Democracy is defined as a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. This abstraction goes back to the old Greek states that spontaneously emerged and coalesced to form one of the greatest civilizations in world history. This was further refined by the great English political philosophers and more importantly, put to test in the pamphlets that led to the founding of the United States of America. The debates that reverberated in the pages of the Federalist Papers still continue to be amplified over the years into the political theater today … and more importantly; it plays a big role in the technology theater.

I have, over the years, found it a fascinating exercise to connect the dots. It is my firm belief that learning can be ported from many different and seemingly discrete and distant disciplines … to connect them is not a Nietzschian leap or a metamorphosis from a man to superman thinking. It is forging creativity, introducing dialogue between the wedges, creating an infrastructure and support system to promote association and free thought … and the abstractions would thus reduce to more concrete and practical rules for the advancement in daily living. Thus, despite being in finance, I have kept my sensibilities open to a plethora of fuzzy possibilities that may affect my realm, as much as explore the fuzzy stretches of finance that may affect the concrete realities in other areas … either in or outside of the corporate environment. I am enamored of the intellectual elasticity that has become a generational bar that the open society has enabled through technology.

So as we enter the domain of technology and mesh it with the advances in our understanding of an idyllic society with fine workings of democracy, we have to keep a few things in mind. These few things are important enough to understand in order to build out product and service solutions that are injected into mass gatherings and conversations, albeit in the virtual space. They are as follows:

1) Privacy: Man is a social animal. That being said, we crave for society but we seek solace in ourselves. Hence, science and religion coexist happily. There is never so much of each to drive the other out, since the final questions that one ultimately asks is meta-scientific. In seeking our silent spaces, the proxy in a social network is privacy. We impute value to this quaint notion which has different magnitudes across different cultures … however, my contention is that a true democratic system will allow its citizenry to preserve their spaces and enforce property rights upon such spaces. If a social network is a microcosm … an experiment playing out in the petri dish of events in our world, the network will have to embrace the democratic ideals and ensure privacy. The privacy can be protected through statutory means, business rules implemented in the system, technical do’s and don’ts, self-governing protocols, etiquettes for mutual understanding etc. These are the attributes that the right network will imbibe in the framing and final design of its own emergence.

2) Ease of Use: It is upon the network to enable the participants to speak and quickly adopt to common practices, learn new languages, adapt to changes, and to be wooed by the beauty of minimalism and simplicity. Urban planning is a lot different today than it was a 100 years ago. The good old times were not really the good old times … we live today in the best of times, and it will only get better. We are dealing with the consequences of advances in medical sciences, disaster recovery, and a general increase in income, et al… all of these translating into a burgeoning global population. Despite this and the adverse impact on the environment and having aptly defined the gloom and doom prophecy of Rome diatribe – we are not under the shadow of a Tower of Babel, lost in a litany of tongues. Rather, we are happily skewed toward embracing the common denominator, the ultimate leveler, the common theme, a grand platform. This de facto standardization of diverse orientations is making us more proficient in people finding greater meaning in their lives. The virtual network exist to allow such meaning, if the participants use it accordingly and most importantly … be able to step back and reflect upon the dialogues that they see or participate in. So the network must appeal in a manner to advance the common parlance … the global village is less a village … it is a megapolis of spontaneous evolution of innovation and knowledge. The pace of innovation in the next 10 years will outpace innovation over the last 100 years.

3) Mass Psychology – When I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, I recall thinking that indeed … years of experience can effectively shortcut a process to arrive at conclusions that may be correct. Arriving to a meaningfully correct judgment happens despite one not working through heaps and layers of data, analysis, observations etc. Thereafter, I read Crowdsourcing by Howe and that opened up another world … there indeed is this wisdom of the crowds. I have, as you recall, referred to Hayek who had always been optimistic toward an aggregate marketplace of opinions … Crowdsourcing empirically confirmed that theses. So now one need not necessary get to Blink when there are infrastructures setup to crowd source reference points to get you meaningfully within a safe distance from a “blink” conclusion, the latter fermented over years of experience. A great network is the one that enables such crowdsourcing to occur… functionally and aesthetically. It takes years out of the equation; it advances knowledge at stupendous pace. Somewhere I read that innovation in the next 10 years will outpace innovation over the last 100 years … I imagine that the network of connections, social or otherwise, across a standard operational platform is enabling this effusion of ideas and innovation that is and will continue to permeate our daily living.

4) Communication Channels: Finally, the virtual network must create a flurry of communication channels. I am abstracting communication to a higher level … to a plane wherein the underlying meaning is to exchange messages that drive people to act toward something. Communication is not passive; even it would engender a dialogue as commonplace or existential as “Who am I”. The value-based virtual network ought to be responsible for parsing all the touch points that impact the sensibilities of a user. These sensibilities constitute the perennial target … but unfortunately it is a moving target since new contexts emerge rapidly and may change the underlying value from which the sensibilities are wrought.

So the networks that we know today – the big elephants in the room: FB, LinkedIn, Twitter have to reinvent themselves to go deeper into capturing the intrinsic value of the participant. Or it may serve the system of surfacing the extrinsic and articulated needs of the participants … thus leaving open the possibility of ushering a new generation of niche networks that can tap into the god and the devil within us. As long as it proscribes to the four rules outlined above, I am optimistic that these cocktails will advance us sooner to the better and more productive lives in the future.