Actics Blog

Thought Second Life was innocent, wholseome fun? Not so. With more than 4000 server computers runing at the same time the virtual world- or metaverse, consumes a substantial amount of electricity. So much that electricity supply is one of the main constraints for its growth, and each avatar has a carbon imprint comparable to an inhabitant of Brazil. More on Nicolas carr’s blog, Rough Type

Launch party invitation

Come and celebrate the upgrade of Actics.com from humble widget platform to fully fledged social community.

Finally, in March, we proudly unveil new ways for people and companies to live their values by engaging with people around them.

We’ll demo the new Actics.com and you can even test drive it yourself. We also hope you’d like to discuss the ethical potential of the web with likeminded industry luminaries.

Vibrant tunes accompany nutritious drinks and snacks.

The Actics party takes place March 8th at
The Coningsby Gallery
30 Tottenham Street, London W1T 4RJ
6 – 8pm for the serious part of the evening
8 pm till late for the fun

We look forward to seeing you! (Please comment on your participation)

Download invitation here.

There’s a war going on out there. A war between darkness and light, between right and wrong, between what really matters and what doesn’t. Left is shattered individuals and companies, straying in dismay, lost in the wilderness of the modern world with it’s manifold temptations of shortsighted and misguided material objectives. Morally numbed without a natural contact to their feelings of attachment and blinded without a sense of direction they are beyond salvation - unless saved by brave and sincere soldiers fighting their way through the dark waters to save the marooned. Stand up and join the chosen bound for a daring mission to bring home the lost souls. Are you prepared? Ask yourself, can you answer YES SIR! to our code:

I’m not afraid; I will not bend or be let astray. Harnessed with a profound respect for the demonic lures of the capitalist jungle. Together we will silence the songs of the sirens and steer the herd clear of the cliffs of amorality guided by the lighthouse of reflection. Ethical stewardship WILL prevai. The future is ours – the future is ACTICS.

Then ENROLL IN ACTICS – TODAY!

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What I’m trying to say here is that we are looking for skilled developers and designers to help us realize the Actics concept in applications like the web has never seen before. If you’re good, passionate, focused, and fit for the euphoric freedom and tough responsibility in a start up - get in touch. The salary’s right, our coffee always freshly brewed, the team is skilled, mostly nice and always challenging. You will work from either London or Copenhagen. Need I say more?

Get in contact - get enrolled.

Two weeks ago Business Week ran a special report under the title ‘Beyond The Green Corporation‘, which was based on the announcement of this year’s Global100 ‘role models in sustainable business practises’ (view list).

Though the work by Innovest no doubt is professional, noble, and solid, I cannot help feeling that the methodology is somewhat static and irrelevant today. Basically, the list is made by analysts that through quantitative (e.g. annual reports, CSR reports, NGO documentation) and qualitative (e.g. interviews of managers) analysis assess the score of each company based on pre-defined metrics.

It is commendable that companies live up to what ever metric, standard & code-of-conduct, and have integrated business practises that can cope well with various ethical risks, but somethings are missing in the equation: the perception by all stakeholders & the company’s own ethics!

The message comes across like: “we are what the others are, and as long we do what the others do, our shareholders are happy”.

As all stakeholders today more or less are guided by ethical values in their decisionmaking, i.e. employees’ choice of work place, consumers’ choice of products, and clients’ loyalty to the company, and investors’ choice of company, stakeholder empathy & affiliation have become some of the most important parameters for the competitiveness and market value of these companies.

With all the new collaborative web technologies and the rise of critical aware stakeholders, open & ongoing stakeholder dialogue seems more important for being a ‘role model in sustainable business practises” than living by static standards, code-of-conducts, and pre-defined metrics. In particular, when we still do not know what their own ethics are!?

The great boom in philanthropy, partly as a response to generous tax regulation and partly as a way for a new financial capital to legitimize itself (see my friend Nicolai Guilhot’s book), has produced a jungle of foundations and NGOs who are, for the most part unregulated. Indeed NGOs and charities are often less regulated and less accountable than most business, and, overall there is no measure of the efficiency or social impact of a particular program or activity This might have been OK if the main role of NGOs was to make business and wealthy individuals look and feel good- just give some money to ‘the poor’ and your conscience clears. But in a world where NGOs are becoming ever more important as development and aid actors, often taking over from states and official bodies, we need a way to assure that their activities are transparent and the impact of what they do objectively measured. It is not just a question of making sure the money arrives to the people that need it, but also of ensuring that particular activities and programs are not directly counterproductive. As today’s Financial Times article on the subject concludes
“Of every $1,000 spent in so-called charity today,” observed a philanthropist both Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have described as an inspiration, “It is probable that $950 is unwisely spent – so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils it hopes to mitigate or cure.”

An interesting debate at the P2Pfoundation blog: Web 2.0 platforms (like us) often represent themselves as giving something away. At the same time, of course they rely on user-generated content to aggregate attention and commuity which they can subsequently sell on to advertisers. So they make money by exploiting the free labour of their users. In return they give those users access to the content they themselves (and other like them) have produced.

To quote the debate:’ The most eprverted example is yaadz,(http://www.yaadz.com/). This site offers video ads created and uploaded by the people who watch them. Somebody who loves Nike shoes can now create their own video ad and upload it too. And it’s free. They don’t even have to pay for giving their immaterial labor away for free. In East Germany where people gave socialism a shot for some forty years, many things stank. But surely people would have rolled on the floor laughing if you’d have suggested to them tocreate advertisement aimed at themselves for free.’

Is this ethical? What would an ethically sound system of retribution look like? Follow the debate here.

I’m at a workshop with the Nomadic University’ a european-wide netowork of artists, business and activsts, investigating the possbilitie sof aesthetic intervention and activism. This meeting, organized by world famous Michelangelo Pistoletto at his Cittadellarte foundation in Biella Italy, contains interventions by lovediffererence.org, an artistic moment for an InterMediterrranean Politic, the Italian stalker group a laboratory for architecture and activism and the Egypt based El Akdar project (no website), a group of activists who used art and aesthetic intervention in bolstering the developmental dynamic of an Egyptian fishermen’s village.

Everyone seems to agree that the way forward for activism is aesthetic intervention, and that are, having exhausted its increasingly self referential development in the last century needs to be come ethical : As Pistoletto claimed in his opening speech: ‘Art now needs to engage with its surroundings and become an ethical practice’

We couldn’t agree more: Politicians are in generally only up for (hard) evaluation in elections every 4-8 years. But what about feedback in the meantime? New Political Review offers Americans a new service to rate and rank their politicians ‘on the fly’.

Acknowledging that political disagreements stem form differences in perfectly legitimate basic value sets, this is at least a way to tell politicians if they come across as good public servants whatever their political standpoint. Expect more of this to come. Even if the default four values - honor, integrity, dignity and character - might not represent the actual outlook of all the senators, this is a good, simple start to take the lived values of public agents into the public. Next step is to either make the politicians state their basic values or ask the public WHICH values they perceive the agent as pursuing (keep an eye on Actics.com for this).

And I can’t help adding, that the dynamic aspect highlighted by New Political Review is fully analog to companies with annual customer satisfaction questionnaires or formal audits. Why not open a 24/7 channel for stakeholders to tell you about your performance right when they have an opinion to get relevant and timely feedback – and feedback at all?

Thanks to Daniel for the tip.

IBM’s Global CEO study for 2006, ‘Expanding the Innovation horizon’, focuses (it follows..) on innovation. Building on interviews with 76 CEOs across the globe they conclude that today collaborative innovation is that involves actors outside of the firm or organization is indispensable. Furthermore, ,’business partners and customers were cited as the  top sources of innovative ideas while research and development (R&D) fell much lower on this list’ .

The main challenge for the future is thus to involve your stake-holders in extended networks of cooperation; to ‘ collaborate on a massive, geography-defying scale to open up a world of possibilities’  and to ‘force an outside look, every time,  Push the organization to work with outsiders more, making it first systematic and then part of your culture. ‘

Many of the CEOs interviewed stated that their companies were seriously working with strategies to leverage the innovative potential of stake-holders.  In today’s global, networked and info-tech-saturated (to use a couple of clichés) economy, immaterial productivity has been thoroughly socialized, to quote Sam Palmisano,
Chairman, President and CEo of IBM : ‘ The nature of innovation - the inherent definition of innovation- has changed today from what it was in the past. It’s no longer individuals toiling in a laboratory, coming up with some great invention. It’s not an individual . It’s individuals. It’s multidisciplinary. It’s global. It’s collective.’

download the whole report here

There’s a war going on out there. A war between darkness and light, between right and wrong, between what really matters and what doesn’t. Left is shattered individuals and companies, straying in dismay, lost in the wilderness of the modern world with it’s manifold temptations of shortsighted and misguided material objectives. Morally numbed without a natural contact to their feelings of attachment and blinded without a sense of direction they are beyond salvation - unless saved by brave and sincere soldiers fighting their way through the dark waters to save the marooned. Stand up and join the chosen bound for a daring mission to bring home the lost souls. Are you prepared? Ask yourself, can you answer YES SIR! to our code:

I’m not afraid; I will not bend or be let astray. Harnessed with a profound respect for the demonic lures of the capitalist jungle. Together we will silence the songs of the sirens and steer the herd clear of the cliffs of amorality guided by the lighthouse of reflection. Ethical stewardship WILL prevai. The future is ours – the future is ACTICS.

Then ENROLL IN ACTICS – TODAY!

·········································································································································································

What I’m trying to say here is that we are looking for skilled developers and designers to help us realize the Actics concept in applications like the web has never seen before. If you’re good, passionate, focused, and fit for the euphoric freedom and tough responsibility in a start up - get in touch. The salary’s right, our coffee always freshly brewed, the team is skilled, mostly nice and always challenging. You will work from either London or Copenhagen. Need I say more?

Get in contact - get enrolled.