My hometown Vienna (t d f), Austria certainly is a lively place, it’s of mid-size with a diverse economy. Still I’m not sure if Vienna will ever become such a mega-region – likely not I’d say. I remember there was once the ambition to find & define something like creative industries here. The idea was to garden a diverse environment that might attract talent and innovative thinking leading eventually to economic success. Still I have the feeling that around here we lack something like entrepreneurial spirit. Even worse I think that gardening efforts make no difference. They just petrify the status quo. On the other hand I experience a lively self-organized discussion culture in Vienna (evolved around initiatives like BarCamps), might be echo-chambers but then you need to start somewhere.

I can’t tell you though what’s right. Richard Florida’s article in the Atlantic (see quote below) just made me recapitulating what’s already known. A next step might involve forward thinking and talking about what emerges from an economic reset that’s going to happen.

How the Crash Will Reshape America – The Atlantic
(March 2009): “The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.”

Trampoline: Harnessing Social Behavior in the Enterprise: “Trampoline’s SONAR platform brings a fresh approach to information management, by harnessing the social behaviour that occurs within organizations. SONAR plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems, including email servers, contact databases and document stores. It analyses this data to map social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise”
Read/Write Web

On the contrary I think [tag-tec]Social Software[/tag-tec] or [tag-ice]Enterprise 2.0[/tag-ice] is – at least not only – not about making things visible via decoding [tag-tec]meaning[/tag-tec] and/or social action but essentially about enabling an organizational framework that supports collaboration based on people, objects and the needs of those people on an individual level. To get there you need a change in mindsets first, proper tools that help you to associate on purpose and only eventually tools that make the hidden things visible. Paradoxically by the same token, however, I think those tools – the social software ones – need to support making things visible and invisible at the same time.

I myself wouldn’t trust the data-mining tools of the SONAR kind if I were a knowledge worker. I’d like to be in control and like to freely choose what is in/visible. In German I’d call the impressive SONAR Rasterfahndung (dragnet investigation) which has a rather bad connotation. Somehow this tool is some kind of travesty of the visions of social software by turning some of the basic principles into toolsets of control. Sounds like the old Foucauldian dispositif (thanks to Martin for the link) – a net of un/spoken discourses, institutions, tools, and laws – creates and analyzes the “You” newly from the perspective of the social networking analysis. [tags]Social Software[/tags] [tags]Business[/tags] [tags]Politics[/tags]