July 17, 2010, the “Digital Natives: Not Yet Mainstream?” Forum was held at the Degui Academy by the School of Philanthropy of Dharma Drum University in collaboration with the Frontier foundation and the Netivism.com.tw. Mr. Ilya Lee, Project Manager at the Research Center of Information Technology for Innovation of the Academia Sinica gave a talk on the emerging phenomenon of “digital natives.”

Instead of using power-point slides, Lee used in the presentation a “mind map,” which is a diagram of ideas connected graphically and radically with one another. Lee commented that, comparing with the linear power-point slides, the network-like mind-maps are more flexible and share more commonalities with the mentality and behavior of the digital native generation. The talk began with interesting questions, ”Do you consider yourself a digital native or not?” “What is your experience working with digital natives?” And “From the digital native perspective, what are the challenges that your organization is facing?”

Lee highlighted that the emergence of digital natives represented a paradigm shift regarding how we get things done. It requires us to embed the new organizing principle into our organizations and work. It calls for efforts to build coordination mechanisms into the information infrastructure. If succeed, the result would be tremendously fruitful. Flickr is just one of the many ventures that succeeded.

Have “digital natives” become mainstream? The forum said, No, Not Yet. Lee added some remarks on the challenges in front of us: how to develop better content management system, how to leverage crowd-sourcing, how to pave the way for open data, how to further cultivate trust, reciprocity, and compassion in both the virtual and physical worlds, etc. (Leemen Lee/Taipei)