Archive

Posts Tagged ‘work’

Future Work

May 11th, 2009
1 comment

Interdimensional Hopscotch 1 There are a lot of insightful people talking these days about the changes that are going on now. Of course the economy is challenging, as every mainstream media reports. However, the fundamental shifts that are undermining a speedy recovery to status quo are what I find more interesting. Lots of people are being laid off because some of our larger industries are facing hard times. For example, auto manufacturing workers and newspaper journalists spring to mind.

The Institute for the Future’s Tessa Finlev wrote an article called 10 Workplace Skills of the Future; the skills workers should strive to have and the skills workers should seek out and promote. The first three:

Ping Quotient
Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

Longbroading
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

Open Authorship
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

Many people have one or more of these skills as native strengths. The question becomes how to make use of our strengths in a way that translates into a job. Human Resources (HR) departments don’t exactly know how to value or even recognize these as valuable capabilities yet. So how do we get to the future from here?

Coaching moment: Take a look at the list of skills  at Tessa’s post. Think about your past jobs, and write a job description that highlighted those strengths. Rewrite your résumé with a focus toward those skill sets. How might you quantify how well you did in any one area? Talk with your friends, see if they know of any jobs that sound like a fit for your new résumé. Note that they don’t have to think of job openings, just jobs that sound like good fits. It might give you a new direction for research and thought.

[del.icio.us] [Facebook] [LinkedIn] [Ma.gnolia] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

friends/family, future, records, tools , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Eviction?

January 17th, 2009
1 comment

Phil Wolff has a great post about on his DataPortability Blog about The Power to Fight Eviction. He’s talking about what happens when a service that you’ve been using–and have data stored on–shuts down. Phil points out the tension between the business needs of a service provider and the intellectual property rights of the users.

The question is broader than the one product.

It goes to the tension between consumer rights, enterprise service rights, and the health of our society. For example, if a province decides to demolish your building, you have many rights under law to contest that decision. In the US, many cities have laws about protecting historic landmark buildings.

Phil’s post offers six actions that might be appropriate to redress the imbalance of power between a user and the service provider. Briefly, those include:

  • Intervention with a back-up service
  • Prevent and educate on graceful exit strategy
  • Commit to adding appropriate language to contracts (EULAs and TOSs)
  • Insure your digital assets
  • Advocate for the little guy
  • Enforce with real laws and penalties

Coaching Moment: Why is this matter important to digital identity? If it’s an email service, you may have been using that address for a while. The service provider has your address book. They have all of your email. That’s a part of you, right? Or how about a service that you use to create stuff or do paying work? Do you have a back-up? Could you make a back-up? If the provider offers a unique service, is there any way to keep doing this work? What about getting access to your past files? You might imagine, as I do, that there’s a strong need to start talking about creating protection mechanisms for our online work. Like Phil pointed out, everything dies. Let’s work to make that a graceful passing.

[del.icio.us] [Facebook] [LinkedIn] [Ma.gnolia] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

future, history, records , , , , , , , , , ,

Switch to our mobile site