Generations@Work

Open. Opening. Openness.

I woke up this AM with some questions about Openness:

• Could it be that when historians look back a century from now they will say that a group of visionary technologists and a generation of younger people saved American democracy?
• Could it be that these same historians, or others, will look back and see that these same groups tenanciously held to the practices of creativity and innovation and perhaps nearly single-handedly saved the American economy?

Pretty grandiose questions. Not very humble in some respects. But, I’m not making this up.

I know where these questions come from in a literal sense. For the past several days I have been reading lots of posts and articles about open source software, along with several about social networking. And when I woke up it hit me. Where else in our society at this moment do you hear, see, or touch the word openness more than in the tech world AND the life-world of young people as expressed in their words?

Look back a few months to an extremely interesting post discussing radical transparency.

Where else in our culture are we hearing this kind of discourse? So much of our social discourse has been, and remains, locked in the language of shutting down and closing down, whether it be about our physical borders or our psychic borders.

Technology is definitely involved, as most of you know. From the open source movement to Web 2.0, what we have seen in the tech world is a revolution in the social philosophy of production and a potential transformation of the levers of power and control: Openness. If you are a relative novice in this new world it is a heady, almost sensual and tactile experience as more and more sentient beings around the world find each other in exhilarating new ways.

Open-source is not synonymous with openness, but it aids and abets the process in profound ways. Openness is a quality, open-source is a technology; but both are about creativity and innovation. Openness as a personal quality suggests vulnerability. So is creativity and innovation also about vulnerability? Is it not so that the case against open-source software is about its vulnerability to malevolent tampering?

Risk and reward. Does it not seem as though more people are willing to take risks?

Even in the corporate world, the phenomenon of social networking is all about openness. And now its seen as a potential new source of innovation in business.

From this radical openness comes a new type of organization.

Is courage involved? Does it take a certain amount of courage to risk the sort of radical openness and transparency called for in these various posts?

Who gets all of this? What group in our society just seems to intuitively understand how all of this works? Who in our midst has the courage to transcend convention and conventional forms of mediation? It is not just young people of course. But in many ways it is a generational phenomenon. Scan any blog, article or book about the Millennial Generation and the first thing people observe is how “tech savvy” young people are, especially in the workplace. OK, we don’t need to keep repeating this as if it were some profound revelation. What we need to do is to begin to think about what this savviness means experientially.

We got some thoughtful comments to our last post about “sensing”. What emerges several times in these comments is the word ‘egalitarian’. Openness… egalitarianism. A connection?

Obvious Editorial Comments:
Not since WW II, and maybe not even then, has our country been so full of fear and loathing for the Other, and so full of fear about itself.

Who is holding the place of Openness? Who is prepared to take the risks necessary to transform, not just change? Is the tech world driving openness or is the energy of openness waltzing the tech world in an exquisite alchemical dance?

OK, too much caffeine. I’ll stop here.