Time Magazine has announced its Person of the Year. It’s you.

If you’ve ever written a book review on Amazon.com. Or blogged, vlogged or podcasted. Or had a LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook profile. In short, if you’ve ever contributed to part of Web 2.0, you’re part of what Time calls “a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before:”

…look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. [emphasis added]

Community. Collaboration. International understanding. Helping one another. Change the world. These sound like phrases people use when they talk about why they do or want to mediate. Web 2.0 and ADR work go together.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.