Technology Push for Change

Over the past 30 years, the digital revolution and specifically the Internet have evolved and grown in ways no one could have imagined. The Internet continues to fundamentally transform how business is conducted, how government operates and how individuals interact. It has become one of the greatest catalysts of economic and societal development of all time.

What the Internet pioneers created as an open platform for sharing data is now a game-changing medium used by more than two billion people around the globe. At the heart of this amazing growth – and what distinguished the Internet from other communication mediums – is its openness, global reach, and its multi-stakeholder model of development and management.

As evidenced by the 300 million people on Twitter, one billion people on Facebook and two billion people with Internet access on mobile devices, the digital revolution continues unabated. The Net has evolved from a network of websites that enabled organizations to present information, to a computing platform in its own right. Computer processing and software and be spread out across the Internet and seamlessly combined as necessary. The Internet is becoming a giant computer that everyone can program, providing a global infrastructure for creativity, participation, sharing and self-organization. And with the explosion of mobile devices, computing is pervasive, enabling us to collaborate 24/7.

The net result is that this new paradigm in technology is radically dropping transaction and collaboration costs and collaboration that used to be glacial, can now occur real-time and on a massive scale. This is now enabling us to devise new ways of collaborating to address global problems that are vey different from the traditional state-based institutions.

To learn more about the drivers for a new model of global problem solving, read Don’s report Introducing: Global Solution Networks