Good Morning,

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas holiday and is looking forward to a new and improved 2010!

Our family gatherings are usually infused with a lot of political discussions and heated opinions on all sides of the aisles.  This Christmas as we were deep in our traditional argument I thought about all the energy, intelligence and knowledge that was represented around that one dining room table and how it would be so wonderful if this knowledge could be channeled in such a way as to make a difference vs just make a statement.

The opportunity is actually available to us today through the concept that is best referred to as “crowdsourcing”.  Everyday people who use their spare time to create content, solve problems even conduct R&D.

Clay Shirky the author of Here Comes Everybody and other acclaim came up with a word that solves the problem of explaining the essence of crowdsourcing: “cognitive surplus”. This is the unused potential of the minds of 6.7 billion people. Social media is unlocking this potential. Technology allows us to be creative and productive instead of consumptive. Or as Shirky puts it:

We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

To see a clip of this speech at the Web 2.0 Conference, Cognitive Surplus: How Social Media unlocks Potential of 6.7 million people spend 15 min listening and several hours reflecting.  You too may be able to pull yourself away from the tube and add your cognitive abilities to the world of the future.

After listening to the different opinions and problem solving methods employed by my parents, my siblings, my children and my grandchildren it is apparent to me that the change will be better than we can imagine.

It just makes Sense!