On Monday, April 19 (yeah, just two days after the UCSC thing), I'll be speaking at Social Business Edge in New York City, a new (and hopefully recurring) event looking at the intersection of business innovation and social media.

Certainly what is going on today is more than just social media marketing, limited to marketing and community outreach efforts. Some of the leading thinkers in this area believe that we are at the start of something much larger than a retake on marketing. We are seeing a rethinking of work, collaboration, and the role of management in a changing world, where the principles and tools of the web are transforming society, media, and business. The mainstays of business theory — like innovation, competitive advantage, marketing, production, and strategic planning — need to be reconsidered and rebalanced in the context of a changing world. The rise of the real-time, social web has become one of the critical factors in this new century, along with a radically changed global economic climate, an accelerating need for sustainable business practices, and a political context demanding increased openness in business.

Assembled (and hosted) by my friend Stowe Boyd, Social Business Edge includes a pretty good variety of speakers. Stowe has decided to do this in something of a "talk show" format, so use of powerpoints will be limited, and the presentations will be more conversational than formal.

The event isn't free, but it is pretty reasonably priced for something like this. If you're in the area, and are interested in the future of social media, I think you'll find this quite valuable. Hope to see you there!

As you might know (especially if you've read my bio), I went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, receiving a double-BA in History (with a focus on 20th century revolutionary movements) and Anthropology (with a focus on human evolution). UCSC was a terrific place to get an education, due to (at the time) its use of narrative evaluations rather than letter grades, the deep commitment on the part of the faculty to undergraduate education, and its general spirit of enlightened experimentation. Although UC Santa Cruz has changed over the 22 years since I left, I still have real affection for the place.

So when UCSC contacted me about speaking at an upcoming event, I jumped at the opportunity to give something back.

On Saturday, April 17, I'll be one of the three featured speakers at what they're calling the "Intellectual Forum," part of the 2010 Reunion Weekend "Day by the Bay."

What does the future look like?

Three UCSC alumni explore the next generation of communities, work and health care, offering fascinating insights into the way we’ll live our lives:

Jamais Cascio (Cowell, anthropology and history ’88)
Writer, leader, and visionary, Jamais will share scenarios of the future that cross the boundaries of technology, the environment, and society. Research Fellow, Institute For The Future. Named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 global thinkers and a "moral guide to the future."

Shannon Brownlee (College Eight, biology ’79)
Nationally known writer and essayist whose book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer was named the best economics book of 2007 by the New York Times.

David Bank (Oakes, politics ’82)
Vice President, Civic Ventures. A veteran journalist, Bank was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for nine years, covering Silicon Valley and the software industry. His book, Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft (Free Press) was named one of the "Best Business Books of 2001" by the Harvard Business Review

The event is free, although you'll need to register. And don't blame me for what they're calling it.

I'm honored to have been asked to serve on the advisory council for LAUNCH, a group looking to support innovative ideas for sustainability. Sponsored by NASA, the US Department of State, US Aid for International Development, and Nike(!), LAUNCH is intended to give good ideas the assistance -- financial and otherwise -- necessary to move from concept to plan to implementation.

LAUNCH will identify 10 innovative, often disruptive world-class ideas, technologies or programs that show great promise in making tangible and impactful progress for society in each of the key challenge areas. These innovators will be invited to be part of the LAUNCH Sustainability Forum which is a high-level impact event where they present their innovative ideas to LAUNCH and engage in a collaborative discussion.

The event however, is just the starting point, post-event the Innovators will become part of the LAUNCH Accelerator, an on-going effort which utilizes the collective power of the networks, resources and expertise of the LAUNCH organization to create and execute an action plan accelerating them from where they are to where they need to be to successful have a positive impact on global sustainability.

The first meeting will be about water-related innovations; you can see the list of ideas we'll be talking through here.

My fellow LAUNCH Council members are all brilliant and insightful, and I'm gobsmacked to be a part of this group.

(This is a long piece, but I'm putting it all on the front page because it's a massive issue.)

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there's a considerable amount of methane (CH₄) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There's as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here's why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect -- warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO₂-driven scenarios -- perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth's geologic past.

(Here's one piece of mitigating information: it's unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we're lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on "if we're lucky" is not very wise.)

Because of this tipping point/feedback process, a runaway methane melt won't stop on its own. When I've written before about desperation as a driver for the rapid (and risky) implementation of geoengineering, this is precisely the scenario I had in mind. If this news holds up, and if it can be shown that the methane leak is actually increasing, then I believe that we are certain to engage in geoengineering, and probably will do so before we have enough good models and studies to suss out any unwanted consequences. We'd be faced with a choice between guaranteed catastrophe or terrible uncertainty.

We'd probably try every geoengineering option available in the event of a methane runaway, but the one that most people would focus on would be the temperature management strategies: stratospheric sulfate injection, seawater cloud brightening, and (unlikely to happen but certain to get a lot of media attention) orbiting reflectors. But there's one more method we should consider. Understanding its potential requires a bit of science talk.

I noted earlier that methane is a "significantly more powerful" greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. More specifically, it's at least 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO₂; some reports (such as the first piece I linked to above) cite it as 30x stronger, and I've been seen as much as 72x stronger. The difference comes from how the effect is measured over time -- methane and carbon dioxide leave the atmosphere at very different speeds. Although CO₂ takes upwards of a century to cycle out naturally, methane takes only about ten years. Why the difference? Chemical processes in the atmosphere break down CH₄ (in combination with oxygen) into CO₂+H₂O -- carbon dioxide and water. In addition, certain bacteria -- known as methanotrophs -- actually consume methane, with the same chemical results. These processes have their limits, however; an abundance of methane in the atmosphere can overwhelm the oxidation chemistry, making the methane stick around for longer than the typical 8-10 years, and the commonplace methanotrophic bacteria evolved in an environment where methane emerges gradually.

These are pretty much the only two natural methane "sinks." There are a few small-scale human processes that can make use of methane (for the production of methanol for fuel, for example) and function as artificial sinks, but such efforts would be hard-pressed to capture methane released across two million square kilometers. So here's where we start to think big.

Both of the natural processes are, in principle, amenable to human intervention. The oxidation of methane into CO₂ and water is a well-understood phenomenon, and relies on the presence of OH (hydroxyl radical); upwards of 90% of lower atmosphere methane is oxidized through this process (PDF). But OH is something of a problem chemical, in that it's also a key oxidation agent for many atmospheric pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and NOx. Although we could produce OH to enhance the natural chemical oxidation process, the side-effects of pumping enough OH into the atmosphere to oxidize all of that methane would be unpredictable, but almost certainly quite bad.

So what about methanotrophic bacteria? Such bacteria have long been recognized in freshwater areas and soil, and have had limited use in bioremediation efforts. Methanotrophic Archaea -- similar to bacteria, but a wholly different kingdom of organism -- were recently identified in the oceans; research suggests that methanotrophic Archaea may be responsible for the oxidation of up to 80% of the methane in the oceans. Methanotrophic microbes can also be temperature extremophiles, as they were among the various species found after the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed.

We recently began to learn much more about how methanotrophic bacteria function, as a team from the Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the genome of the methanotroph Methylococcus capsulatus. The scientists discovered that Methylococcus has the genomic capacity to adapt to a far wider set of environments than it is currently found in. They also looked at the possibility of enhancing the microbe's ability to oxidize methane, although admittedly for purposes other than straight methane consumption.

So here's the proposal: we need to deploy methanotrophic microbes at the East Siberian Ice Shelf. Methanotrophic Archaea appears to be best-suited for this task, but we don't know as much about them as we do about bacteria. If we need to modify the microbes (to consume methane more quickly, for example), we may need to work on Methylococcus bacteria, making them viable in extremely cold seawater. I suspect that working with the Archaea will probably be sufficient, but it's important to think ahead about different pathways. Either way, we should consider just how we could make use of methanotrophs to avoid a methane-melt disaster. Given the size of the region, we'll need lots of them, but that's one advantage of biology over straight chemistry: the methanotrophs would be reproducing themselves.

We need to be aware of possible unintended consequences, but at this point, it's not clear how additional methanotrophs would pose a larger risk; moreover, a mass of methanotrophic organisms would undoubtedly be helpful for reducing overall atmospheric methane beyond the Siberian release. Nonetheless, there are some crucial questions we need to answer before we could consider deploying natural or GMO methanotrophs:

My latest Fast Company piece is up: Augmented (Fashion) Reality takes a look at what happens when the world of fashion gets ahold of AR technology.

It starts out with a scenario. Here's a bit of it:

I remember the first time I saw an AR outfit. I did a double-take, because I could have sworn that the woman had been wearing a fairly bland dress when I saw her at a distance, but suddenly she was wearing a sparkling gown that I could swear was made of diamonds. A few minutes later, I took off my arglasses to get something out of my eye, and *poof* her dress was back to the simple beige shift. That bland outfit was actually carrying a half-dozen or so specialized smart tags, providing abundant 3D data that my arglasses--and the AR systems of everyone else around her--translated into that diamond dress.

I note late in the essay that fashion may end up being the "killer app" for wearable AR. The more I think about it, the more it rings true -- AR can't just be about finding the nearest Starbucks or getting a read on local environmental conditions. It has to be playful, too.

Picturephoning gives a heads-up on "Recognizr" (you know it's cutting-edge when they leave out the "e"), an iPhone app that will supposedly recognize faces seen by the camera. Here's the promo video:

It's a prototype from the Swedish group The Astonishing Tribe. Apparently, a photo taken in Recognizr (sigh) gets compared to pictures in various social networking platforms, including Flickr (see? no "e"!!!!), Facebook, and the like.

Picturephoning links to a hysterical Daily Mail article, which plays up the STALKRS WILL STEAL UR VIRTUE angle, not really looking at the more interesting -- and potentially more troubling -- aspects. Popular Science is a little more sober, but ultimately not hugely more informative.

Until I see something more than just the one video, I'm going to call this one Plausible, but not at all difficult to hoax. Anybody know better?

I've been blogging for over six years. (Yes, blogging about blogging is a sin; I am aware of all Internet traditions.)

My first post, at WorldChanging, was on October 2, 2003, linking to a BBC story about an "Earth Simulator" computer system in Japan. In fact, you can look at the handful of posts I put up that first month and see the early moments of a set of interests that have remained with me: nanotech, biotech, green tech, open source, social networking, ethics... These first posts were mostly just pointers with excerpts, and without much analysis, but these are the seeds from which larger things grow.

Although my six-to-nine months of blogging had a pretty sporadic pace, by late 2004 I was on a much more frequent schedule, and in 2005 I don't think I had much in the way of a day off of any kind -- if I was healthy enough to pick up a laptop, I was blogging. After I left WC in April of 2006, and started Open the Future, I went back to a less-frequent blogging calendar. And in recent months, the emphasis has definitely been on the "less" rather than on the "frequent."

This isn't an announcement that I'm stopping now, nor is it a promise to post more frequently. It's more of an acknowledgement that Open the Future isn't as lively as it might once have been, and is largely pointing to Things I've Done. I have this vague feeling that I should apologize for that, but OtF has always been a place for my brain to get some exercise. I do still need to play with ideas, and I'm glad I still have this platform. I'm not going to stop doing that, and -- as I finally get this damn book proposal rewrite finished -- I hope to use it much more actively while writing my next book.

So there we are.

(tap tap... this thing on? There's dust and cobwebs all over the place.)

My most recent three Fast Company pieces are all of a set, part of the Futures Thinking series. Mapping the Possibilities (Part One, Part Two) give some practical advice for coming up with differing scenarios as part of a futures thinking project. Writing Scenarios offers up a set of real-world scenarios as examples of different styles.

Part One offers some advice as to how to think about what you're going to do:

Foresight exercises that result in a single future story are rarely as useful as they appear, because we can't predict the future. The goal of futures thinking isn't to make predictions; the goal is to look for surprising implications. By crafting multiple futures (each focused on your core dilemma), you can look at your issues from differing perspectives, and try to dig out what happens when critical drivers collide in various ways.

Whatever you come up with, you'll be wrong. The future that does eventually emerge will almost certainly not look like the scenarios you construct. However, it's possible to be wrong in useful ways--good scenarios will trigger minor epiphanies (what more traditional consultants usually call "aha!" moments), giving you clues about what to keep an eye out for that you otherwise would have missed.

Part Two lays out the basics of world-building:

World-building is, in many ways, the mirror-opposite of a good science fiction story. With the latter, the reader only needs to see enough of the world to make the choices and challenges facing the characters comprehensible. The world is a scaffolding upon which the writer tells a story. Clumsy science fiction authors may over-explain the new technologies or behaviors--where they came from, why they're named as they are, etc.--but a good one will give you just enough to understand what's going on, and sometimes a little less than that (trusting that the astute reader can figure it out from the context).

Scenarios, conversely, are all about the context. Here, it's the story that's a scaffolding for the scenario--a canvas upon which to show the critical elements of the world you've built. A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story--but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

And Writing Scenarios looks at the different styles that can be employed to tell a scenario story:

In Scenario-as-Story, the presentation is similar to that of a work of fiction. Named characters operate in a lightweight plot, but in doing so engage in behaviors that display key aspects of the scenario. [...]

The advantage of the Scenario-as-Story approach is that fiction is a familiar presentation language for readers, and they can more readily grasp the changes to one's life that emerge from the scenario. A story model lets you describe some of the more nuanced aspects of a scenaric future. The disadvantage is that, generally speaking, scenarios are lousy fiction. Even the best-written scenario stories generally wouldn't pass muster with a fiction editor.

The examples I use are from the project I did with Adaptive Path (for Mozilla) in 2008, looking at the future of the Internet. The full set of scenarios can be downloaded here (PDF).

An audio recording of my talk at the "Biopolitics of Popular Culture" meeting in December is now available, so I've gone ahead and uploaded the presentation to slideshare.

It's a ~25 minute talk, and it should be relatively easy to follow along while listening to the audio.

Audio: MP3