Editor’s Note: This is the second article in a three-part series presented at the New Wilmington Missionary Conference in July 2006.
Last issue we started to look at how Thomas Friendman’s “flat world” might have implications for our new patterns of missional involvement. Let me describe four of the ten “flatteners” that have changed our world and should change our missiology.
1. 11/9/89: “The New Age of Creativity: When the walls came down and the windows went up.” The Berlin wall fell on 11/9. Friedman says, “I realized that the ordinary men and women of East Germany peacefully and persistently had taken matters into their own hands. This was ‘their revolution'” (p. 51). “It tipped the balance of power across the world toward those advocating democratic, consensual, free-market-oriented governance, and away from those advocating authoritarian rule with centrally planned economies.” This meant greater freedom, more contact across borders, and it paved the way for common standards. It must be repeated because as Americans we seldom appreciate the transformation that 11/9 began. Openness, freedom and more democratic possibilities were created first in eastern Europe and then in all of the former Soviet countries, then in China and now in Vietnam, Laos and other countries.
The second part of this flattener was “Windows” from Microsoft. The 3.0 series was a major breakthrough which bridged people and machines as never before. As Friedman notes, “The rise of the Windows-enabled PC (shipped on May 22, 1990) combined with the fall of the Wall, set in motion the whole flattening process.” The world became much flatter between November, 1989 and June of 1990.
2. 8/9/95: “The New Age of connectivity: When the Web went around and Netscape went public.” Brit “Tim Berners-Lee posted the first Web site on Aug. 6, 1991 to foster a computer network that would enable scientists to share their research more easily.” (p. 59) As Friedman notes, “He designed it and he fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free.” What made this even more valuable and freely accessible was the development of Netscape (went public Aug. 9, 1995); a way to search and find information across the various Web sites. This innovation opened up the portal to information to all people in the world as never before. The openness of this new world of information (remember: knowledge is power) gave power to common people like you and like me, as never before. “Open, nonproprietary and free:” this was truly revolutionary in the history of knowledge.
3. Work flow software. Animation today is produced through a global supply chain, not by a bunch of techno-artists in a Disney studio. Work flow software made it possible for people all over the world (in Starbucks, my home, a factory or an internet café in Timbuktu) to add on ideas, concepts or to make critical decisions. For example, SMTP (or “simple mail transfer protocol”) enabled the exchange of e-mail messages between heterogeneous computer systems (p. 80). We can all connect directly! By 1999 new global standards were built upon other standards: HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP XML and SOAP (“simple object access protocol”). As a result “… once a standard takes hold, people start to focus on the quality of what they are doing as opposed to how they are doing it. In other words, once everyone could connect with everyone else, they got busy on the real value add … to enhance collaboration, innovation and creativity.” This is very important. Once standards are set and universally accessible, people are freed up to do new and innovative things.
When eBay decided to use “PayPal” rather than develop their own inferior payment system, they were listening to their customers say, “Would you guys quit fighting? We want a standard–and by the way, we have picked the standard and it’s called PayPal” (p. 86). “Standards don’t stop innovation … they just clear away a lot of extraneous stuff so you can focus on what really matters.” What this also means is that the standards (Remember the fallen wall?) were set by common people, not by professionals getting paid a lot of money to make important decisions. The right people were making the decisions (the customers) and the big business folks let them. Both became winners.
Consider how this applies to our missionary activity. When it comes to Presbyterian missional work, we have many standards in place, but we need to have a “work flow software” mentality that would allow us all to work together and to listen together. The General Assembly Council’s mission division can be and should be the “clearing house” for the standards, values and strategies of Presbyterian-Ecumenical mission. But their job, like eBay, is to free up “the People” to be more effective; to have more power and control of their work.
“The virtual company is here–and it is going to be very disruptive because it is going to give small and medium-sized businesses access to some of the powerful work-flow tools that a few years ago only big companies could afford.” We might add that mission agencies are also proliferating and have much greater access to participation, thanks to the flattening of the world: “As more and more of us learn how to collaborate in these new and different ways, we are steadily flattening the world even more.” (p. 92) The key in the computer-generated world flattening is global collaboration. Remember this, please.
4. Uploading: Harnessing the power of communities. Friedman notes that the “great shift from audience to participants” occurred with the new freedom people had to add or contribute directly (p. 95). It is remarkable to note that the underlying web server for e-commerce software is a global community-built software (share-ware) known as “Apache.” A big company did not develop the key, foundational software for e-commerce. What an irony this is. With uploading technologies, middlemen, large corporations and large institutions are cut out of the process as people directly share ideas and move forward. This has produced “Wikipedia, podcasting and blogging” (all of which are not in my spell-check yet!). Friedman is very clear: “This is making each of these things (mentioned above) a bottom-up and globally side-to-side phenomenon, not exclusively a top-down one. This is now true inside traditional companies and institutions as well as outside them. Uploading is, without doubt, becoming one of the most revolutionary forms of collaboration in the flat world. More than ever, we can all now be producers, not just consumers” (p. 94f).
Please listen carefully as I give an important warning: this does not mean that traditional companies and institutions are not necessary, just that they have to work according to different patterns; I would argue that these are patterns that are more Protestant (democratic) or community orientated. People can build and feed information like never before, creating “thick descriptions” of missionary work, activities and global needs. But this is not just “power to the people.” Listen to what happened: IBM, the large corporate institution, found out that the Apache folks (young 20-something geeks) were doing something better than IBM’s six-figure professional techies could do. They did not try to silence them or buy them out. IBM contacted them and backed the Apache team with money, structure and they became part of the community (p. 102). Thus, IBM avoided getting “flamed” by the internet and learned to work with young collaborators who worked with open-source programming that was offered for free! This is the important warning we need to remember. The collaboration between free-agents and corporate structures creates the best context for business and, I might suggest, mission.
Friedman reminds us that “The Apache collaborators did not set out to make free software. They set out to solve a common problem (Web serving) and found that collaborating for free in this open-source manner was the best way to assemble the best brains for the job they needed. … It is something like a pure meritocracy; only the best survive and are promoted.” Yes, meritocracy trumps bureaucracy in this flat world in which we live. The best idea and the most excellent workers are promoted, not because of position, but because of the merit of their work.
Again, I would hope that this would be the basic concern and goal in our churches and in our denomination, that we move away from the privatized and possessive to the communal and common.
Of particular importance for our missional thinking are the following two sentences: “We are now seeing venture capitalists actually funding open-source start-ups” (p. 107). These blended models are probably the future. Those who may be tempted to resist the flattening and hold fast to hierarchical control, as well as those who relish the idea of the democratic and flat world, need to rethink things. The future is with those who can develop a blended model. “For a complex software platform to be sustainable–that is, to be constantly freshened, debugged, and improved–there has to be an economy around it …” I would add that you need structure, continuity and tradition (like a skeleton or a scaffold) to keep innovation and creativity standing. Yes, blended models of collective or community based innovation and corporate structures are the future of the internet, of e-commerce and of global mission.
Friedman offers six other flatteners, all of which we need to know about. I would note for this paper that a theme throughout all of these ten flatteners is the new place of China and India in all of this flattening process. In fact, these new players who are empowered by the flat world, and who are leading in innovation, require that we take a different role in global mission. We need to follow. As Chinese are perfecting and refining their production and business capabilities, and as Indians are sharpening their technological abilities, they also are leaving us in the dust in the area of missional leadership. In the area of Christian mission, we could add to this list the Brazilians, Mexicans, Senegalese, Cambodians, Indonesians, and the list goes on. This does not mean we are irrelevant to Christian mission today, but it does mean that we have a new role to play and that role will be different in each context.
In our next and final installment, I will outline some priorities for our ongoing missional discussion and point out some missional models being developed in other Christian communions.
Scott W. Sunquist is the W. Don McClure Associate Professor of World Mission and Evangelism at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. From 1987-1995 he taught Asian Church History at Trinity Theological College in Singapore, as a missionary of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
