How would you answer the question What is the future we will make? Here’s my answer, and here’s how you can share your own answer with TEDxChange and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In our future, passion and purpose pays.

What do I mean?

In our future, doing good is good business, because …

… a business without a “social good” is not a sustainable business. And I’m not talking about environmentally, culturally or morally sustainable, but strategically, economically and financially sustainable.

I’ve written and talked about the role of humanity, meaning, ethics, passion and purpose repeatedly over the past year or so, heavily influenced by John Hagel and Umair Haque.

These principles span many of the Millennium Development Goals. An economy that allocates returns based on meaning, ethics or purpose directs attention, effort and money towards things that matter: it promotes gender equality, it allocates food and basic services better to eradicate extreme hunger, reduces child mortality, values environmental sustainability, and creates a strong base for countries and organizations to partner on economic development goals.

Think about the work you do: Is passion or purpose a source of a competitive advantage for you and your company? Are profits tied to passion? Is the purpose of your job or company aligned with the source of revenues or profits? Is passion a valued asset at your company? Can you true back your work to supporting a larger purpose?

No? Why not?

In our future, to create a thriving, sustainable economy, passion and purpose have to pay. Meaning, passion and purpose have to play a meaningful role in allocating profits, as important as access to inputs like land, labor and capital, as important as the level of education, knowledge and information, as important as product/market fit, as important as any other input in a business’s equation.

And how does that happen? To start, we have to care. We create a demand for products and services through what we buy, talk about, read about and do. Our individual consumption decisions create market demand; companies create products and services to fit markets demand. If enough of us demand passion and purpose, then companies will have to find a way to embed humanity, passion, ethics, meaning and purpose into what they do.

“When we have low-quality demand, we have low-quality jobs.” It starts with us. Care about what you buy. Invest your time, money and attention in things you believe in. Talk with your friends and colleagues about things you’re passionate about. Invest in yourself. Make the decision to reward passion and purpose, and passion and purpose will pay.

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View this photo on Flickr, and view the rest of the submissions to the project in the Flickr group pool.

Highlighted photos from TEDxNOLA, a one-day conference that addressed the question: how can creativity save a community? View all the photos on Flickr and Facebook.

TEDxNOLA was a local, self-organized conference convened in New Orleans to explore the pivotal role that crisis plays in the development of groundbreaking ideas. On August 27th, 2010 during the week of remembrance of the 5th Anniversary of Katrina, Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre hosted intellects and achievers to examine how crisis forces us to rethink, reinvent and reinvest. How can creativity save a community?

View all the photos from TEDxNOLA on Flickr and Facebook.

Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans

James Carville

Gary Solomon, Jr., The Solomon Group

John Besh, John Besh Restaurants

Lisa P. Jackson, EPA

Matt Wisdom, Turbosquid

I’m suffering from a bit of voting fatigue.

A Clandestine Meeting, Brooklyn, NY

Yes, I currently have a Pepsi Refresh Project and three SXSW panel proposals up for voting. And I’ll probably write blog posts about them soon. But I’m torn.

Wait, don’t get me wrong; I love supporting friends’ projects. Send them over, I’ll take a look, and vote, donate and help promote if it’s meaningful, valuable, and can change lives (yours, mine, everyone).

I like the players. But I dislike the game.

I understand why we (online digital strategists) create these contests. We tap into the naked human desire to win contests and their rewards, provide people a way to market and promote their own cause / reason / project, and help them directly promote themselves, driving traffic, attention and money indirectly to us, the creators of these contests. Inexpensive marketing, tapping into other people’s time, passion and self-interest, to support our underlying business goals.

That’s not underhanded or duplicitous, it’s just how it is. Tapping into people’s self-interests to drive your own self-interest is simply smart business, marketing and product strategy.

That’s the game.

And it always has been. The difference, and this is where we’re feeling the pressure, is driven by the fact that everyone has the potential for a larger voice on a larger platform than ever before. More content, information and voices? We need more context, more filters, more curators. More contests, more clamour for votes and money? We need better ways for us to signal what we care about and track the impact my votes and money had. More context, more filters, more curators.

As Sloane has told me before, contests can be tricky strategies for fundraisers to pursue, because votes don’t mean money. And when the votes don’t add up to money (meaning, you don’t win), you have to go back to your supporters for money. But in your supporter’s mind, they’ve already helped you. In their mind, they’ve already given you something. And they have, even thought you many not have received the benefit. That’s the problem.

Not all contests and fundraising platforms are equal, mind you. Mechanics matter. Kickstarter, for example, is as much of a market-testing and fan management platform as a project fundraising tool. Each platform and contest embeds its own game, a bounded set of social interactions that promote and incent gestures, behaviors and actions.

That’s why game theory matters here. All contests are games, a set of interactions, incentives, moves, risks and rewards. Yes, it know most of these contests come from a place of good. The intent is good. But the game simply creates too many opportunities for the execution to fail, to misplace the rules, incentives and rewards for everyone involved. And we’re left with a bad taste in our mouths, a lingering dissatisfaction in our heads, and a hole in our hearts.

Thus, as Mike would say, we need to change the game.

But I’m first to admit I don’t have the answer. Simply ending all contests isn’t the answer. At first, I didn’t want to just say “this sucks”, without proposing a solution. But perhaps, by raising the issue, we can start to problem-solve this one out. I’ll certainly be paying attention.

Privacy is valuable. Value it, consciously, and spend it, wisely.

Found, @Newseum, Washington DC

Privacy is a conversational black hole. “Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape.” (link)

We all love to talk about privacy. The reality, however, is that:

Most users care about privacy but don’t think about it in day-to-day life.

Few people truly value privacy.
Seriously. We all value privacy in the big, philosophical, fundamental “human right to privacy”, in the sense that we agree that it’s important, and we hold the idea near and dear to our heart, and we’ll get upset, justifiably, if our right to privacy is violated.

But few people value the marginal costs and benefits to privacy at the granular level that would allow us to make reasoned decisions about what we choose to share and not share. What’s the price of privacy? What’s the value of publicity?

Example: do you consciously think about the pros and cons, the marginal value and benefit, the full impact of what you share on the web, or a Tweet, a Facebook post, a Flickr picture or a blog post? Do you consider what could happen in the short and long-term?

No. Why? In many ways, we can’t.

We haven’t developed these heuristics yet. Our guts are still figuring out the equations that compress a lot of information and thought into a “gut call” about the impact of what we do online.

It’s hard. And as Alan Patrick has pointed out many times over the past two years, widespread adoption of web services have contributed to privacy erosion. Fundamentally, individual users don’t have the power, incentive or ability to reliably influence how companies use our data, thus our data is free but everywhere in chains. Companies haven’t given us enough information or guidance about how our data is (and will be) used, we evaluate each decision on the margin without considering how all our decisions add up, and we undervalue our privacy, making poor decisions about how we use web services.

But of course, not only do we get something for using those services, but we also get something for spending our privacy.

My comment to my friend Jim Goldstein on his post Privacy: You’ve Just Given It Away What Next?

What about the value of making something public?

There are valuable, tangible, even measurable benefits to making information public. As long as it’s within our control, and we can value the benefits and costs of our decisions, that’s all that matters. Private, public, whatever.

The issue isn’t about privacy per se, but control over data, where it goes, who sees it, putting it into (and taking it out of) the stream of information that people see, interact with, and act upon.

But this is a conversation we’ve had before :)

I share what I choose to share because it creates the friction that brings people and passions together. It’s not the only way, and I don’t share everything: but I share what I share because I think the benefits are worth the costs. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ll learn by doing and testing. I’ll learn by spending my privacy.

Wisely, of course.

How? Consider the misplaced debate about privacy; the real debate is over control, not privacy.

Noah Brier, Stalked? Not Really: Noah Brier Responds:

At the end of the day a breach of privacy requires some reasonable expectation that something would be kept private. Not only did I not have that expectation, but for much of the information I put on the web I hope for exactly the opposite.

Exactly.

We don’t just “give away privacy.”
We use services and exchange our time, money and attention to get something back from using that service. There’s a value exchange there. We’re explicitly opt-ing in to use the service under those terms, good and bad. Don’t like it? Quit.

Why did “quit Facebook day” flop? Because even if we don’t like how Facebook handles their product decisions, privacy settings, etc., we get enough value out of using it that it’s worth it to put up with the pain.

Remember that Facebook is a business. Their choice on how to manage privacy is a business decision. As my buddy Ethan put it:

“The business model they appear to be pursuing makes Facebook’s interest to erode/obfuscate privacy *just* to the marginal point before which there would be a mass exodus. No more “privacy”, no less.”

And to be honest, we shouldn’t expect Facebook to look at it in any other way. It’s up to us, the market, the aggregate of all of us, to tell Facebook what we want. Not just tell, but to *do*. What we do indicates what we agree on; markets are aggregations of actions. That’s how a market works, whether it’s a market based on money, attention or any other measure of value. And if enough people don’t like it, or use it, or pay for it (depending on the business model), then it won’t be successful, and it won’t exist.

And the fact that we didn’t quit en mass says something pretty powerful.

Yes, Facebook “should” make it easy for people to manage how their data flows. But I argue it’s not because of morals or ethics, but just good business.

Granted, increasingly, in many ways today opt-ing out of technology is opt-ing out of society. We’re drawn into using some services because we simply have to. But we can still choose how we use them.

Underlying this is a powerful investment opportunity. More personal data, services, networks and connections creates the opportunity for better curators, filters, blockers, and routers of data. The value in content isn’t in content but in how it flows, how it gets added to, remixed, rerouted, represented.

But that’s a thought for another day.