The meeting was in their solution and innovation center near Zürich, one of 6 such centers world-wide and of 3 in Europe.

They presented a number of new features and their reflections behind. The keynote speaker showed some interesting slides, one of them showing that in our society more and more people are knowledge workers and it will increase in the future. How to work with knowledge and what challenges come out of this development. There is a profound impact of the demographic shift to less births and less people in the productive age, who have to be more productive. And the way the different generations work and live changes profoundly: the “boomers”, born from 1946 to 65 have different attitudes to work than the “generation x” from 65-80 and again a shift to the “generation y” from 80 to 2000…

After a discussion of the people present about their experiences with the new technology we were invited to have a tour through the headquarters 4th floor. There we saw a fantastic interactive computer with intuitive handling,  just touchscreen and impressive ways of dealing with visual objects. I typed a bit on a virtual keyboard and played with the finger-zoom. It is really getting the imagination substantiated and working like with etheric manifestation on a screen – by the way the opening screen was like a water pool: the whole surface of the screen was full of little ripples, and you had the impression to put your hands into water, when touching the screen.

The “magic” was coming out of this “box” under the screen…

We then walked through the offices, where there were no more individual workspaces, but different kinds of rooms, for silent concentration, group work, small exchanges or relaxing. The lady who lead the tour explained how working and leisure time are more and more intermingling – people work during the weekend, but take off time during the week for private activities. Their teams meet less physically and people coming to virtual meetings are spread over different places or even continents. Aquarian waves of living expressed through high-tech surroundings, and not at all in a context where they would consider this as Aquarian…

Personally I’m very reluctant about using such a platform: a month ago I got an unrequested invitation by Facebook – spamming me – to join them. The wrote: “Hi… The following people recently invited you to be their friend on Facebook: (and there were six names of persons from my mailing list contacts all over the world, who had sent me invitations in the past, to which I had not responded)…

And then: “Other people you may know on Facebook:” and there were 6 names I all know, from South America, who never had contacted me about Facebook. So they are profiling my contacts, though I never had entered into any contact with Facebook. A very aggressive web 2.0 marketing strategy. Of course they mentioned, nearly illegible, in grey letters: “This message was intended for xxx@good-will.ch. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe.” I never had asked them to subscribe me.

On the insistence of a colleague from the ICT of my office I had joined some weeks ago the professional contact platform Xing, because there is a Swiss MS-SharePoint community and I’m in charge of the SharePoint-based intranet of my office and document management. Hardly had I registered in Xing that I got a phone-call from a web agency offering me support services. And a information technology courses provider contacted me several times to get me into their mailing lists or on some courses. I declined these contacts…

I’m very much interested in good, relevant contacts, but at the same time very selective as per what is relevant. Friends are not gathered the fast way the social webs promise with “friends” and “followers”.

Last Wednesday I was at a presentation in our office about the latest Microsoft Fast data search technology. Fast had been acquired by Microsoft in 2008 and will be part of SharePoint from 2010 on. A specialist from Munich gave us an introduction into the working of this most modern search engine with a lot of fascinating features. Since I’m just running a pilot project about document management together with an external agency to implement a new system, this was particularly thrilling for me to see. The ways we had been searching up to now require quite a lot of work from the staff to relate the documents with so-called meta data. Now this new search engine promises to extract the meta data automatically. We will set up in August/September a test environment to compare the different solutions envisaged. By October we will decide which way will be the most viable…

Reflections on the globe in the court of the Cité des Sciences at Paris, photo by a friend.

While up to now many people on the planet cannot attend a university, the Web 2.0-technologies now allow students to study at home, using open source technologies and open course material as well as e-learning methods and methods of peer  to peer teaching. They offer classes with 15 – 20 students each with one lecture per week and a weekly work and learning schedule of at least 8 hours.

Up to now they have about 200 students from 52 countries in computer science and economics. For the first semester they don’t take more than 300 students. In the course of 4 years they want to extend it to 15’000 students. The final exam will correspond to that of a Bachelor for the moment, they hope to be accredited as a full university in the next years.

A very inspiring development.

Info-kiosk in front of the Swiss Federal Palace during renovation

There had been a lot of work beforehand, not only in preparing the papers for the presentation, but also setting things in a good way: Though the launch of the intranet had been already in December 08, there had been a number of technical troubles in March and April, and though there is quite a progress with the new Sharepoint-based system, some adaptation works are still causing some problems. When two weeks ago I had been talking things out with the head of the agency who had done the implementation of the system, I came to know: on that very day they had fired their project manager with whom I had had problems from the very beginning… Their new project manager is a very competent person from their management board. Two days ago I cleared all the open points with him to set a good basis for the future collaboration.

A second agency is involved, who are delivering a software for the document management system. In my office I had a number of talks to explain the questions facing us at to set up the new team. It is quite a complex matter and not so easy to “translate” the different aspects into a form which can be understood by the persons concerned.

In a way it is a very spiritual process: Weaving together all the different aspects of a complex matter, which will deeply affect the way of working of all collaborators in the house, is a very fascinating process. Many things are still hazy, but planning, meditating, asking questions, putting together the information from different sources and trying to construct the “final view” is building a way into the future. Never before I was left so much left to my own pre-decisions and laying down the structures, taking responsibility for the process. Others, the “decision makers” followed the prepared path, supporting the indicated direction. At the same time I feel that it is not “me” doing this weaving, but that there is an underlying “process intelligence” which has to be discovered and brought to manifestation. So from my viewpoing things sometimes take a sudden turn, but seen from the thread going through the “tissues”, a deeper sense is unveiling.

Photo of a computer installation in Zurich main station, May 08

About 2 months ago we saw that part of the project had to be taken out into another project: The document management, which shall replace the file explorer, turned out to be more complex than we had thought during the concept phase, so it will be developed in a second tranche of the project – again me as the project manager. We will start when I’m back from January’s holidays in India. It seems that this will again be a long project, we will start with a pilot.

Being the project manager I had a lot of trouble with instructing the team, finding and describing mistakes and cleaning the system. The last weeks we had been working on the migration of the content from the old intranet into the new system, and the team of our info-managers had done a good job, but – mostly out of ignorance – also created several “crises” by trying to adapt things in a “try and error”-way. I sometimes was reminded of Hercules fighting with the Hydra: Having cut off one head, two other heads appeared. The mistakes of the system didn’t seem to take an end.

Hercules fighting with the Hydra. Image of Antonio Pollaiuolo, from Wikimedia Commons

And then the launch – the director giving congratulations, the head of the agency speaking about the pioneer work and me about the team-work and the surprises of the process -  happy faces all around.

An hour after the launch new problems popped up – no safeguarding possible with different pages, strange way of presentation of the news in one of the news aggregators. This morning some other questions popped up…. The last months my patience has been tested a lot – and quite some times I failed. It seems that my personal testing phase isn’t over yet.

An old sewing machine – not so complex than a modern web collaboration technology, but also helping to stitch different matters together.

Entrance of the site of the Center of the Mind, Sydney.

They have established a state of the art mind laboratory (MindLab), with magnetic pulse stimulation (TMS) and brainwave sensing (EEG) apparatus. Therer they have developed a device that works with magnetic impulses, which by swifting on and of over or under-active parts of the brain, thereby unlocking its hidden potential. Wearing the hairnet-like cap for a few minutes is said to have improved artistic ability and proofreading skills. Once perfected, the device could be marketed as a cap slipped on to boost creativity and intellectual capacity.

No wonder that all the media is crazy about it. The professor was in many TV shows, won famous prizes for his study with autistic savants and geniuses, and he even had talks, together with the Dalai Lama and many others… In Bejing, during the Olympics, they helt a What Makes A Champion? forum which was opened by former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair and other celebrities, and they got a global media coverage.

In spite of all the publicity the hope seems to be a bit airy – to discover the magic wand in order to open up the hidden genius of man. No tedious exercises for spiritual evolution, but just a magnetic cap, and then the brain functions at its optimum. Inner transformation work for refining the brain, to reflect the soul? No need, materialistic science dreams of finding the clue. The only thing they forget that there is no shortcut way on the path of evolution. Transformation work needs refining the personality through culturing the character. If you don’t tackle the fundamentals, the development will stand of feet of clay.

Man’s potential cannot be unfolded through a technical trick. Even a crystal skull isn’t enlightened but from an outer source of light. Photo of a friend from an exposition in Paris.

A group of African Harvard undergraduates and university scientists, have created a social enterprise working in off-grid energy delivery and lighting technology in Tanzania. They call it “Lebônê“, pronounced [La - bo - ney], a Northern Sotho word for light, lamp, or candle.

They “combine efficient lighting technology with a simple energy source readily available to all Africans in the form of microbial fuel cells. These inexpensive fuel cells run on animal and plant waste and naturally occurring soil microbes, and are framed around a flexible substrate (wood, steel, etc) that can vary by geographic availability. This is truly electricity right out of the ground. These fuel cells are used to charge a battery or cheap supercapacitor, which in turn will be used to power a high-efficiency efficient LED or PLED lamp.”

To reach the target group of people they combine their innovative technologies with an innovative implementation strategy that will promote local entrepreneurship and youth involvement.

Another very innovative approach is the initiatve of a retired Swiss journalist in Kenia, Peter Baumgartner. He has realised a magazine for sustainable agriculture called “The Organic Farmer“. They are publishing “relevant, reliable and ecologically sound information which is both, appropriate as well as applicable for farmers in Africa.” It is monthly magazine with 18’000 copies, distributed nation-wide in Kenya and reaches around 100’000 readers. The electronic version can be accessed free of charge and has been used so far by farmers and researchers in over 20 tropical countries. Since end of August 08 they are also on the radio in Kiswahili and they offer the programs as MP3-files. They are supported by different sponsors, among others the Swiss government and www.infonet-biovision.org, an information platform for ecological control of plant pests and disease transmitters.

Their initiative has a very strong resonance, with more than 150 e-mails, sms and phone calls after every emission. People are asking questions about pests or other kinds of information. They have a team of specialists. One strength of the magazine is the intelligent distribution structure via farmer groups, church organisations and schools. So they can spread the knowledge of a gentle biological farming with a minimum of chemicals. The journal with 8 to 12 pages per month has also spread to neighbour countries. Each copy is read by about 7 – 9 persons in the average.

A very inspiring initiative for supporting local farmers by sharing know-how – good will in action.

A meadow in Switzerland – biological farming is also an important factor here.

Animatronics – employing electronics to animate motorized puppets – is quite a developed technology of the illusion-creating industry, as you see here with a human on the site of a Californian special-effect studio. They say: “We can replicate the likeness of virtually any character imaginable. We create realistic looking animals, creatures, and humans. These life-like creatures move, walk, talk, and simulate breathing.”

The dream is old, like with the creation of Pinocchio by the woodcarver Geppetto, or Frankenstein, or, a bit older, of Prometheus, who brought the divine fire of understanding to mankind, or the biblical creation of man out of clay. The modern robots are in the same tradition. There is a certain hybris hidden behind the hopes of technical betterment of man’s living conditions. Robots, however, have become a part of modern life, be it in automobile production or in surgery.

So have a look at the Salvator DaBot, the portraitist robot. He “recognizes human faces in its surroundings and extracts relevant characteristics from them. By using its uncanny artistic talent, it then draws portraits of the participants from the captured images by converting them into vector art and by using inverse kinematics to control the robot’s arm.”

The woodcarver Gepetto creating Pinocchio. Scene from a doll’s house in Berne

Together with IBM, the phone company Jajah has just started today a real-time free phone translation service called Jajah Babel that allows anyone in China, the U.S., UK and Australia to call a local number, speak in English and immediately hear the message back in Chinese Mandarin. It also works the other way round. So you can simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker, so they hear the message.

I wonder how the system manages to understand the ambiguities of language, which automatic translation programs don’t hit (for example: “Bill Gates” as the bill for the doors…), but nevertheless it is a great step ahead in finding a way out of Babylon.