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Diplomacy and New Media: A Rich Conversation Between James Fallows and John Podesta at Gov 2.0 Summit

It’s not often that a conference can synthesize relevant technology and policy communities, but the O’Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit did just that. The most compelling example of synthesizing technology and policy was the rich dialogue at the close of day one between James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly and John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

The dialogue between Fallows and Podesta revealed how each participant understood the role of new media in diplomacy and public policy. Like a hopeful prospector Podesta probed Fallows for evidence that new media was actively shaping public perception of US policy overseas. Fallows, who spent much of the last three years in China, maintained that new media has not yet become sufficiently mainstream to affect public perception. Based on Fallows’ observations, broadcast media, movies and music still play the fundamental role of shaping perception of America and Americans overseas.

Fallows engaged Podesta directly on health care reform. Podesta is optimistic that new media can effectively overcome institutional barriers inherent in traditional media by directly reaching a large enough demographic to influence the outcome.

The Pew Center's New Media Index shows evidence of interest in health care reform in the blogosphere. During the second week of August 24% of postings from bloggers were about health care. That same week on Twitter, however, only 3% of tweets pertained health care reform. The number one topic, at 16%, was Microsoft's support for Internet Explorer 6 through 2014. In fact, four of the top five topics on Twitter were technology-related, which could indicate the Twitter audience is more technology-oriented. However, blogging is more suited to analysis than Twitter's 140-character limit, so perhaps we should expect to find more policy discussions in the blogosphere.

Is new media sufficiently influential to affect diplomacy and policy outcomes? According to the dialogue between Fallows and Podesta as well as the New Media Index, there isn't enough evidence just yet, but health care is one key policy outcome to watch.




Management Innovator’s Bookshelf: Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger (2002)

A few weeks ago, in my review of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control, I contrasted hierarchical command structures with biological systems that are networks of cooperation. In Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, examines how the World Wide Web provides the ideal infrastructure for networks of cooperation in today’s global information society.

Those of you who are following the Management Innovators Bookshelf series may have noticed that I skipped ahead to #7 on Gary Hamel’s essential reading list. I think you’ll agree the complementarity between Out of Control and Small Pieces justifies my choice. I’ll return to Hamel’s #3, the Age of Heretics by Art Kleiner later in the series.

Like a reflection in a mirror, Web infrastructure is ideal because it takes the same shape as the networks of cooperation that use it. Both the Web infrastructure and these networks of cooperation self-organize. And if we drew a picture of self organizing systems, whether physical or biological, they would have surprisingly similar shapes. Although we might assume they're random, they are very efficiently organized in a shape called scale-free. And they both look like Figure 1.

Figure 1
scale free network

Like Kelly, Weinberger is hopeful. As we read in the final chapter of the book, Weinberger writes “The Web will have its deepest effect as an idea. Ideas don’t explode, they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall sized television screens.” But Weinberger is also worried. He acknowledges disappointments like the dot-com bust, and he also recognizes that the Web can generate unrealistic expectations about the pace of change: “[…] answers can come quickly. The Web is indeed speeding up the pace by enabling ideas to be heard and discussed faster than ever before, but it takes more than a meme, or an idea virus to work through the implications of a change in bedrock concepts. It can take generations to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world.”

Weinberger writes that identity, space, time, perfection, togetherness, knowledge and matter all shape our experience on the web. And that experience defines a networked culture of cooperation whose collective behavior, like Kelly’s bee hive, is adaptive, distributed and organic. The group seems to possess a knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. While at the same time we preserve and even celebrate our individuality on the Web.

The Web is what we make it and we are what it makes us. The Web is a MirrorWorld. And Weinberger’s unified theory of the Web is a reflection of our culture in the Web.

We are Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.




Management Innovator’s Bookshelf: Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (1994)

Last year when I started Around the Corner I promised a place where we could challenge some of our assumptions, explore something new or discover something unknown. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly is the second in the list of Gary Hamel's essential reading for management innovators. It presents a wonderful opportunity to challenge, explore and discover.

Kelly, previously the founder and Executive Editor of Wired Magazine and member of the Board of the Long Now Foundation, imagines a world for us in which biological principles can help to enable human collaboration. For instance, the typical organizational structure is very hierarchical and top-down driven. But Kelly suggests a beehive model might be informative for our modern knowledge economy. The members of the beehive do not have formal roles and responsibilities, but each member makes a contribution. The beehive as a whole is adaptive, distributed, and organic. Likewise, a spider web is a useful model to describe the interrelated nature of suppliers, employees, customers, and stakeholders in today’s complex organizations. These and other systems in nature don’t generally follow a centralized hierarchy, but instead work through networks of cooperation. In some cases the group seems to possess a kind of knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. Consider migrating geese. None of the flock have made the trip before, yet somehow the flock knows its migration path from hemisphere to hemisphere

Another of Kelly’s key ideas is that complex systems work best when they grow incrementally: “The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization without growing it, inevitably lead to failure..... Time is needed to let each part test itself against all the others...."

Out of Control is not a quick read, but it is a thoughtful book that challenges the reader to think about future possibilities. As technology professionals we know from what we experience every day that success requires careful attention to every detail and that progress is slow and most times really quite laborious. Possibilities are endless in Out of Control. It is worth the reading because we're too often led to exclude possibilities rather than wonder what's Around the Corner.

It's on my bookshelf and I hope you have the time to add it to yours!




Web 3.0: A Smart Web that Helps People

Hey, I'm Rick Murphy. Casey's out and gave me a guest spot to share some thoughts on where we are with what some folks are calling Web 3.0 and what it might mean in our lives and our jobs.

Web 3.0 is really just the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Remember that Web 2.0 is a response to the perception that heavyweight planning and technologies were slowing us down. Our tools were too complex. We quickly put blogs, wikis and other social media utilities in place that shifted complexity away from our tools, but cause us to manage that complexity. For an excellent talk on this issue, see Ross Mayfield's All Things 2.0 Are Made of People, part of PARC's Beyond Web 2.0 series.

The success of Facebook and Twitter increase the information available to us. Now that we all have 500+ friends and Tweets streaming at us faster than we can read, how do we keep up? Our lifestreams are overrunning our lives. Whether we tag our family photos or search the Web, we expect to get all relevant results and exclude the ones that are irrelevant so we don't have to filter them ourselves. We need a smart Web that reduces the burden of the complexity that we've taken on ourselves. Web 3.0 is the idea that we can add some smarts, known as the Semantic Web, to Web 2.0. These smarts help us at home and work by reducing this complexity.

So where are we with Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web? Since the 2001 Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila, both skeptics and supporters have sought evidence that the Semantic Web has been adopted. The good news is that the favorable climate for innovation recently accelerated adoption of Semantic Web technologies. Most recognizably, both Google and Yahoo announced support through their Rich Snippets and Search Monkey offerings. The UK Government moved the London Gazette, a four hundred year old publication, to the Semantic Web. You can hear more in this podcast from my colleague John Sheridan, Head of e-Services, of the UK Government's Office of Public Sector Information. Datasets from data.gov are already available for the Semantic Web and our team has used Semantic Web technologies in our Enterprise Architecture practice.

Web 3.0 is the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Facebook will produce more meaningful information about relationships among family and friends. We might discover meaningful trends among Tweets. And we'll spend less time filtering inaccurate search results.

Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web are happening now, but they won't happen all at once. And there's no more appropriate time to recall the well known William Gibson quote: "As I've said many times: the future's already here, it's not just very evenly distributed."




Innovation Happens

Have you ever wondered how and when innovation happens? Can managers demand it? Can we put it in our project plans? Can we just reprioritize it when we get too busy? Although these questions seem rhetorical, each one causes us to ask how and when innovation happens. Is innovation, much like creativity, neither intentional or something we can turn on and off? Does it just happen?

There's no one answer to these questions, but there are patterns we can observe from successful innovation.

Take the opportunity to watch this TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee on The Next Web. In this talk Tim tells the story of how he created what we now know as the World Wide Web. In March of 1989, while a software engineer at CERN, Tim handed Information Management: A Proposal to his supervisor Mark Sendall. Sendall wrote "vague, but exciting" on the paper, put it in his drawer and nothing happened. Eighteen months later Sendall told Tim he could "do it on the side as a sort of a play project." Some twenty years later we know the Web not only as an essential global information and business resource, but also a part of the critical infrastructure on which our national security depends.

This is an interesting enough anecdote, but there's a pattern. During the fall of 1992 at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) Marc Andressen and Eric Bina had enough time available to start a side project based on Tim's work at CERN. The project soon became X Mosaic, the world's first widely available graphical web browser. Within a few years the Mosaic team formed Netscape Communications Corporation which a few years later was acquired by America On Line (AOL) for about $4 billion.

Today, Google recognizes this pattern in its operations plan and it calls the pattern 20-percent time. Engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects of their own choosing. Google does not enforce 20 percent time and engineers work on behalf of Google during that time. 20 percent time is so successful that about half of Google's new product launches originate from what engineers create during their 20-percent time.

There's solid evidence that innovation happens when employees have time and opportunity to investigate projects beyond their core duties. That does not mean that managers have lost control, or that employees are not working on behalf of the organization. Not all organizations recognize 20 percent time in their ops plan, but all organizations can create an environment that encourages how and when innovation happens.




Aspen 140: The Open Ideas Project

The Aspen Institute holds its annual Ideas Festival each summer. This year the festival was held from June 29 though July 5. The 2009 Festival theme was, “Ideas That Work,” and had four tracks: World Affairs and the Global Economy; Arts and Culture; Life in America; and Managing Planet Earth.

The Festival gathers recognizable leaders, thinkers and doers at the Institute to share their ideas. Traditional media outlets typically provide limited coverage of the Festival. This year my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, is running a special ideas report and recently the Festival started sharing ideas through a video library.

This year there's a twist. Because sharing ideas widely is as important as being at the Festival, the Institute is extending its reach by recruiting at least 140 attendees to share ideas from the Festival through Twitter. (The number 140 is relevant because Twitter updates are limited to no more than 140 characters.)

You can track and share open ideas from the Festival by searching Twitter, using the search term #AIF09. This search string is called a “hashtag,” denoted by the pound sign at the beginning. Prior to the Festival, organizers established this hashtag to give everyone a common reference point to track updates from the Festival on Twitter.

There are other ways to track ideas from the Festival too. Because of Twitter's 140 character limit, users abbreviate the ideas they share as memes. The term meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 best seller the Selfish Gene. Memes are units of cultural information with specific meaning that are replicated throughout a culture. Memes can be abbreviations or terms whose interpretation requires tacit knowledge.

"Chimerica" is a good example of a meme used at the Festival. Chimerica was coined by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson to describe "China's strategy of dollar reserve accumulation that has financed America's debt habit." By simply searching Twitter on Chimerica, you’ll find Tweets from all the attendees that used that meme in a Tweet.

Twist provides a graphical view of Tweets containing a meme. Enter Chimerica in Twist and you will see a time series plot of Chimerica Tweets. Twist also displays the Chimerica Tweets in a list below the plot. Mouse over the plot and select a specific point in time to browse the Tweets.

Tweets are an excellent way to share ideas. Whether through hashtags established as a convention or by plotting the time series of memes, you can be part of the Aspen 140: Open Ideas Project.




Open By Default

I hope that by now you've had the opportunity to follow the speakers who appeared at the Management of Change Conference. Aneesh Chopra, Rob Carey, Clay Shirky and Vivek Kundra were all very well received. Vivek Kundra provided his very compelling vision for a Federal government that is open by default. "Open by default" means that the beginning presumption for federal agencies is that their data should be published and publicly available, unless privacy or security considerations indicate otherwise.

Several days ago Vivek Kundra, our federal Chief Information Officer, spoke at Wired magazine's Disruptive by Design Conference where he elaborated on that vision by describing the work of Federal Agencies on data.gov. Nancy Scola of Wired reports: “The premise behind behind Data.gov goes to the philosophy around transparency and open government that the president has been talking about. What we want to do is democratize data and democratize information and put it in the public square,” said Kundra. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed.”

An open default setting allows the American people to find innovative paths to society's most compelling challenges. You might remember that in my first post here on Around the Corner I mentioned Nassim Taleb's Black Swan. In the Black Swan, Taleb, a notable economic skeptic, identifies selection bias as a high risk to large-scale problems. The Skeptic's Dictionary defines selection bias as the "self selection of individuals to participate in an activity or survey, or as a subject in an experimental study." Of course, Federal IT investments are not experimental studies, but the open by default setting removes selection bias by allowing any and all American citizens to actively participate in mashing up their own data in ways that they determine. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation play an instrumental role in democratizing data by sponsoring x-prizes or contests like the ongoing Apps For America 2.

This week the government is accelerating the publication of data. Data will be published in as many formats as possible, as close to raw as possible, and there is a preference for machine readable formats.

I hope you will have the opportunity to mashup your data. You can find it here. If you can't find it yet, there's more on the way.




Productive in Place

Each day in the workplace we hear the sound of the fluorescent lights around us and the fans in the computers under our desks. We smell pop corn cooking down the hallway. We might be too cold, or too hot. We subconsciously filter most of these stimuli; others may be more difficult to filter, some directly affect our productivity.

We often assume that technology is our primary source of productivity. Workplace design, or what architects sometimes call the built environment, can also be a source of productivity. Light, color, sound and comfort have been shown to enhance productivity. Vivian Loftness, University Professor and Head, School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, in her presentation on Sustainable Design for Health and Productivity describes how factors such as health, reading comprehension and task execution can all be improved through ventilation, natural light and temperature control. Professor Loftness and her team of researchers have identified more than 100 studies that scientifically link physical infrastructure to organizational performance. Better surroundings result in less use of sick leave, lower expenses on health claims, and productivity increases. The salary and benefit costs of people in an office building are typically 10 to 12 times greater than the cost of the building’s real estate and utility costs, so the potential return for smart design choices upfront is significant. (see GSA’s WorkPlace Matters, p.8)

GSA’s Public Buildings Service has a lot of fabulous research on productive workplaces. The PBS Workspace Delivery Program has published interior basics, a framework for designing functional, flexible, healthful and sustainable places for federal employees to work. I’ve written before about the need for innovation in management practices, to move beyond the industrial-era approach and maximize the productivity of today’s knowledge workers (a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959). We need innovative design for our offices as well. The old model, where more space and better furniture is given to more senior employees, holds little appeal to modern workers and does not address the complex and fluid nature of work today. The Workspace Delivery Program has adopted a structured, balanced scorecard-based approach to designing spaces for GSA’s federal clients. You can read a few of their success stories with clients such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, US Coast Guard, and the Department of Energy.

So what are the implications for us? The link between physical infrastructure and a high-performance organization is real. A well-designed workplace offers great potential to improve organizational performance and realize financial return far greater than the initial investment. Thoughtful design that integrates with our work rather than impedes it, makes it possible for all of us to be productive in place.




Management Innovator’s Bookshelf: Creative Experience by Mary Parker Follett (1924)

I recently mentioned Gary Hamel's vital work on Moonshots for Management. Moonshots is part of a larger initiative at the Management Lab on Management Innovation. Hamel defines Management Innovation as an organization's ability to effect fundamental changes in its way of working. Recall Hamel's premise that many of today's management principles remain grounded in the industrial era where a large portion of work was physical labor. Today, a much larger percentage of our work is based in knowledge and creativity, resulting in a need to change organizational management processes and adopt more innovative approaches.

Hamel recently published his list of essential reading in Labnotes. I'll share some thoughts on my favorites from the list over the next few posts. Whether you get a chance to read the books, or just have a comment, let me know what you think.

It's no surprise that Follett's Creative Experience is at the top of Hamel's reading list. Today, where national competitiveness and productivity are measured in terms of knowledge and innovation, Follett's analysis of integration, power and experience provide key insights into a highly productive, post industrial workforce.

Follett defines integration as the ability to successfully introduce new information that resolves an an apparent contradiction without inducement, compromise or domination. Successful leaders use integration to reveal common interests among diverse groups or individuals.

Follett contrasts power-with and power-over. Power-over disregards will, purpose and motivation. It can introduce resentment. Power-with naturally follows from the process of integration. It preserves will and purpose. It is sustainable and its origin is in experience. Follett says: "These three are bound together: the unifying, controlling, the sustaining are one. Whenever we are talking of actual power, then, we are talking of something which is generated by circular response [...] It often has tragic consequences when our control attempts to run ahead of our integration."

Follett describes experience as a self sustaining and self renewing process of creativity. Creative experience implies that organizations increase capacity by evoking unity of purpose from richly diverse individuals who respect differences while retaining their identity.

Creative Experience contrasts sharply with Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Managment. If you're a student of management practice, you'll appreciate that both of these influential texts are available on line. Take a few minutes and compare Chapter 2 of the Principles of Scientific Management with Follett's Creative Experience. And be thankful that today we have a wide variety of opportunities to bring innovation to the workplace, unlike the industrial workers of decades ago who were incentived simply to perform the same task over and over without end.




Among the Generations: A 4-G Workforce

Have you noticed the person sitting next to you might have different work habits, values or ambitions? The workforce is now comprised of four generations (4-G): Matures, Boomers, GenXers and GenYs (also called Millennials). Matures are born before 1946, Boomers between 1946 and 1964, GenXers between 1965 and 1977 and the GenYs after 1978.

Generations differ in their approach to work. We all want to get work done, we just do it in different ways. Sometimes it's the events that have shaped our lives; sometimes it's what we need in our lives at a given time that shapes the way we work. You might work with Boomers who work tirelessly in the office on a dedicated task and prefer face-to-face communications. In contrast GenXers or GenYs may prefer to work remotely in coordinated groups using email, wikis, text messages or telephone conferences. Don Tapscott, in his recent book Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, explores the significant workplace changes being wrought by Millennials and those who have grown up immersed in technology.

Of course, our goal is to work together productively and understanding one another's styles is a big part of doing just that. But it's no easy task in the 4-G workforce. Respect for different approaches is a good place to start. Team members may specialize in areas where they're most productive or best suit the team goals. Matures or Boomers may serve as excellent mentors and GenYs may bring a fresh set of eyes or a technology-based approach that is a big help.

Supervising the 4-G workforce requires leaders who can build trust across widely diverse styles, behaviors and individuals. Some may lean towards enforcing policies, others towards autonomy with the hope of an increase in productivity. There are no easy answers, but we are stronger together than we are as individuals. Recognizing the strengths each generation--and each individual--brings to the workplace is a good place to start.

You can share your experiences here on Around the Corner.




The Future of Management in the Knowledge Economy

As I mentioned in my recent post called The Language of Innovation, Gary Hamel is onto something truly vital with his work on Moonshots for Management. Inspired by the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Engineering Challenges and the work of the X-Prize Foundation, Hamel and a group of the world’s most recognizable innovators spent two days together last May defining twenty-five make or break challenges for the future of management in the 21st century. Why define these make or break challenges? As Hamel explains, many of today’s management techniques originated in the late 19th century with one specific purpose: train semi-skilled human resources to repeat manual tasks at ever increasing levels of efficiency. Simply put, these management techniques are ill suited to today's organizations which operate not in an industrial, but in a knowledge economy.

So what’s a knowledge economy and why is it important to management techniques? The term knowledge economy was introduced into the mainstream by Peter Drucker in his 1966 book The Effective Executive to differentiate an economy where organizations profit by the labor of employees who worked with their heads, not their hands. Since its introduction the idea of a knowledge economy has become widely accepted. Today the World Bank ranks nations annually in its Knowledge Economy Index according to the four pillars of its Knowledge Assessment Methodology: economic incentive and institutional regime; education and training; innovation and technological adoption; and information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure. As one might suspect, in 2008, eight years after adoption of the Lisbon Strategy, European countries dominated the knowledge index ranking with Denmark at the top. The U.S. currently ranks number 9.

Lawyers, doctors, software engineers, teachers, scientists and public servants are all considered knowledge workers. The twenty-five moonshots Hamel and his colleagues defined speak volumes about how to manage knowledge workers so they can be most effective. Moonshot #2, Fully Embed the Ideas of Community and Citizenship in Management Systems, makes a lot of sense to me. As we all know too well, knowledge is a precious commodity and as professionals we all need and learn from each other. It seems today that things change so rapidly it takes an entire community to master a discipline. As do moonshots #6, Reinvent the Means of Control and #7, Redefine the Work of Leadership. When managing knowledge workers we must transcend the dichotomy between discipline and innovation as mutually exclusive opposites. And if it takes an entire community to master a discipline, leaders must evolve into social-systems architects who enable collaboration and innovation rather than constrain decisions. Moonshot #5, Reduce Fear and Increase Trust as well as #8, Expand and Exploit Diversity, strengthen both the culture and the effectiveness of an organization. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, describes in this conference video how the effectiveness of the Google organization is embedded within its culture. Finally Moonshot #15, Create a Democracy of Information, articulates a very optimistic view of how information technology can empower us all to act on behalf of the entire organization.

These are just a few of my favorites. Please let me know yours. I hope you enjoy challenges as I do. Whether you’re a knowledge worker, a leader or a manager these Moonshots are our challenges together.




The Language of Innovation

Like many of you I was fascinated by the stifling innovation video. Did you know that video was filmed by the Barriers Analysis team at NASA's Johnson Space Center? The characters in the video act out familiar mindsets, assumptions and processes that all too often put up roadblocks to innovation and inclusion. Justin Kugler tells the story of the video on the Open>NASA blog in his post called Pathways Beyond the Barriers. Kudos to NASA for being transparent about their efforts to change the culture of bureaucracy!

You'll read words in Justin's post from the language of innovation: inclusion, acceptance, spark, learning, building, investigating, fostering, people, trust, optimism, openness. Innovation is an attribute of an organization's culture and the words used by that culture speak to how and whether innovation is nurtured within the organization.

The characters in the film had to make a series of judgments. It's no easy task to make these judgments, but they are grounded in our values. Our values are the foundation of our culture and they are revealed through the language we use every day.

There is some interesting research emerging on how the values of innovation can improve management and organizational performance. Last month I attended the Gartner Symposium and heard a luncheon address from Gary Hamel of the London Business School. The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine have both named Hamel one of the world’s leading management experts . I was fascinated by what he had to say. His point was that today’s management techniques and organizational models were developed for the Industrial Age, mostly by men born in the mid-1800’s. Industrial-era management is ill-suited for today’s knowledge economy, and we need new thinking. I will blog more about this in a later post, because I really think Hamel is onto something vital, but you can read more in his latest article for Harvard Business Review, “Moon Shots for Management.” Here he suggests a set of 25 ambitious goals for 21st-century management to “shoot for,” including:

- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems

- Reduce fear and increase trust

- Create a democracy of information

I think the challenge for the public sector will be evolving management systems in a manner that recognizes our unique obligations to the public trust and sound use of tax dollars. There are many hopeful examples, however, including NASA’s. Another example of innovative management thinking is GSA’s support for my starting this blog. It took the work of numerous organizations, including legal, communications, IT, and my supervisory chain, to get it going. Yet no one ever said it couldn’t be done. Indeed, everyone had the perspective that this is a good thing and let’s see it done properly. And for that, I am very appreciative.




TED: An Idea Worth Spreading

Have you ever wondered where great ideas come from, or whether there are some great ideas out there that you just haven't heard yet ? Well, the annual Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference is a hot-bed for those ideas. And this year it's being held from February 4 through February 8 in Palm Springs.

TED started in 1984. Back then its goal was to bring together leading thinkers and doers from the diverse fields of technology, entertainment and design so they can share their best ideas. Since then TED expanded its scope to include world leaders, scientists, musicians and more. And these thinkers, doers and leaders have agreed to share their best ideas with you for free. You'll find videos from people you'll recognize like Al Gore who spoke last March on the pace of climate change. Here's a talk by Tony Robbins on why we do what we do and how we can do it better. Bill Gates just gave a talk on philanthropy and education that hasn't been posted yet. But you'll also find videos with fascinating ideas from people who you may not know.

The theme for the 2009 conference is "The Great Unveiling." Ethan Zuckerman from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is live blogging from the floor of the conference.

Enjoy!