Beyond Connectivity to Interactivity - A Radical New World

When all of this started , and by that I mean the web and on line communities, it was about making connections between people with similar interests (at the start, the very specific interest of theoretical physics), so they could share information, data, applications and experiences. So, at the start, it was more than just connectivity and made it easier to interact. Then somewhere it became commercialised - in and of itself no bad thing, as this provided the impetus to grow the community beyond our wildest dreams, but it became more a worldwide community of spectators rather than active players. Indeed the supporting infrastructure which enabled all of this was primarily targetted at this larger (much larger) community of spectators.
Time has moved on, and eventually the underlying platform capability (the networks, operating systems, devices, software applications) are coming of age, to the extent that they now offer potential way beyond just connectivity. The new online community will be about interactivity - Interactivity of individuals, groups, societies, companies - on a massive scale, sharing ideas, sharing not only data but applications, a community of active minds, able to come together easily to sieze the opportunity whenever it arises, to play, to create, to make the world a better place for all of its citizens.
Yes, there have been elements of this already, but on a much smaller scale. We now have the potential to connect well over half of the world's population to this community, and by so doing give them access to knowledge, the ability to share insight, and the abilityto make services and applications available online immediately to people and communities anywhere in the world.
The challenge now, is to make this happen. Whilst this new evolving platform can also do pretty amazing such with the distribution of digital content online, if all we do with it is to allow people to watch better picture quality movies at a time of their chosing, then we will have wasted one of those precious inflection points in history, when it is within our grasp to accelerate radically the pace of progress for society as a whole.
Active Minds, and similar communities, aims to plant the seeds for this interactive world, by making easy for people to share ideas and experiences, and to access knowledge. Step 1 is to build an active online community - step 2 is to go to wherever the opportunities which present themselves take us. The motto - "When nothing is certain, then everything is possible" has never been more true.