Social Media Sparks Visions of a Radically Open Future

TED Global is underway in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a lineup of more than 70 speakers set to offer their visions of “radical openness” (the theme of this year’s conference) across disciplines as diverse as corporate governance, global security and education.

The conference was kicked off by Dan Tapscott, who in 2003 authored “The Naked Corporation,” which called for new levels of corporate transparency and accountability — a novel idea at the time, when you consider there was no Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

In his talk, Tapscott defined what he sees as the four key principles for an open world: transparency, collaboration, sharing and empowerment. Offering examples like Gold Corp, which used a $500,000 contest to find $3 billion worth of gold, Tapscott said we’re moving from a world of social media to one of social production.

He also sees the need for industries like pharmaceuticals to do away with their intellectual property-based business models and instead focus on openness, and in turn allow the wisdom of the crowd to accelerate development in medicine.

Tapscott’s framework set the stage for NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis to share his vision for “open source security.” The leader of the alliance said that security in the 21st century won’t be delivered “solely through the barrel of a gun,” calling on more cooperation between nations, agencies, and the public and private sectors, linked together through “strategic collaboration on the Internet.”

Starvidis described how NATO now collaborates with volunteer organizations for disaster relief missions, works with groups like Major League Baseball and the Department of State for goodwill projects, and teaches reading and writing in places like Afghanistan. While not necessarily “open source” in the way we think of it in technology terms, Starvidis compared his organization’s efforts to those of Wikipedia, saying “No one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.”

Looking to add a visual twist on the “radical openness” theme, futurist and filmmaker Jason Silva created this rapid fire video looking to capture the rate at which society and technology are evolving:

Underscoring all of these ideas, of course, is the far reaching impact that social media has had on everything from business, to governments, to media and entertainment. It now seems as if the next frontier may be in applying the tenants of social media — transparency, crowdsourcing and the democratization of media — to solve a wide array of global problems.