Canada 3.0, continuing the theme

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week (June 8-9) at Canada 3.0 www.canada30.uwaterloo.ca, which was an amazing experience. Sitting in a room with 1000 people who want to see Canada move forward and be a leader in the digital media space was energizing and motivating and if you’ve spoken to me in the last few days you know that I can’t say enough good things about my experience there and that I want to get involved and help move this forward.

Now, some of you may be asking what digital media has to do with knowledge management, or business-IT alignment and why I’m blogging about it at all. But like social networking and Web 2.0, I believe it is another tool to help people do their jobs more efficiently and effectively and to do their jobs in a different way, the way I have envisioned in my two most recent posts, which is why I’ve sub-titled this “continuing the theme.”

Digital Media is about the intersection of Design, Technology, Business, and Government. It is about breaking-down barriers and silos and working together, collaborating on a new future. Creating a future that is sustainable and meets the needs of the greater-good, not just a select few. Ideas and activities  discussed at the conference continue on the path that I was taking when I started out answering the question, “Can you manage knowledge?” and suggested that you can, but that it requires a new style of management, not the old “Command and Control,” but recognizes that we are all leaders and all have a role to play and that we all need to work together to accomplish what needs to be done.

What needs to be done? I was in the Talent Attraction and Retention track, so we talked about what universities and colleges need to do to prepare students for the future, things like encouraging entreprenuerism; what governments need to do, resolve IP ownership issues; and what business needs to do, take a more active role in encouraging entrepreneurs and training students for areas that are emerging and evolving, so that they are ready to take on those roles. We had a very long list, so these are just one or two of our ideas, and I’m sure the other streams had equally long lists of what they recommend for their areas.

The really exciting thing is that everyone was there: Business, Acedemia, Government, and everyone wants to work together, and recognized that the go-forward plan needs to be inclusive, not exclusive, that the way things have been in the past is not the way things were going to be in the future. I am so excited to have been part of this and look forward to staying in touch and moving the initiative forward.