Nigeria. Suddenly, corporations started to realise the importance of their public image and reputation. And they began to understand that they needed a strategy to convince the public that they could play a very valuable and socially meaningful role within the ecosystem they occupied.

Contemporary CSR was ushered in to give the corporation a caring, human face and get rid of any whiff of unethical conduct. But with the collapse of Enron in 2001, the claims of an organisation against the reality of its conduct entered the bright spotlight of public scrutiny. The call for greater accountability and transparency has also led to the current focus on CSR.

But I fear that CSR could suffer from a number of flaws inter alia:

• too much hype and obsession over defining what CSR means (mmm…brings back memories of knowledge management!);
• global companies wanting to get themselves out of the glare of public scrutiny, jumping on the CSR bandwagon and wanting to be seen as ‘leaders’ when in fact many are unethical in their business practices;
• do voluntary codes of conduct work?
• is CSR simply a very clever way to increase corporate power and global domination; and side-stepping regulation?
• will CSR fall victim to the marketing/comms people who are smart enough to see CSR as a great opportunity for a public relations campaign?

Consider the Body Shop, often lauded as a shining example of CSR and fair trade. Its founder, Anita Roddick, described the Body Shop’s flotation on the stockmarket and move to being a multi-national as a ‘pact with the devil’. The Executive Chairman installed after Roddick commented: “we believe in social responsibility but we are hard-nosed about profit. We know that success is measured by the bottom line“.

So it could turn out to be business as usual but with a PR spin of CSR - nothing changes, corporations just get more powerful and pretend to embrace their social responsibilities.

You can read more about CSR here and here (but you will need online journal access for this last link to an article by Archie Carroll in 1999, which I relied on heavily to navigate my way through the evolution of CSR. Haven’t been able to locate a free copy to share).

Meanwhile, I am off to do more thinking on the topic! and I’ve included a fabulous image in this post of a romanesco cauliflower courtesy of the great site Free Photos, one of the few photos I haven’t taken for my blog posts - but I just love it!

Great to see a ‘good news’ environmental story for once. Every year, two million milkweed butterflies migrate in late March from southern Taiwan to the north, where they lay eggs and die. In November, the young butterflies make their way to a warm mountain valley near the southern city of Kaohsiung, where they spend the winter.

A 600-yard stretch of highway in southern Taiwan’s Yunlin County will soon be sealed off so that the butterflies will be protected during the seasonal migration. Nets will be placed over the highway to force the butterflies to fly higher than passing cars and ultraviolet lights will be installed to guide the butterflies across the highway overpass.

The largest type of milkweed butterfly became extinct in Taiwan decades ago, so let’s hope Taiwan’s fantastic efforts to protect these migrating butterflies meets with continued success.

As regular readers (do I have any?!) of my blog know, I am doggedly against Western consumerist society, the insane pursuit of “beauty” at the hands of today’s witch doctors (aka doctors wielding the botox syringe and scalpels) and disturbed by what we’re doing to this beautiful planet and its many exquisite (and dwindling) species. I have now come across something else that horrifies me - the modern slave trade.

Although I’ve heard of slavery still existing, it wasn’t until I decided to investigate for myself the reality and the scale of things that I stumbled across the fact that modern slavery takes place in so-called democratic countries. Considering that March 25, 2007 is the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in Britain, you would think that slavery in all its forms is a thing of the past - something we only see in sepia tones. Not so it seems.

Human trafficking is the third largest criminal industry in the world today, just behind arms and drugs dealing - but it is the fastest growing. Figures vary, but around 27 million people worldwide are currently slaves. A further breakdown shows an estimated 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year; approximately 50% of all victims are children; there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers involved in over 30 areas of conflict worldwide, some younger than 10 years old.

Debt bondage is the most common form of slavery today where a person becomes a slave to work off a debt, which might be the cost of having to buy a sick child some medicine. The length and nature of work is not usually defined, so it becomes a never-ending cycle with the debt being passed down to the children thereby enslaving offspring.

Contract slavery is another common form. A contract of employment is offered for a factory, sweatshop or domestic position, but the contract tricks them into slavery usually because the person is unable to read the contract in the first place.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (194 states “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms“. And in 2000, the United States unanimously voted 95 to 0 for legislation to protect women from trafficking and domestic violence and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 came into effect. Between 45,000 and 50,000 women are trafficked into the US each year.

So what is the cause of all this suffering and inhumanity? An average slave in the American South in 1850 cost the equivalent of £40,000; today a slave costs only about £60, which means today’s slave is a cheap and disposable resource in the global consumerist market for ever-cheaper goods and luxury brands.

When you pick up that next piece of rich, glossy looking chocolate and can’t wait to scoff it down, consider this statistic - nearly half the world’s chocolate is made from cocoa grown in the Cote D’Ivoire in Africa and 12,000 children have been trafficked into working on these cocoa farms. How many hours of exploited labour went into the block of chocolate we just bought or the Easter chocolates we’re about to give?

We can choose to buy Fair Trade goods, including chocolate. It is estimated though that Fair Trade chocolate represents less than 1% of the world’s roughly $60 billion chocolate market. Chocolate lovers like me can check out Stop Traffik’s Good Chocolate Guide on their MySpace page.

March 25 2007 is Freedom Day and we can all do something to address the shocking fact of modern slavery. Download Stop Traffik’s Freedom Day organiser’s pack. Sign the petition to End Modern Slavery, which will be presented to the US Government and global leaders. Go see the newly released film, The Amazing Grace, based on the life of anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce. Read Andrew Crofts’ book, The Little Hero: One Boy’s Fight For Freedom (2006), the story of Iqbal Masih, a 4 year old boy who was sold to a carpet maker by his half-brother, who was getting married and needed money. Or read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy; or this short story from BBC News.

Watch this video on YouTube to see the many faces affected by modern slavery - but only if you think you can stand it.

In our fast-paced consumer bubble, it’s easy to lose sight of the plight of millions of fellow humans but we can be inspired by 15 year old Zach Hunter, a modern day abolitionist who, at the age of 12, decided his life’s mission was to abolish modern slavery. And when your thoughts next to turn to chocolate, remember Fair Trade and send a message to the chocolate companies who exploit children.

I was just gearing up to use Wikipedia as a case study on trust, which is a topic that has occupied my thoughts of late. But I might look at Wikipedia from a governance perspective instead because things are getting interesting over at Wikipedia. Picked up the interesting news that two resignations have occurred - Danny Wool, who is grants coordinator and seen to be the number two person at Wikipedia; and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim Executive Director of the not-for-profit foundation.

Wikipedia is built on a model of open source, community driven knowledge-generation and sharing. But it’s also a foundation that in December 2006, for example, raised US$1 million from over 50,000 people with its fund raising activities. Dealing with this level of funding requires good corporate governance and a Board with members who have sound business acumen and competencies. At present, Wikipedia’s Board comprises: a biotech and genetics researcher, a former CEO of an options trading firm, a couple of computer scientists, a law student at George Mason University, and a musician and composer.

Brad Patrick was recently quoted as saying: “I’ve said before that the board could just as soon have a pie-eating contest or flip a coin or Tiddly Winks to determine who the next board member would be and it would have the same legitimacy as an election.” Apparently, a new Advisory Board is being formed and will include members with business expertise to run a 501(c)3 non-profit.

Danny Wool (as grants coordinator?) could allegedly delete sites and change a user’s access level, according to a member of the Wikipedia community who didn’t want to be identified because of disagreements over deletion issues. Wikipedia itself suggests that people should not edit their own biographies, yet überpedian “Jimbo” Wales has edited his bio 18 times, including deleting phrases describing former Wikipedia employee, Larry Sanger, as a co-founder of the site. Wales and Sanger are currently in dispute over whether Sanger was co-founder, along with Wales, or an employee.

An age of participation I’m afraid also brings with it a demand for accuracy and transparent processes, so it will be interesting to see whether the shake-up results in an emergent phenomenon that is also one of quality, veracity and sound governance.

You can read Wool’s resignation here. And here’s a great post by Nicholas Carr who attacks the hive-mind mentality of Web 2.0 (which Wikipedia exemplifies) and examines the quality (or lack of) for two entries - Bill Gates and Jane Fonda.

Following an earlier post, I came across this report during my research into carbon trading. The report is published by the Corner House, a not-for-profit UK organisation aimed at supporting democratic and community movements for environmental and social justice.

The report is entitled Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power and covers what I talked about in my earlier post about carbon colonialism. A number of case studies are included, which demonstrate the lessons not learnt.