I thought I’d wrap up the year by looking forward instead of backward. Because looking back on 2009 isn’t all that much fun.

A lot of people have had a tough go of it for some time now, and the last year was not a great one (heck, the Yankees even won the World Series). We’ve seen plenty of examples of bad behavior from prominent people, and a lot of victims left behind. We’re also still recovering from the near-collapse of big and important parts of our economy. And we’re facing huge challenges related to climate change, two wars being fought in the Middle East, and (in the US) altering the health care system.

And yet I find myself optimistic as I look ahead. I try not to be blithe or naive, and I know that soulwise, these are trying times. But I believe that we’ll get through them, and that we’ll address with some level of effectiveness the challenges we’re facing.

My optimism has two sources, one general and one more specific. Generally, I think people are good problem solvers, and are more inclined to be helpful than harmful to each other. Combine these two traits and what results is a world where, as the economist Julian Simon phrased it “The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely.”

I realize that sounds incredibly blithe, naive, and at odds with the facts, but my read of the evidence tells me that it’s not. Climate change might well be an important exception to this happy trend and I don’t mean to be cavalier about it, but I’m with Bjorn Lomborg on how to best address it: invest more in basic energy R&D and unleash human creativity on this human-caused problem.

My more specific reason for optimism springs from my work on the impact of technology, and in particular the emergent social software platforms I’ve written about. Thanks to these technologies, the global Internet, and the explosive growth of wireless bandwidth and mobile devices around the world, we’re entering a really interesting period, and one we should be hugely excited about.

To characterize this period, I’ll rely on the writings of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and visionary who died in 1955. Tielhard de Chardin worked to fuse two strains of thought be believed in deeply: Catholic doctrine with the theory of evolution. I won’t even try to summarize his strange and wonderful arguments, except to say that like Simon he was an optimist, and thought that we are on our way to someplace better.

Tielhard de Chardin held that an important step in mankind’s progression was the interconnection of the world’s people, and he was confident that this would take place. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he wrote

We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered in myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection.

In Man’s Place in Nature, he was specific about how this grouping and reinforcing might take place:

And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision.

More than fifty years after Tielhard de Chardin’s death, his ‘astonishing electronic machines’ are being deployed all over the world, and our abilities to calculate and combine are being multiplied just as he said they would be.

I am incredibly heartened by this. I give us people enough credit to believe that more good than bad things will come from the ‘harmonized collectivity of consciousness’ we’re creating at present, and that we’ll use it to help overcome the challenges we face. Including the ones we ourselves create.

I’ll end this post with a sentence allegedly uttered by Benjamin Franklin just before he signed the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” We have better tools for hanging together than we’ve ever had before, and I’m confident that they’ll help us get through our current hard times and on to better ones.

Happy Holidays, all.

I ended my talk at last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco (viewable here; free registration required) by trying to be cute: I gave advice about how to fail with E2.0. My goal, of course, was to talk about good practices by highlighting bad ones. I gave six bad ideas:

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish
• Accentuate the negative
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features
• Overuse the word ’social’

On the last point, I said this about ’social’ as a descriptor for the technologies of Enterprise 2.0:

“It’s technically accurate… [but] I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to busy, pragmatic line managers inside organizations. The best thing it is is neutral… the worst thing it is is a sign that we’re going to use these tools to waste time, to goof off, to plan happy hour, to do all these social activities. The impression I get from people who make decisions… is ‘I’m not running a social club.  I’m trying to run a business here.’ ” (I accompanied this monologue with a picture intended to convey what flashes through an executive’s mind when he hears the word ’social.’)

I was responding to a newish thread in the Webwide conversation about enterprise use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs). I came across it in a post by Stowe Boyd:

In particular, Web 2.0 as a phenomenon is strongly tied to social tools — social networking, social media, and so on — in which the individual is primary, and asymmetric networks of relationships with other individuals form the principal mechanism for connection and information flow…

We need to switch our attention to the shifting nature of work itself, and how business needs to be reconsidered in a rapidly changing world (which includes a revolutionary social Web, notably)…

So, I have come to believe that this is the place where companies need to focus their attention: socializing the business, not adoption of Web 2.0.

And in the mission statement of the newly-formed Dachis Group:

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.

Blogger and do-er Euan Semple posted that he’s in favor of ’social business’ as both a movement and a term, and describes my “Enterprise 2.0″ as “too narrow, too corporate and too managerial”

Which would sting if it weren’t accurate. My definition is narrow, corporate, and managerial, and I’m glad to have it labeled as such. I think it’s both prudent and responsible to be circumspect about one’s claims, and I think it’s neither to assert that the old rules of society, culture, or business no longer apply because of the appearance of a network, some software that sits of top of it, and a large number of (primarily younger) people who like using it. As I wrote a little while back, Enterprise 2.0 is not THAT big a deal.

But whether or not it’s a big deal, it’s not going to be ANY deal until ESSPs and their attendant practices make their way inside organizations. And the point I was trying to make in my talk, and the one I still believe, is that keying the message / sales pitch / marketing / education effort around the word ’social’ is a bad idea.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff evidently agrees with this. According to an article in The Industry Standard:

Salesforce was careful to position [its new offering] Chatter as a collaboration tool, not a “social this or social that” because there’s such a glut of social networking tools, [Benioff] said, and customers are more willing to pay for collaboration software.

“We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,” Benioff said…

Another Salesforce co-founder, Executive Vice President of Technology Parker Harris, also stayed on message with the collaboration concept in a talk with ZDNet editors (see video below). “I think about our platform as a collaboration platform,” Harris said. “You’re building applications to collaborate around data in the enterprise on a trusted system.”

The article points out that Chatter at present looks very much like Facebook-ish social software, but Benioff and his colleagues were taking pains to describe it and its value using narrow, corporate, managerial words. Does anyone want to make the case that these guys don’t know how to convince organizations to adopt new tools?

What do you think? Is social a helpful or harmful word when talking to enterprises and their managers about the new digital tools and the business practices that make use of them?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I can’t resist the urge to brag a bit about a cool victory for MIT, my alma mater and professional home. A team from the Institute’s Media Lab won the DARPA Network Challenge, an experiment in distributed intelligence conducted in part to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 4-node ARPANET network that blossomed into the Internet.

DARPA announced that on December 5 it would float ten large red balloons in fixed locations throughout the United States. The first team that submitted to the Agency the correct longitudes and latitudes for all ten balloons would win the $40,000 contest, which would be active for seven days.

It took the MIT team only nine hours to find all ten balloons.

Like most other groups that entered the contest, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team recruited a country-wide network of spotters; the goal, obviously, was to make this network as large and geographically distributed as possible. It also needed to be robust against spammers, saboteurs, and others who would submit false spottings in order to confuse a team.

So how do you quickly build a large, dispersed, sufficiently motivated, and fault-tolerant network of balloon finders? The MIT team’s approach was brilliant. It relied on the Web and its social networking utilities like Facebook and Twitter (duh), on multilevel and relatively high-powered financial incentives, and on a clever tracking mechanism.

Here are quotes from the team’s site explaining how it worked: