Recently came across this great site by Dan Robles.
One of his latest posts Will Social Capitalism Replace Market Capitalism? (Parts 1&2) included great video material on how social currency can change industries.
His forecasting example is the airline industry. And it’s even not so far fetched. What if you could “Time-Share” seats in private jets ?
It’s easy to think how this social currency model would apply to any other business and radically innovate by creative destruction.
It’s a very novel way to show how a number of trends come together:
- The influence of gaming theories and practices in new business models
- The value and tradability of my personal information
- The power shift from Push to Pull that is so well described in John Hagel’s latest book “The Power of Pull” (I repeat it, in my opinion THE business book of 2010)
By the way, we recently had a face to face meeting with John exploring the possibility to have him with us at Innotribe at Sibos in Amsterdam, 25-29 October 2010.
We have asked John to consider a talk in our Innotribe Opening Keynotes, and to be part of our special Innotribe Lab on The long now in Financial Services.
To come back to the subject of the power of identity, I’d like to spend a bit more time on the tradability of my personal information.
The essence of the story is that some parts of my personal data have value and can be traded under the user’s control to get a better service.
It opens questions to:
- How tradable is my personal identity ?
- How tradable is my digital footprint ?
- How tradable are my on and off-line relationships ?
I have been immersed in “personal digital identity” the last couple of weeks. Recently i attended the EEMA’s The European e-Identity Management Conference in London.
The week after i was the “tour guide” for a "Digital Identity Tour” we organized with some colleagues on the West-Coast”. I am preparing a set of blog posts on these conferences and 1-1 conversations with thought leaders in e-Identity space.
In this blog i will just simplify my summary thoughts with the statement that e-identity is much, much more that a certificate on a smart-card, or for sake of the argument any other form factor.
We are witnessing a power-shift:
In stead of the government (or the bank, or any other service offering entity) creating digital identities to give more value to the citizen, we see the emergence of identities created by the user to give greater value to the government (or the bank, or any other service offering entity)
We have to carefully think this through, as identity – and relations between and with persons – is really a complex animal.
Have a look at this fantastic 210+ slides presentation “The Real Life Social Network V2” by a Google analyst @Padday aka Paul Adams, working for the UX team at Google. The essence of his story is that there is nothing such as a generic “Friends”. You have all sorts of friends and different depths in relations. Whether those relations are between people-people or people-companies.
It’s a great story, and all slides are annotated. As a teaser, here are his 3 summarizing slides:
It’s interesting how the words identity, privacy, care, relationships, collaboration, strong/week ties, Klout, etc are now all coming together. As a matter of fact, these are all attributes that make us truly human.
As a sherry on today’s cake, i’d like to link you once more to Venassa Miemis site “Emergent by Design” and the great recent blog post on Guidelines for Group Collaboration and Emergence, that is building on both her previous work on “Strenghts Based Society”, “”Skills for a 21st century connected world”, and her work on the open source collaborative tool “Junto”.
As we are preparing Innotribe at Sibos, i had the pleasure to talk to Venassa during a Skype session. We are discussing her participation at several levels of our Innotribe Program.
It is great to see how these novel ideas become “totally” relevant when you start thinking about their value for a “community” like SWIFT and an innitiative like Innotribe where “Enabling Collaborative Innovation” is our “Leifmotto”.
From the conversation with Venassa, i can tell you she “totally” got it, and she is preparing some material and levels of interactivity for Sibos that you even never dreamed of.
We are now 16 weeks from Sibos. The idea is to begin hosting a junto every week, invite different thinkers to discuss the future of money, record all conversations and develop a presentation based on them, but also make the videos available for the attendees of the conference to be able to watch whenever they want to see what those conversations were like.
If we think about the Long Now, will there still be currency as we know it? Or will social currency become central to our trade? And what impact does that have on banks ? Should be have personal data stores where we deposit our digital footprint and open personal accounts and do payments for services from there?
Feel free to jump in.
Petervan Studios 
Hey Peter,
Great Post. I find this topic really fascinating, and I’ve been trying to work within this space myself. I think you can already see that there are companies and products emerging more frequently (in many ways in response to the financial crisis) that are looking to be disruptive towards the current economic paradigm. People are still playing with social currency as an idea, mostly from the perspective of aggregating social media data. As you point out, this data is also seen as an emerging basis for digital identity. Beyond that, there are many sharing and freeconomy experiments out there, and many more coming seemingly on a weekly basis.
My question to you is, thus far, many of these services seem to find a neat place within the startup landscape, playing specific or niche roles with the functional benefits they provide to users. What would happen if a service were to be truly disruptive though? How would governments react? How would the IRS or other tax bodies react? Would these be seen as complementary, or incompatible with the current economic paradigm? Nobody knows of course, but I’m curious what you think is the key to making these important innovations stick.
Since it seems that many of these innovations may ultimately lead to a greatly diminished role for banks and financial institutions (or worse), I’m greatly encouraged that SWIFT seems to be exploring these innovations with an open mind.