Cardinal Rule of Crowdsourcing

Mar 28th – 8am

picture-7This week Jeff Howe ended his presentation at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (at Harvard) with The Cardinal Rule of Crowdsourcing:

Ask Not What Your Community Can Do For You — Ask What You Can Do For Your Community.

The community is we (or “us”, as Pogo would put it) – we here in the Philippines that are so dependent on electricity supply.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we are taking baby steps in building out an open source consulting platform here in the Philippines.

One that I envisioned back in 2006.

One in which “new knowledge is developed, shared and refined in ways that emphasize its character as a common good, rather than as something to be owned and enclosed.” [reference]

It will be powerful. And empowering. And disrupting. And our energy sector will be better for it. And WE will be better for it. And our kids will be better for it.

I’ve started a Friendfeed Room for the NPC Rate Increase Filing. Others are looking at starting an email group to address the issues in this filing. This, I perceive, will be a mix of people who are paid to address these issues and many many others that are participating because they want to and they choose to find the time to. We now have the tools that enable all people that have something they want to contribute, to contribute.

By Nick Nichols | Posted in philippines | Comments

This Is a Blog. It’s Always Been a Blog.

Mar 23rd – 2pm

Notice a change? There. Up at the top of your browser page. The Title and Byline. The words Asian Energy Advisors are gone.

First, a failure-to-communicate story: I was at the ERC last week for a meeting and the colleague I was with brought me in to meet one of the Directors that I had never met. We chatted for a while. I suggested to this Director that s/he visit my website because I discuss a lot of relevant issue there s/he may be interested in. S/he said something to the effect, “If I have time. I’m very busy.”

The point I tried and failed to make was, “Exactly, and the things I discuss there may help you out.” Part of the problem is that, sitting there on the business card, it looks like a corporate website: www.asianenergyadvisors.com. If you’re like me, you rarely visit corporate websites. Just how useful is reading a brochure going to be.

My colleague, Viking Logarta, with whom I’m trying to build out the practice of Asian Energy Advisors, thinks the site should be more professional – and contain more of what one expects of a professional advisory firm’s site. He’s right of course. But what about my blog? I need someplace to put my blog.

The simple answer appeared to be just move all the entries over to a platform operating at a new URL and let Google do it’s indexing. It’ll catch up. But that turns out to be problematic, given the size of my blog. So after fretting about this for months and months, I’ve decided that the URL doesn’t matter. I’ll leave it as it is and just change the name of the blog. Bam! Done! This is a blog. Not a corporate website.

I’m mostly interested in driving business opportunities to me – where ever I may be. And that is what this blog is about. It was never about a firm. If I change firms, I don’t want to change blogs. If you want to know my views on whatever it is I’m involved in at the moment, this is the place to check it out.

I’m not totally satisfied with the title and byline yet. But with a few clicks of the mouse, it’s changed. And I’m just not going to sweat the url. Don’t ever sweat urls. And I hope to be back soon with a more professional looking site for Asian Energy Advisors.

By Nick Nichols | Posted in philippines | Comments

A ‘Coral Reef’ for the Napocor Rate Filing

Mar 22nd – 6pm

There is now a Friendfeed Room for keeping up with and exchanging information on the NPC rate case: NPC Tariff 2009.
picture-22

See this discussion thread for more information.

This is the result of my previous post. Also, watch the 1 minute video of Nancy White in my post on We Have Complex Work To Do to find out why we need to do this.

Update: Look at about the six minute mark in this video of NYU Professor Rosen from just a few weeks ago and get yet another perspective on why do this. Basically – because we can (now) and it’s cheap to do so for us that are dispersed around these islands.

Update: Oh! And you’ve got to see his statement at the 7:40 mark. Dead on.

I chose to implement this in FF because:

  • It’s lightening fast.
  • It’s stable.
  • It’s open.
  • Works well with other social media apps.
  • There’s an RSS feed, of course.
By Nick Nichols | Posted in philippines | Comments