trends

The Tagged Tanakh (TT) turns the future into the past by making Torah study front and center in the Jewish educational experience. The Tagged Tanakh takes the Old Testament and places it in a contemporary format and context to suit the needs of current generations. Using the TT, educators can build new curricula, conduct faster research, prepare D’vrei Torah, and help foster communities of practice around Jewish text.

For everyone else, the TT offers an easy and engaging way to learn Torah L’shma, learning just for the sake of it.

Previously on this blog, we noted that the Talmud dominated the intellectual discourse of Jewish thought for more than a millennium. However, both halakhah(Jewish Law) and haggadah (Midrash) use biblical prooftexts to validate and ground their arguments. The foundations of Jewish scholarship, ethics, and imagination are found in the Tanakh.

In recent news, Google and the U.S. State Department unveiled their plans to work with Iraq’s National Museum to digitize their collection and offer a “virtual tour” of Ancient Mesopotamia with Google tools. Comcast officially announced that they are acquiring 51% of NBC Universal. Stevie Wonder was appointed a position at the UN as a Messenger of Peace. And poor Tiger Woods is being skewered by the media.

So what do all these things have in common? Each one of these headlines forecast major developments in technology that will profoundly affect our future. Although I don’t have a crystal ball, I do have a healthy imagination and read lots of Warren Ellis comic books. So here are four things that I think will change the way we conduct our lives in the coming years.

Last week Philanthropy.com featured a fascinating report published by La Piana Consulting for the James Irvine Foundation. The report identified five key trends influencing the non-profit sector and gave examples of organizations that were effectively navigating our convergence culture.

After reading the report I felt a mixed sensation of vindication and dismay. Many of the conclusions validated the moves we have made with JPSI and the Tagged Tanakh and many other points reflected how much further we have yet to go.

In an earlier post I introduced the concept of datasets and how they are becoming more valuable via crowd sourcing tools. Tech guru Tim O’Reilly has suggested that, “Data is the next Intel Inside,” meaning that the next major commodity in our economy will be specific bodies of information or data. Here’s the money quote from the O’Reilly post:

“The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

Yes, yes we all know that times are tough. And as of late, philanthropies have found themselves in the hot seat. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article lambasting foundations for tightening their belts too much:

“An increase in the payout rate to 6%, all in grants, would eventually add about $10 billion a year to the coffers of nonprofit organizations to the approximately $40 billion that it is estimated that foundations now give. Foundations have claimed that such an increase would jeopardize the perpetuity of their assets, yet a number of studies argue that their assets could be maintained with a payout of 7% or 8%.”

Is the Information Age at an end? With a new decade nearly upon us, some have been saying that we are now entering the Network Age– a time when men will mine for data, not oil. Ranking and figuring out how people share their sentiments will become the driving force of community management and business growth.

In the book Authenticity, the authors describe “rendering experiences” for customers as the foundation of this new emerging economy. Digital Anthropology jobs and community management tools will drive the 21st-century economy. Eventually, we’ll all climb aboard the Cluetrain and ride off into brighter, more lucrative future.

It seems like everyone these days is talking about the future. Will people still read books? Can global catastrophe be averted by not eating meat?

According to the CEO of Google, in five years we’ll be surfing through mostly Chinese content online. According to a former muckity-muck at Facebook, the future is not information, but networks. While architectural students in London envision a future made up of, “car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea.”