360DigitalInfluence

It would be impossible to wrap up the first day of TED in 1 post.  Themes emerged around the power of diet (to do everything from prevent angiogenesis leading to cancer to reversing childhood obesity), taking scientific lessons from space and spiders to improve our daily lives, and the Nobel-winner-documented delta between happiness and economics (hint: means, not end).

The theme that is most relevant to our ongoing discussion here, however, is the possible societal echoes of the transparency that social media facilitates.   The most powerful applications discussed yesterday:

• Regardless of your political affiliation, the unscheduled simulcast appearance of predicted next Prime Minister of Britain David Cameron made a big impact on the crowd.  In his 18 minute TED talk, his message was improving the well being of Britain through a combination of de-centralizing power (“Power to the People”) and changing behavior by understanding how people actually are motivated.  Power to the People was essentially an all-social media plan in 3 parts: Transparency (publicly listing every government expenditure over 25,000 pounds as well as every potential contract), Choice (providing individuals more information to make better choices), and Accountability (such as showing interactive crime map that allows the public to hold the police accountable or, say, interactive maps of places where snow has been plowed).  I found it interesting that his open government examples were all taken from the US when Canada has more vibrant examples, but maybe he was playing to the crowd.  Regardless, it resonated as a very sensible use of government transparency.
• Why not use Social Media to find intelligent life on other planets?  SETI satellites collect so much data, and the subtlety of seeing patterns in data is difficult to be done by computers.  So, what to do?  Distribute the work to amateur ET hunters all over this planet?  SETIQUEST, launched yesterday, provides citizen scientists with the opportunity to review pieces of this data from anywhere via mobile device and trigger other citizen scientists to take a second look if they think they see something.  If others agree, the telescopes are repositioned to hone in on the signal and the SETI scientists then review.
• The difference between Data and Insight was the topic of a 5 minute TED U talk by Monitor 360’s Doug Randall.  He told the story of the US Government having access to reams of data, but relying on on the ground, crowd-sourced insights to combine with that data to make decisions related to military strategy.  Algorithms can not replace the value of  human instinct.  The key to culling the insights is asking the right questions and tapping into the right “crowd”.

And why, might you ask, have I included the photo I did at the top of the post?  Because I was moved over and over again by the pieces put together by musical director Thomas Dolby - seen here with power string quartet Ethel and I wanted to give them a digital kuckle bump even though it has nothing at all to do with social media.  More to come tomorrow!