Shaping Network Society » mexico

What Mexico and the US need to learn from Europe after 1990

Philipp — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:49:31 +0000

Larry Rohter writes about Mexico and the US in the New York Times today,

Today, like it or not, the two countries are bound together inextricably in ways that would have been unthinkable during my time here. There is an old expression here, originally applied to economics and trade, that says â€œwhen the United States sneezes, Mexico catches cold.â€ The events of the last month suggest that the reverse may also be literally true. Or, as Jorge CastaÃ±eda, a former foreign minister who now teaches at New York University, put it: When it comes to living together, â€œMexico has no choice, and Washington has no choice, period.â€

This seems a fairly obvious point. However, it is underappreciated in policy circles of both countries. Mexican and US policy makers need to push their historical pet grievances to the side, spend more time studying the integration of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union to figure out, how to move foreward. What is really needed to make this possible?

My Country is Different

Philipp — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:43:02 +0000

in May 2009 many of “us” are getting social media and do believe that “web 2.0″ has the potential to be a game changer. However, the critique of the new way of organizing collective action is to be taken seriously. Some of the points policy makers from Austria, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, and the United States have voiced to me in the last weeks are:

- in my country/company, labor laws do not allow government officials to work at 10 pm at night and if the write an email from home, we have a serious problem.

- in my country/company, journalists do not get social media, so we had to buy them 100 copies of Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) so that they would understand our politicians point.

- in my country/company, maneuvering the tension between privacy and transparency is so complicated, we would not be able to profit of increased transparency.

- in my country/company the politicians do not get what they could gain from increased transparency, collaboration, and participation.

What are the main objections you have heard in the last months? What are your counter-arguments? What will happen?

The Swine Flu and the University 2.0

Philipp — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:07:29 +0000

Alberto Bustani, the rector of the campus Monterrey of Tec de Monterrey (full disclosure: he is a facebook friend of mine and I was/am Tec faculty) has just posted on his facebook profile a professionally produced video, where in front of the mural of the Tec rectoria he introduces one of my Tec colleagues from the medicine faculty, who discusses the pandemic and offers advice to the students. After less than 24 hours, it has been seen several hundred times, 126 have â€œlikedâ€ the video and 20 people have commented.

Also on his profile he announced that classes were suspended, however, that the exams would take place in early May. A lively discussion developed on what to do about the knowledge the content that the students were not able to learn, because of the missed classes.

Early last year, when he had hit the magic 5000 friends mark, he started a fan-page, and asked us to un-befriend him, but of course nobody did.

….Think about, what a powerful leadership tool social media has become in the last 24 months, imagine how much we need to learn about holding socially mediated leaders accountable, imagine what types of knowledge platforms we can can create, when we start to re-think the university, and imagine what we can do for life-long-learning. Let us take this seriously.