Citizen Centered Governance For Civic Ecology

In the corporate world customer is king, all the more so in the civil democratic systems where the citizen holds the scepter.  Elected representatives and governors that will not realize that the people have crowned  a new the people and its well being, are jeopardizing their political validity. 

In a very fragile world economy, where tectonic shifts threaten countries, activism and sympathy are not enough to draw the blueprint for citizen centered social justice and solidarity based . The process of dethroning and crowning may be two phased. Where first new political powers will emerge, based on anger and frustration and on the call for change.

Stealth leaders with no central political backbone, lead the protests, while political leaders that were formerly trusted , are rapidly losing the faith of the public.

New leaders may arise, mastering the language of civil ecology based on solidarity, social responsibility, but lacking the tools, skills and political craftsmanship needed for implementing it responsibly without throwing  the baby out with the bath water.

A real citizen centered governance culture will revive the original and natural increasing returns dynamics where the people elect representatives appointed to really take care of their needs and act on their behalf, those who truly prove to fulfill this, earn the constituents’ trust, will enjoy a greater “rating” (the equivalent to share owner’s value in the corporate world) and will thus ensure their future credibility and their central place in continuing and serving the people.

ARTICLE SOURCE:    http://www.icentered.com

Citizen Centered And We Centered An Introduction By Icentered

Icentered blog add another dimension to the Icentered paradigm – that of citizen centricity, or we centered, as another lens of Icentricity.

To date citizen aspects of user centricity evolved primarily around digital relations between citizens and governing institutions, aiming to facilitate interaction and make processes and information more accessible to citizens, within the framework of existing paradigms.

However, the political, financial and social turmoil taking place around the world make us all part of a changing paradigm. User centricity is not confined to web based digital life. The internet  and user centered web culture are among the main powers igniting and feeding  many of the tectonic shifts that are taking place. As citizens we are users of systems created primarily to cater to our needs. Governing systems, just like commercial ones, need to be attentive to their users for their survivability and adapt accordingly.

As we are proclaiming our rightful place in our relations with our institutions and states, user centricity exceeds by far preserving the relations between us and our governing offices. The earth is shaking in some countries, others are in the process of very significant shifts and others will follow if leaders fail to read the writings on the wall. We, citizens, in many countries, in many different ways, are claiming an affordable human centered life, demanding new orders, values and regulations that adhere to the people’s voice and needs in new pacts tailored around us and for us.

There is going be a series of posts on Icentered Blog which will be dedicated to citizen centric or WeCentered as part of a shifting paradigm in the relations between states, institutions and us, in view of the changing cultures, values and structures. To know more about citizen centricity visit : http://www.icentered.com

ARTICLE SOURCE: http://usercenteredweb.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/from-user-centricity-to-citizen-centricity/

Trust is the new green

Transparency empowers trust. The internet is one of the most significant catalysts of transparency. Users own conversations, foster diversity, choices and openness.
The internet, information technologies, social media and users’ engagement have cultivated a culture of open sharing.  They keep providers, leaders, corporates and governments under a glass menagerie, evangelize virtues and broadcast any misbehavior.

The internet allows visibility that users cannot control. Visibility on people, actions from Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, articles, comments. It makes us vulnerable, because we cannot control people’s reactions to what we do or say –voluntarily through the likes of Facebook and up to bully disclosures of Wikileaks – we are more exposed as people, employees, managers, officials, and politician.

Transparency becomes a key to authenticity.  In our personal life, transparency of social networks, a sharing state of mind and web culture support and empower our authenticity. It makes it natural for us to expect it from the brands, services and systems we interact with. We grow to demand the same accountability from our employers, providers, leaders.

Authenticity is a key to trust building.

The internet is more than just a global system of interconnected computer networks. It’s about us, people, and not just about technological platforms and apps, bits and bytes.  It is key in establishing transparency, authenticity and trust mechanisms and plays a cultural and ethical role that transcends its material, practical and functional aspects.  Therefore the soft values that we users embrace as part of a web culture, will drive changes that will ensure a trustworthy, transparent, empathic way of life, that corporates and institutions will have to embrace to reach us.

Trust based relations are the new green – the key to clean web ecology.  This fabric is what matters now – a new ecological culture of transparency, trust and engagement that individuals, corporates and institutions alike must embrace.

Author publishes articles frequently on clean web ecology and user centered paradigm. To help you comprehend more about web evolution, user centered, contextivity, Return on Attention, user centric from Author pay a visit to - http://www.icentered.com/trust-is-the-new-green

Article Source: http://www.icentered.com

Icentered on Smart Billboards Advertising

One of the New York based started building smart billboard technology that can target the users, personally, and present relevant ads on bill boards.  You must be considering it a promising advertising technique or you may be frightened whether this is going to work for you or not. But with all the speculations this definitely sounds fascinating.

This is a combination of real time, location based, combined with age and gender reading from cameras in locations where the bill boards are placed, make it possible to change ads based on the age group and activity that takes place and segment age and gender based ads in real time.

This does not fall under the category of personally targeted ads as it lacks the personal context of each person that passes near the billboard. If a 30 years old woman passes by and a disposable diaper ad appears, it is not because they know her identity, number of young children and the fact that her credit card shows baby related shopping, but because she falls under age and gender based segmentation.

So for the time being we can say that retailers must not get feared as this is going to be a universal connectivity, smart gadgets and an always on life style. The future of personal targeting will someday be in time and place defined real personalized ad placement on your personal mobile device once you enter a location, based on your very personal context, purchase history – the semantic web vision and internet of things that will eventually connect, combine data and screen each of us very personally.

A real user centered scenario depends on where users stand in the privacy/sharing debate.   Let us hope that till this happens, privacy keeping and sharing mechanisms will  be as developed as the semantic context based  profiles that will allow such individually targeted ads.

Author has a proficiency in user centricity and has written many articles on user centered initiatives and green web ecology that empowers a personalized web. For more information on looking at the web from an Icentered point of view, web marketing, new business models, digital advertising then you must check out this – Icentered.com

ARTICLE SOURCE: http://www.icentered.com/smart-billboards-will-target-you-personally

Amendments to Consumer’s Rights Will Breed User Centricity

According to Icentered.com, in a user centered trust based culture, respecting users’ freedom, choices, set of values and their need for trust through transparent information, will bring a new spring to the dynamic power balance in the relations between providers and users.

As we increasingly turn from citizens to engaged consumers of information, services and goods in many systems we interact with, providers need to become more attentive to the growing user centered culture. Once fighting over our attention is not enough – humility is called for: fighting over our trust demands adapting to the growing zeitgeist of more humane soft values: transparency, relinquishing control, accepting our state of mind and adapting to it.

The growing user centered dignity emphasizes what consumers’ consciousness puts at center stage. Consumer rights are for consumers to be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given, by all goods and service providers, unrestricted access to the complete information needed to make an informed choice, including but not limited to ingredients, materials, origin, labor conditions, life cycle, and political activity.

Users expect from their providers engagement that exceeds CRM discourse and corporate oriented revenue making policies. Users expect transparency and a more humanizing culture.

As we, users, increasingly see ourselves as equal partners in the process and are aware of our power, the shifting balance calls for a new level of ecology, for paradigm change that will flow with the openness, freedom and central place that we, conscious consumers, have today.

Providers that will accept the evolution of consumerism will prevail in the shifting user centered paradigm.

Author is an experienced writer on issues related to web users, internet, web marketing, personalization, privacy. For more information on user centric paradigms, visit her Icentered Blog - http://www.icentered.com/category/marketing

Article Source: http://www.icentered.com

Icentered.com on Icentricity and Apple’s Icloud launch

The announcement of Apple of its icloud sharing and sync service empowers user retrieval of personal materials such as photos, music, files on any device, as it stores all the users’ content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it out to them to all their devices.

Apple’s icloud will reshape user content consumption, not only in terms of ubiquity – my content is intuitively accessible from any point, any device. It is also a significant step towards a user centered, user side cloud based paradigm where all user’s content and data are aggregated and harmonized in a cloud, a personal operation hub for personal management of our digital life.

Cloud is the infrastructure to empower full user controlled user paradigm.
Icentered.com published more about Cloud computing – the infrastructure for the vision of a contextualized Icentered paradigm that examines the value of cloud based services for an Icentered vision.

Author writes regularly about Icentricity and icentric on her blog Icentered.com. To find more about this article in details see the complete article at - http://www.icentered.com/icentricity-and-the-cloud-following-apples-icloud-launch

Article Source: http://www.icentered.com

From User Centricity to Icentered

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, cloud computing, mobile web offer us an always on, accessible, knowledgeable social world, that keeps us connected physically and socially.

In the intersection between social graphs and interest graphs new relations between people and content are created.  He assumes that different consumer segments need different technological support tools. In distinguishing between traditional, online and social consumers, users become stakeholders in the attention economy, as they draw their information not only from different content and social resources, but refine their relevant interactions through communication tools such as tweets, retweet, comment all create a very different user experience.

From an Icentered point of view, where I (the digital I of each user) strive for an adaptive web, tailored to personal choices and preferences – the human link of the single user still has a long way to go.

User centricity is about us, people. Yet it still takes a systemic view that we interact with those tools and infrastructures, and how we become more immersed in this ubiquitous web.

Taking a different prism, an inside- out lens, the Icentered one, makes it more humanized. From that point of view it’s about us as people, not just users – centered or captive. To truly personify our web experiences, a deeper degree of individual personal signature should be called for.

Our personal data, real-time experience and interest based social graphs empower more humane social experiences, but the missing link is still personal context. Social humanification in smaller groups, such as the one offered by Flink12 that humanizes the social experience by creating social circles of no more than 12 people , is easier, because it reflects real life circles of interaction ad is initiated and moderated directly by users.

We need to control and manage more than just users’ privacy settings in various sites. We need to control in the same way Flink12 empowers us to connect at will people close to us around a specific subject, to connect our identity, data and sharing options from various sites around a topic that interests us in an inclusive holistic way that reflects us in our interactions around that topic.  This translates to Contexting us, people, and not just a single thread of content. In such a Icentered reality, when I am in full possession of my personal information, meshing all my interactions around a specific topic within a specific interweb.

I, the individual user, am the glue that interconnects one inclusive context around many interwebs and allow an individual prismatic view of a thread/experience/ topic/action.

Once I, the individual user, create my personalized story, it is the context that makes it unique and turns the overwhelming over pour of the liquid web into a humane selective experience.

Author is an experienced business professional who is working on empowering clean web ecology. She is exploring Icentricity, a new paradigm to have Icentered green web ecology. You can get the required information about Icentered paradigm through this article. For more information you can visit -: http://www.icentered.com/from-user-centricity-of-the-people-in-the-urls-to-icentered-in-the-liquid-web