Translation to English of my article in the newspaper La Crónica de Hoy:

The events happening in Puerta del Sol in Madrid cannot be understood by watching the news on TV from the sofa at home. The aerial views of the square, the number of people protesting, the clever messages on posters, the slogans people yell … all that attracts attention, but it doesn’t really communicate the essence of this phenomenon.

You have to walk under the plastic sheets of the tents in the camp and experience firsthand the development of their daily activities to truly understand what is happening and why.

The first thing we notice when we approach the center of the square, next to the statue of Charles III, is that the camp is not a chaotic group of people in sleeping bags and tents, but a coherent structure that has gradually been built with wooden planks, ropes, furniture, and any material that the “infrastructures commission” has been able to get.

We must have looked a bit lost, because a young man approached us. He was wearing a cuff of the “commission of respect”, which is responsible for ensuring that the camp retains its serious and peaceful climate. He kindly pointed us to the information desk.

The girl at the information desk asked us if we wanted to volunteer. Everyone is welcome to help out in any of the commissions of the campsite. Many young people with a high level of preparation, but who remain unemployed, are devoting all their time and talents for the benefit of this movement.

They gave us a map of the camp and informed us of the various activities of the day: assemblies of political, economic or social issues; musical concerts, and even a play.

Inside, Acampada Sol is buzzing with activity: some entertain children in a nursery, others are responsible for cleaning, others give free legal advice, others provide food and water donated by families or nearby restaurants, others attend the infirmary, many others attend the mailboxes where anyone can place proposals, many are involved in some of the assemblies. There are also many, as myself, who driven by curiosity, walk around the square taking pictures and let themselves get carried away by the spirit of solidarity and renewal that fills the place.

Undoubtedly, the heart of Acampada Sol and the whole movement is the “communication commission.” Here, volunteers are working around the clock in front of their laptops, informing the world through social networks on the progress of the various initiatives and coordinating with more than 300 campsites around the globe. While I was there, a volunteer announced through the loudspeaker that a new camp had started in Siberia (Russia) from where they were sending their greetings and support.

Talking to the official spokespersons, we heard that they intend to keep the camp at least one more week in Puerta del Sol, but they are already making plans to bring the movement to the next level: they plan to form assemblies in every district of Madrid to keep the objectives of the SpanishRevolution alive, which are aimed towards the search for greater citizen participation in the decisions of the country and putting pressure for an electoral reform to break the bipartisanship and allow a better democratic representation.

We’re leaving Acampada Sol with great satisfaction after talking with young people so full of dreams, who do not limit themselves to complain passively of the problems that affect them, but have decided to put all their physical and intellectual energy to actively transform their environment in a positive way . There is no doubt that whatever happens, they are already making history …

Translation to English of my article in the newspaper La Crónica de Hoy:

“Something big is happening here. ” This phrase from periodismohumano.com sums up the feeling you get when you reach Puerta del Sol square in Madrid and see people who are so different from each other that, sick of the situation in their country, decided to do something about it.

They arrived on Sunday, May 15th to camp in the plaza of  Spain’s  “kilometer zero”, without a clear agenda, distributed in various initiatives with names from twitter hashtags like #nolesvotes, #democraciarealya, #tomalacalle, #acampadasol and #yeswecamp.

By Wednesday, May 18th, the “Acampada Sol” had become a small town divided in commissions to resolve  immediate needs, with an assembly to vote the direction of the protest, and an effective communication strategy through social networks that has allowed to replicate Acampadas (campings) in Spain’s main cities and even in other European cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. And it’s still growing …

This is the #SpanishRevolution, a movement that emerges spontaneously and peacefully, without a clear identity, but with a shared and strong message: “they do not represent us.”

Spain, with a fifth of the workforce unemployed and a third of young people without access to a home or work, with a completely polarized electoral process which has been based on mutual insults from left-wing and right-wing parties, has met the necessary conditions for Civil Society to reach the critical point of not trusting the way their country is being administered, or the process by which the administrators are chosen, and deciding to protest outside the establishment. They have three very concrete demands: electoral reform, true separation of powers and political regeneration.

Constructing Democracy 2.0

Underlying this collective awakening of the Spaniards there is an idea which is similar to what has inspired the protests in Arab countries, the protests on Saturdays in Iceland’s financial crisis of 2008 and the main motivation for Wikileaks.

Citizens around the world feel alienated from decisions affecting the course of their lives by a political structure that they feel fails to represent them and listen to them, has not been transparent and has also driven the global economy to a scandalous failure.

It no longer makes sense to divide political ideologies into arbitrary and obsolete packages such as “left and right”, it no longer makes sense to wait four or six years to express our opinion in an election when we do it regularly in social networks, it no longer makes sense that the only way we have to express is voting for a party with a mark on a ballot when there are means now to have a more active and participatory communication with the people we elect to represent us.

Democracy 2.0 is the same good old democracy, but with more efficient mechanisms to fulfill it. It’s letting people who govern actually represent the majority, expanding freedom in the election process, and letting their decisions reach a real consensus, broadening the channels for citizens to participate, especially in crucial areas such as education.

How far will the # SpanishRevolution get?

Nobody knows where this will end, but Spain is perhaps the ideal starting point for a transformation that has significance. It is a natural connection point among Europe, Latin America and Africa. It is a key economy which is at the same time, part of the European periphery in danger of needing a bailout, and one of the five pillars of Europe (along with Germany, France, Italy and the UK). It is a country characterized by great solidarity at critical moments, in which the lack of clear solutions and opportunities has led the youth to a situation where their only alternative is to devote all their energy and talent to change the world.

I had the opportunity today to attend the conference of Nikesh Arora, President of EMEA Operations for Google, at IE Business School in Madrid. It was titled “Internet 2019: The Road Ahead”. Here I share a summary of what I believe are the most important ideas from the conference.

I. Reflection: 10 years ago

During the first part of the conference he invited us to reflect on how we used to do some things 10 years ago compared to how we do them now. He reminded us of objects and habits that used to be so important in our everyday life and now they are gone because some other innovation has replaced them. Some of the examples used were the VCR/video tapes, cameras with photographic film, traditional TV channels and local buying habits. He also reminded us of how was our own adoption process of technologies that are so common today, like the e-mail, social networks or online video.

He then challenged us to think of habits and objects we use today that might disappear 10 years from now. The audience suggested a few (keyboard and mouse, newspapers, desktops). We all laughed a little bit, and Nikesh said, “the more you laugh about the possibility of living without a particular technology, the more likely it is that you won’t be using it 10 years from now”.

He then quoted Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

“Regarding the Internet, we are the transition generation. We know both how life was before the Internet and how it is now with the Internet, but our children won’t.”, he then said before moving into the second part of the conference.

II. Trends: 10 years from now

The second half of the conference was a small glimpse of Google’s Nikesh Arora’s vision of the Internet in the year 2019. He developed this vision in five trends:

1. Everything in the Cloud

Technology innovations used to target companies (PC’s, software, LAN’s) and recently innovations have been targeting the consumer. These new consumer-oriented services are all served from the Internet or “in the cloud”. Gradually, companies from multiple sectors will also transfer most of their processes and infrastructure to the cloud because it’s cheaper, it’s faster and it’s where all the innovation is taking place.

2. Creative Collaboration

The creative process is changing. It’s no longer about getting a bunch of people in a room and then wait for them to come up with a new product or service. The creative process is now open, dynamic and involving the customer in all stages of development (perpetual beta).

He used as example Paulo Coelho’s Experimental Witch Film Competiton in which everybody is invited to contribute with input for the creation of a film based on one of Coelho’s books.

3. Smarter Search and Better Visualization

There’s an outstanding amount of content being created every moment, (281 exabytes or 281 billion GB of data were created, captured and replicated in 2007 according to an IDC report). Smarter ways to search, organize and cluster information will need to be developed to be able to handle this massive universe of data. These searching innovations have to be complemented with better ways to visualize information to understand it better and make it more useful. He used as example a fragment of a “TED talk” that I like a lot featuring Hans Rosling debunking third-world myths with a remarkable stats visualization software.

4. Real-time Translation

As the world becomes more globalized, the need for tools that help us understand each other across language barriers grows. Technology will need to be developed that lets us all communicate in our own language and be able to understand each other at the same time.

5. Massive Personalization

Services will be delivered in a more personal fashion, adapting to individual needs, personalities or lifestyles. He used a very funny example of a customized video generated during the last US Election.

III. Questions

Four very good questions were asked by IE students to Nikesh Arora.

1. He was asked what he thought about privacy issues caused by Internet companies having too much information from the users.

He said that users in the new Internet reality are strongly opinionated and have the means to put pressure on companies that handle their information in a way they don’t approve. Also, companies’ most valuable and important asset is customers’ trust, and they will always take care not to betray it

2. He was asked about Google’s position on the high carbon footprint of Internet companies that rely heavily on energy-consuming data centers.

He said this challenge can be approached in multiple levels. Google, for example, places data centers right next to energy generation sites to save the estimated 40% of energy that is lost in the transportation process. In another level, he thinks that there is a transition towards doing a lot of things more efficiently thanks to the Internet that will ultimately counterweight this footprint with considerable energy savings.

3. He was asked about his opinion of Internet platforms having a lot of users but not being able to find the right business models to be profitable.

He said that the new dynamics generated by the Internet are forcing companies in a lot of sectors (particularly those dealing with content) to reinvent themselves, but he thinks it’s far better to try to find the right business model when you have a growing user base than trying to find it with a declining demand.

4. He was asked how he thought the global financial crisis would affect the development of the Internet.

He believes this crisis, like the ones before, is part of a normal cycle in the economy, and it will not affect significantly the long-term trends that the development of the Internet is following.

People who fail to see that our world has fundamentally changed are wrong. This is not the contraction phase of a balanced cycle that will start all over again. This is a key moment, a turning point in the history of our civilization, a time to contemplate long-term consequences of our decisions.

It is time to radically modify some of our concepts to adapt them to our new reality, the same way our ancestors had to admit the Earth was not flat and was not the center of the universe. This is what a group of people are trying to do under the name of AEREAS with a campaign to spread the concept of sustainopreneurship as the new way we should be doing business.

Poverty. Climate Change. Epidemics.  Problems are there and have been there for a long time. A lot has been written about them. Non-profit projects (based on unstable fundraising) and government actions (with limited capability) have not been sufficient to provide significant long-term solutions to the problems. We need to add business to the equation, we need creativity and innovation.

The first step was social entrepreneurship, (I even studied cases from Schwab and Ashoka in business school), but it still didn’t offer a fundamental change. It was merely a hybrid, a “not-only-for-profit”, which is a good step forward but not enough to get where we need.

How do we involve in one single concept all the innovation agents (academia, industry, government), and sustainability both as purpose and part of the process?

I believe Anders Abrahamsson (@sliceonline) is right on target with the concept of sustainopreneurship:

- “View the sustainability agenda as something that creates even greater business opportunities than the problems”

- “Solution and business emerges from the local context, bottom-up, not top-down. Acting local, thinking global!”

I invite everybody to join the conceptual campaign to get 1 million hits in Google for this word before the year 2009 ends.

Hopefully this concept will go beyond the word into our minds and then into real business decisions and actions.

Then again, this city is a blossoming global capital, and very innovative cutting-edge stuff happens here too. This was the case of the “Comunidad Enterprise 2.0″ event organized by everis (the company I work at) and Oracle on March 17th at the BBVA Innovation Center close to Plaza de Alonso Martínez in downtown Madrid.

ComEnterprise 2.0 (#cent20 on the twitter conversation) had an impressive agenda with top speakers from different sectors in Spain, all contributing with their thoughts to the question of how the enterprise can take advantage of the new tools provided by web 2.0 to improve sales, to get both new and loyal customers to engage and to increase in-house talent productivity.

During the event, I played the role of the “twitter guy”. Like a modern-age reporter, I listened to every conference and tried to capture what I thought were the most relevant ideas in 140-character tweets from the @ComEnterprise twitter account. The results? “highlights in one click” for every conference (thanks to twitter search).

The top ideas that continuously came up during the event’s conversation were:

- Companies should stop thinking of employees as human resources (industrial point of view) and start thinking of talent management (knowledge economy point of view).

- Companies that lead in the near future are those that successfully capitalize on the “prosumer” paradigm (user-generated content, crowdsourcing, social media, etc.)

- Open Innovation is the way to go to generate the most value given the current trends and tools (mass collaboration, creative commons, peered value, etc.)

- Innovation shouldn’t be overly focused on new technologies. Most important and most difficult to replicate is innovation on new business models.

- Everybody knows that marketing is no longer a one-way monologue, customers have taken the lead of the conversation. Strategies should be focused on getting them to engage socially with the brand.

- The crisis should be perceived as an opportunity. “When the wind blows some run and hide while others build windmills”. We shouldn’t be worrying about how long the crisis is going to be but about the new business models that will result from it.

- On internet where everything is measurable, it’s where we worst measure because of lack of standards.  (**Great spot to promote my good friend Mauricio’s CALL TO ACTION regarding Social Media Measurement**)

I look forward to more activities like this in Madrid and to get more action with my newfound vocation as a twitter-reporter.

Since we, people, are not mindless animals struggling in evolution according to the law of the survival of the fittest, but rational self-determining beings with an ethical conscience that holds us responsible for our own actions, we are compelled to make sure that everybody has the same chance to live with dignity and to give a hand promptly to those that fall behind. That is what makes us humans.

The corporation was given the same legal status as a natural person in the 19th century. Since then, corporate “persons” have followed the law of survival of the fittest in the jungle of free markets, letting the real people making the real decisions hide behind “limited liability” and the excuse that profits are the raison d’être of the corporation and the only way they can be of any value to society.

Corporate Social Responsibility for me is an effort to give the corporate person the ethical conscience that it has lacked, to give the corporate person the same responsibility that we all have as human individuals of giving everybody the same chance to live with dignity and give a hand promptly to those that fall behind. CSR tries to make the corporate person more human.

How is this being done?

- Broadening the corporation’s bottom-line to include the impact it has on other stakeholders beyond their clients.

- Developing measurable values of the extra-market impact of the corporation’s decisions and strategies.

- Finding new business models and structures that allow the compatibility of profit with social action.

- Demonstrating that every investment that the corporation makes in a socially responsible fashion will bring extraordinary long-term returns.

The same way a man has to be “first a man and then a saint”, the corporation has to be first profitable and then socially responsible. Without air and a healthy life, a person dies; without profit and a healthy balance sheet, a corporation dies.

It is stupid to criticize corporations because they care about profits. That’s what they do and that’s how they give value to society. But they have to realize that there is not only profit.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder of PeaceWorks, said in a conference at the IE Social Responsibility Forum, that the best way to achieve a social objective is to make business out of it, because the profit-oriented approach of business organizations makes them far more efficient than fundraising-oriented NGO’s. His own business, PeaceWorks pursues both peace and profit being quite successful in achieving both.

Another idea that I have been thinking about is the understanding of the risk and unfairness of submitting vital services like healthcare to the laws of supply and demand, because it sets a price on people’s possibilities of living a dignifying life or a life at all.

There has to be an equilibrium price for healthcare because there is a cost and there is a need of providers to be profitable to be able to provide… but at the same time it is unfair that a person can’t have access to healthcare because he or she can’t pay the price. Since governments sometimes don’t have the capacity to provide free or accessible healthcare to everybody, and non-profit organizations are not efficient enough, corporations must understand their responsibility to take direct action on these matters.

From now on, wherever I go, either if it’s consulting, telecom, media, or starting a new venture, I will always include a socially responsible point of view to my business decisions.

I think that’s all it takes. Incorporating social responsibility to everyday decisions, assuming personal responsibility of corporate actions, having always a long-term vision of the social impact, is a far better solution than big social projects with loads of marketing that consume time and money unnecessarily and have short-term effects that fade away.

Social responsibility for me is not a career path. Social responsibility is a change of attitude in our business roles, wherever they are performed.

**UPDATE (18/Dec/2008): My good friend Tobias Schirmer has published on his blog, an article about CSR that we wrote (together with Philipp Pausder and Blagoja Hamamdziev) for brandeins magazine. **

What we have received in the traditio [handing over] is our duty now to pass on to others [reditio].

Reditio is to return. It is an output, but always preceded by an input… because you can’t return something you don’t have. The first stages of life are a massive input… As time passes by, we tend to reach an input/output equilibrium. You take all you have received and start producing your personal output. At the beginning, output is a copy of input. When we create relations among our independent inputs we can actually create new output. We sum, we integrate, we “hyperlink”, all we have received. That’s why everything we have created can be traced throughout history back into the first “1″ of human existence: self-awareness. I AM.

I think the human ideal is to become an output-oriented being. We can’t control input, because we are designed to be open to the world that sorrounds us… we can’t help seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting… But we can choose to orient our life one way or another. We can choose to let ourselves just be motivated by the input we receive from the world… just looking to “be well”, looking for pleasant activities that can’t be transformed into outputs, because they just turn into personal memory… useful and only temporarily only to our own system. We can also choose to be an intelligent server… that receives data all the time, relates it with other data, and outputs useful knowledge for the whole network. It upgrades itself and the network.

Ok…. what’s the Tech Tree?
It’s like our family tree… every human being receives his material existence directly from two parents, and can trace the succession line all the way up to the first (or one of the first ones) human couple.

Let’s define technology as Kevin Kelly’s Technium:

“The Technium: It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology – one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. In short, the Technium is anything that springs from the human mind. It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well.”

Every technology can be traced back to a human need or interest. It’s a more complex tree because one tech can have several parents, and there are different factors that have influence on its developement.

I like to think about the story of every human invention that sorrounds us, from a door-knob to an airplane. I like to mentally filter things to leave only those that we actually need… until I leave human being naked in front of the mystery of his own personal existence.

Inspired a little in my favorite game of all times, Sid Meier’s Civilization, I want to build an informatic, hyperlinked, graphical map of technology. In KK’s language: I want to draw the Technium’s map.

As I said before, the Tech Tree can’t be linear because of the multiple factors that have an effect on tech developement… it has to be a 4D Network… searchable through space and time…. through human minds that influence one each other… through different paradigms, and cosmologies of different times….

This is a pre-list of considerations for the TT model:

- The protagonist of the TT is a specific Technology.

- There will be a difference between BASE TECH or ESSENTIAL TECH (defining essence as the attribute -or set of attributes- that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is) and UPGRADE TECHS (techs that have the same purpose as their mother BASE TECH, and just do it better or add secondary attributes).

- Techs will be related with parent techs (those that made possible its existence), heir techs (those that exist thanks to it), and cousin techs (those closely related, but not sine qua non).

- Techs will be related also with thinkers, science, historical events.

- Techs will brake up into their components.

Knowledge is all about the Medium.

* medium.- a means or instrumentality for storing or communicating information

One human being alone, isolated from anyone else, can only learn by his own observation of the world, and this knowledge remains locked inside his mind.

Two contemporary human beings enrich their learning process by sharing their points of view. The medium starts to appear in this communicating process: they use their voices with an agreed code or language.

This integrated observation is now coded. Things observed have names.

We human beings are temporal. We die. That’s why we feel impelled to leave behind a record of our existence and our observations, our knowledge. The medium appears again in this recording process: stones, bricks, scrolls carved or written with the code that represents someone’s knowledge.

The first observers’ descendants don’t start from zero. They inherit the language, they inherit the records left behind, they inherit the knowledge. Their own observation is influenced by previous records, and, at the same time, they enrich the records with their own observation.

As the records start growing, science, philosophy, literature are born. Culture, history and civilization are possible thanks to this immortalized knowledge that keeps growing with each generation that passes by.

Spoken languages and written alphabets diversify. Records multiply. Systematic knowledge like science is kept on physical records accessed just by a few, and practical “life” knowledge is passed down from one generation to another through oral tradition.

Medium has had three milestones throughout human history:

- The printing press: movable types allowed to generate massive copies of a single record. More people had access to one record, and one person had access to more records.

- Mass media: waves allowed to transmit a single message or record to a massive auditorium. In the peak of mass media, television has displaced family and school as the first cultural agent in human formation. It also has favoured the displacement of actual knowledge by a huge amount of isolated details, words and images.

- Internet: bits & bytes allowed to interconnect a massive amount of records among themselves and connect this global network with a massive amount of persons/users. The users are also subjects of interconnection, and generate records for the network.

The supremacy of television has its roots on the presentation. An image record is better than a written description record, and a video record is better than a static image one. The weakness of television is its “unidirectionality”. The receiver can’t choose the content. This weakness exists because of the physical channel: air propagation or one-way cable/satellite transmission.

Internet is displacing unidirectional TV because of the power of its physical channel and the diversity of its presentation: everything can be coded into 1′s and 0′s (text, pictures, sound recordings, video), “uploaded” or “downloaded” though the world wide network, and “hyperlinked” with any other element in the network.

So… a broad horizon is opening for medium. We are getting to the point in which every piece of information will be accessible for everyone who’s able to plug himself into the global network.