If you want to follow me, my Twitter name is @A_Marsh.  You’ll notice that 3/4 of my posts are very short comments designed to entice followers to click through on links I’ve provided (many of which are in the Wikinomics theme).  Essentially, I use Twitter as a gateway to substantive content, a style of Tweeting that Denis blogged about previously. 

As far as using Twitter as a research tool, I generally follow other user who also use it as a gateway to more substantive content.  For me, Twitter is something like a news condenser, or a filter.  I’ve handpicked a series of intelligent users to follow on Twitter, users who filter through the glut of information available on the web, and highlight what they believe to be the most useful and important.  If you pick out the right users to follow, it can be akin to having an entire team of researchers working for you, pro-bono and in realtime.

So here’s two examples of how I’ve used Twitter to stay up to date on developments in the world of Government 2.0.

In the Gov2.0 space, there have been a series of conferences this year (or rather, unconferences) that I’ve been unable to attend.  Yet I was still able to follow the updates and view most of the same resources as the attendees for events like transparency camp and Government 2.0 camp, mainly through Twitter.  As more and more events are broadcasted live online, having Twitter users to alert you in realtime is incredibly valuable.  The use of hashtags on Twitter makes this even easier, with tags being added to Tweets, thus making them more searchable.    Do a Twitter search on #gov20 and youll see what I mean.

Twitter also allows me to follow, in realtime, individuals with similar research interests.  For example, one of my interests happens to be participatory government, and I’ve come across a researcher named Tiago Peixoto whose work is very relevant to my own.  I started to follow him on Twitter – @participatory – and upon reading through his backlog of Tweets, I came across dozens of useful links and articles on participation.  None of his Tweets are narcissistic, self-aggrandizing or personalized in any way.  Almost everything he Tweets is relevant and of interest to me.  So now, every time he comes across a good resource on participatory government, I am immediately alerted to it via Twitter.  In the research world, that’s an incredible resource for collaboration.

Finally, I’d like to post my Twitter #FollowFriday recommendations for the week, all of whom fall into the Gov2.0 space: @Corbett3000, @participatory, @johnwonderlich, @govloop, @govwiki, @markelliot.

If you’re wondering where online brand communities are going, a recent study from Gartner predicted two trends about the future of communities:  60% of Fortune 100 companies will have communities by 2010 and more than 50% of these will fail to establish a common purpose with their members.  The high failure rate is attributable to many causes, not the least of which is difficulty in determining where a community should “live” within the corporate setting.  Should accountability lie within the marketing department?  Customer service?  Product development?  Moreover, how do you measure success of a community?  How do you add enough value to engage regular visitors and encourage them to create content?

Company-sponsored communities are such a new phenomenon that there’s very little in the way of historic analysis and insight, especially on the quantitative side.  For this reason, nGenera and Agent Wildfire have created a survey to collect data from top company-sponsored communities.

Want to contribute to the study and be privy to the results?  If you have experience with a brand community, you’re invited to participate in the 2009 Brand Communities Survey.  The topics of the survey are:   the basics, focus and objectives, audience and outreach, incentives, rules, tools and platforms, staffing, metrics and ROI and overall advice, covering 55 key questions we always wanted to ask but never had the time.   All respondents will receive a topline version of the results once the responses have all been reviewed.

YouTube has also run into trouble over expiring licensing agreements, with music companies seeking better terms for their contracts (essentially, more money from YouTube).  As one example, Warner Music removed its Youtube videos back in December amidst an impasse in negotiations.  Music videos and other mainstream tv/film clips, Youtube’s premium content, represent the one area where YouTube could generate more revenue (operating more like Hulu), but maintaining favourable licensing agreements is difficult.

Recently, Google’s top brass have been trying to point out optimistic trends.  In an interview with MacLean’s on Tuesday, Google CFO Patrick Pichette maintained that advertising models will support YouTube in the future.  He might have a case – YouTube announced earlier this month that they had reached an agreement with Universal Music to create Vevo, a seperate video site.  YouTube is also working on the launch of a specialized portal to accomodate tv and film content, hoping to compete with Hulu and generate more ad revenue.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that YouTube has been making “good progress” in negotiating with small- and medium-sized studios for this purpose.

But even if YouTube can profit off of their premium content, will they be able to earn enough revenue to offset the massive cost of hosting the world’s home video library (for free)? 

I’m skeptical on this business model.  Let’s assume for a moment that Google can’t find a way to stop bleeding cash through Youtube (which, I think, is a safe assumption for the near future).  What are they to do?  Here’s 4 possible directions:

1)  End the free ride and start charging users.  I’d wager that Google will do anything to avoid this- with over 100 million YouTube viewers in the US alone, and the role it now plays in society, the backlash against Google for ending the free Youtube era could be fierce.  This would be a major controversy, and would probably be a last resort.  A middle ground, however, might be to have some videos “expire” at a certain point.

2) Invent their way out of this mess.  If Google could figure out a way to substantially lower the cost of bandwidth, the problem would be solved.

3)  Maintain YouTube as a cost center.  For now, they might be stuck with this option. 

4)  Create new revenue streams.  To their credit, they are working on a few options  that show some potential, but still, I’m not sure that these fixes will offset their growing costs.

YouTube (and Google) are staring at a problem that’s likely to get worse.  As more and more people worldwide become Web savvy, the number of YouTube users uploading content will grow, with growth in bandwidth costs continuing to outpace growth in ad revenues.  Eventually, Google’s going to be faced with some tough decisions, as option #3 becomes less attractive and #4 falls short (*fingers crossed for #2*). 

Forget the monetization of Twitter for the moment – it’s YouTube that needs a business model.

At noon yesterday, the Sunlight Foundation announced the winners from the Apps for America contest.  The top prize (which came with a $15 000 reward) went to the makers of Filibusted.us, a web-based application that sheds light on which Senators have been filibustering legislation in the US Senate.  There were 16 prize winners in total, and I definately recommend checking out the winners for yourself (my favorite is Legistalker.org).

Next came the recently-launched INCA – the Innovative and Creative Application Contest, based out of Belgium.  This contest is open for anyone to submit an application, be it a website, widget, google mashup or mobile application, to be used by Flemish citizens to help solve “collective and social problems.”  Prizes will be awarded to the ten best submissions, with the top developer receiving a prize of 20 000 Euros (about $25 ooo USD).  Deadline for submission is April 27th. 

With INCA, Apps for America and last November’s Apps for Democracy, we’re starting to see a very exciting trend in the Gov 2.0 space:  software developers and programmers engaging in social causes and public sector development.  Can these contests help spur the creation of new services along the lines of fixmystreet or transparency tools like opencongress?  After speaking with Sunlight’s John Wonderlich and Apps for Democracy architect Peter Corbett over the past two weeks, I’m convinced that they can.

The key to improving on these contest models is to create, in the words of Peter Corbett, a “Cradle-to-Grave” strategy to promote citizen-driven innovation in the public sector.  Corbett’s Cradle-to-Grave approach seeks an 8-step process for future application contests:

1.  Problem Sourcing:  Idea-sourcing, in this case, will work best when a specific problem/social issue is being targeted (such as crime, traffic congestions, etc.)

2.  Open Data:  A key to the success of Apps for Democracy was that Vivek Kundra made DC’s government data openly available with over 240 data feeds. 

3.  Government Sponsorship:  To support the idea-sourcing contest.  This was done in DC’s Apps initiative.

4.  Establish Contest Framework: Well-constructed in all three above examples.

5.  Launch and Run the Contest:  Also well-done in the three above-cited cases.

6.  Award:  All three contests had multiple award winners (not just financial – the recognition is probably a more powerful incentive to participation).

7.  Absorption by Government:  For the best applications to live on after the contest and provide real value to the public sector, they need to be adopted, maintained, and ideally, improved upon.  This represents a murky point, and an area where the initial contests haven’t found a working model.  It’s unclear how this is best handled.  Should the government provide ongoing grants for development of applications?  Should government internalize the best applications?

8.  Commercialization:  Lastly, Corbett believes that the applications need to somehow become commercialized, although it’s unclear whether or not government should be involved.  Could iLive.at or DCHistoricTours have a business model, wherein they could be licensed to other cities to use?  Another possibility might be a sponsorship arrangement with a private company.

Overall, citizen-driven idea sourcing and app creation represents a means of maximizing web 2.0 potential in public sector development.  The room for improvement is massive – outside of DC, for example, very few governments have truly open data (Corbett’s 2nd step).  But even if we’re still years away from widespread adoption of this model, at least we have the model (or rather, a model), with forward-thinking governments seeing the merits and beginning to move in this direction. 

If you’re really into this space, there’s a major development coming over the horizon – but that’s a whole other blog post in itself.

The issue of cybersecurity is nothing new; you can read Obama and Biden’s homeland security agenda, and specifically their objectives for “protecting our information networks” right here.  On a more interesting note, the issue of a Katrina-like disaster in cyberspace has been a topic of major interest over the past few months.  In February, former Whitehouse cybersecurity official Paul Kurts addressed the lack of a ‘FEMA for the internet’.  More recently, the online discourse surrounding cybersecurity has ramped up substantially, particularly following the anxiety over last week’s Conficker Worm.  This only stengthened the push for an American cyberecurity czar, which according to US Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), is an absolute necessity.  In a statement released last week, Snowe (co-author of the new bill) argued that “if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber Katrina.”

The bill’s most striking proposal (Section 18, paragraph 2), and the central issue of the article I cited above, is that the new legislation would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic, effectively shutting down the internet.  Not surprisingly, this created something of an uproar among political bloggers over the weekend, many of whom took issue with this expansion of federal powers.

Much of the opposition to the bill falls among ideological lines; one blog reader commented that “he who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither,” rehashing a libertarian argument that long predates the internet. 

Debates involving a liberty-security tradeoff are nothing new, nor is a generalized a lack of trust in federal government, both long-standing issues among Americans.  On the flip side, the analogies to the disasters of 9/11 and Katrina are also largely disconnected from the issue at hand; these arguments have a tendency to bubble up every time a debate arises over the liberty-security tradeoff.

In my opinion, the ideological arguments that simply cite pre-internet cases and debates, both for and against the bill, do little to confront the issue at hand.  The issues surrounding cybersecurity and cyberterrorism are very different than anything we’ve confronted in the past (contrary to most of the parallel arguments currently being made).  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have a full grasp over the threats at hand.  Whereas I feel well-read enough to comment over issues like journalism censorship or detainment of suspected terrorists, the issue of cybersecurity is one where I simply don’t know enough about the threats to make an informed opinion on the liberty-security tradeoff (even though I have been reading about it).  Even the blogs and articles I’ve read have done little to convince me that these authors have much more understanding of the issue than I do.

Growing up with a very open and libertarian internet, I’m no fan of the notion that a federal government could shut it down.  But then again, with the recent scares over Conficker (see Steve’s Skynet blogs), we may be entering a new age where more internet policing becomes a necessity, with governments needing more tools to limit damage in an emergency situation.  The scale and scope of said tools is currently up for debate, and rightfully so.  But that said, let’s try to focus the debate on the risks and needs that we’re now facing, and avoid referring solely to ideologies and analogies that pre-date the internet.

Denis used crowdSPRING to design the logo for his chTONGUEeek website, and discussed his experience with them in this blog.  For his purposes, crowdSPRING was great – he received 69 logo submissions, the opportunity to collaborate with the designer whose proposal he liked the best, and of course, got the logo he needed.   All for $150.

So, this brings us to the issue up for debate among the SXSW panelists (in the video below).   Does spec work (in creative) devalue an industry of designers?

From the perspective of workers within the industry, it’s not surprising that established designers and creative firms would be opposed to spec work;  one panelist discussed a possible industry blacklisting of workers who engage on sites like crowdSPRING.  For more on this perspective, see the NO!SPEC website, where you can read their “Ten Reasons” against spec work, or the article Why Speculation Hurts.

On the flip side, there’s a good argument to be made that sites like crowdspring tear down barriers and facilitate entry into the profession for the young workers looking to build a resume.  As an aspiring young designer, it can be hard to build a professional resume and get your first job (this applies to most professions).  To these workers, there could be a lot of value in gaining experience through crowdspring (and other spec sites).

The panel at SXSW did a great job covering the issues of spec work in design and creative.  But what if we apply this spec work model to other industries?

One of the best perspectives on this issue came from Alan Majer, citing a great example of a family member who works in the medical profession.  Alan’s analogy actually surrounded the provision of a government grant, where $100 000 of funding was available to a company that placed the “best bid” on a given assignment – a fairly common process.  His family member (and her team) put in about a week’s worth of time working on this project.  But so did 50-100 other teams that also submitted bids, meaning that, theoretically, anywhere from 49-99 teams used up about a week’s worth of work for nothing.  If you aggregate the whole process, there was a lot of work put in (with people “dropping their day jobs”) for what amounts out to very little money.

This raises questions about sites like Innocentive, a company that generally gets very good press (in Wikinomics, in the news, and of course, in the blogosphere).  Innocentive is a great way to find innovations, and is an excellent example of how companies can use external collaboration for R&D.  But from a broader economic perspective, could Innocentive also be somewhat damaging to the science industry?  In many cases, Innocentive works well because it connects company X working on project Y with a scientist elsewhere in the world who, unbeknownst to them, has also been working on project Y; a win-win.  But what if Innocentive were promoting spec work?  If a $1 000 000 award is offered to a scientist who can solve a specific problem, and 2000+ scientists worldwide drop their current projects to spend two weeks working on it, doesn’t this seem problematic, in terms of lost production?

I would argue that in the first example (connecting Y with Y), Innocentive is fantastic.  But if it (or sites like it) start drawing too many workers away from their real value-adding jobs, as with Alan’s example above, then it probably is damaging, on an aggregate economic level. 

So is spec work evil?  For logo design on a site like chTONGUEeek, probably not.  But if this model was applied to other industries, it could certainly be damaging. 

One thing I’m willing to bet – we’re likely to see an increase in the use of spec work as more people catch on to Web 2.0, and also as individuals and companies look to cut costs in the new economy.

Wordles can be a great way to visualize political discourse, especially when you use them in comparative form.  After Inauguration Day in January, Naumi wrote an excellent post , using IBM’s ManyEyes analysis to compare Obama’s inaugural speech to those of his predecessors.

These three tag clouds were all pulled from the Capitol Words Application, another development from the Sunlight Foundation (who we’ve written about previously – here, here and here).  Capitol Words is a program that takes every word entered into the congressional record and archives it online in a mashable and searchable form.  With different search metrics and visual aids, it allows you to see who’s saying what – broken down by individual, state or date.  One application lists the “10 most vocal” and “10 quietest” lawmakers of the last 60 days (over this most recent period, Michael Michaud has only uttered 8 words in Congress, while Richard Durbin has said almost 70 000).

Above, I’ve copied 3 tag clouds.  One of them represents all the words that John McCain has entered into Congressional Records over the past year.  Another one is from Nancy Pelosi, and the third is from all the representatives from the state of Massachusetts.  Can you guess which is which?

Too easy?

If you got the first three, here’s a more challenging one:

Representing all the words that he/she entered into record over the past 12 months, which well-known member of Congress does this cloud belong to?  (note:  I had to blur out the name of the state to avoid giving away the answer)

In the initial round of protests on January 26th, when traditional media reports were unavailable to and from many regions, social media played an important role in information relays.  Now, crisis reporting is made even more transparent with an open platform developed by Ushahidi.  Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili) was first developed to report on violence during the 2008 Kenyan election, using a collaborative base of citizen journalists to map crisis information and gather insights.  The platform has also been in used in Gaza and Congo.

Here, you can see the Madagascar-specific site, where citizens can check the Google Maps mashup to learn where crises are occurring (and have occurred previously).  They can also view a listing of all reports, submit their own (via internet or mobile) and receive SMS alerts on their mobiles about any developments in their locality. 

The functionality and ability of citizens to text-in and receive updates (with a proper verification process) can go a long way to reduce harm in crises.  Also, in many of the developing regions where such crises are most prevalent, the mobile is an ideal channel for this information.  At the end of 2007, there were 280 million mobile subscribers in Africa, representing a 30% penetration rate.  In Congo, for instance, there are only 10 000 fixed-line telephones, but over 1 million mobiles.  If you want to read on about mobile penetration in Africa, check out this article that appeared in The Guardian in January.

In a study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiaitve on last year’s post-election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi’s data was compared to the information released by bloggers and traditional media.  Not only is Ushahidi able to get infomation out quicker, but in many cases, it helped with reporting information that was “off the grid”.  Whereas bloggers and news media often focus on the same areas and echo one another, Ushidi allowed coverage of a much broader area.  Here’s a more in-depth blog from last October that covers this and other findings in more detail.

Twitter, microblogging and citizen journalists may be excellent tools for crisis reporting.  But to take it a step further, platforms like Ushahidi, which can properly aggregate the information and feed it back to those who need it, greatly improves the potential for rapid aid deployment and optimal use of response resources.

While information is available, you generally have to search for it.  Admittedly, while I care a great deal about ethical corporate behaviour, I simply don’t have the time to research the companies that produce all of the goods and services I pay for.  I suspect that many consumers would be interested in more accessible information regarding corporate behaviour, but are limited by this same constraint.

Slowly, information is becoming available about products attached to “good” practices, as we’ve seen with fair trade labelling organizations.  But what about labelling the “bad” products?  Producers aren’t going to do this, nor will retailers.

This is where Knowmore.org can play a role.  Dedicated to revealing unethical business practices, Knowmore has 2 main features.  First, the site is based on a wiki, where registered editors (anyone can become one) are encouraged to build on their library of companies and edit the company wikis.  The five key issues are worker’s rights, human rights, environmental concerns, political influence and business ethics.

The more innovative feature, however, is the Firefox add-on that brings all of this information to your browser when you visit a company’s website or search for them on Google.

Once a user adds the Knowmore application, they’ll get information resembling the image I’ve posted above (the top bar urging the boycott shows up on the Nike website, and the text below it is the hit that comes back on Google).

When I searched “Nike” on google, all 5 of the key issues came up as ‘red’, indicating that the wiki editors at Knowmore have major concerns on each metric.  For comparison, when I search Pfizer, I see that they (according to Knowmore) have issues with human rights and business ethics, although the other 3 areas get a “yellow”.

Similar to LittleSis (which is admittedly only a Beta), Knowmore has shortcomings based on usage.  For this site to reach its potential, it would really need a Wikipedia-sized following to broaden its library of companies, and to watch over the editing to ensure fairness and accuracy.  Knowmore also has consistency problems – some of the companies get flagged on Google search, some do not (even when they’re in the wiki library).  Moreover, some companies get a notification pop-up on their website (see Nike above), but others do not.  I think this shortcoming relates to Knowmore’s reach – as with other Gov 2.0 applications, it needs a very broad user base in order to fulfill its potential.

Still, I love this potential.  As more consumers are researching products and making purchases online, the Knowmore feature serves as a push-based alert (one you opt-in to by downloading it), notifying the user about corporate ethics issues that they otherwise wouldn’t have taken the time to research.  Not every consumer is a social activist, and very few conduct corporate research for their purchases.  But I suspect that many, if alerted to, say, human rights abuses, might think twice before buying a product from a questionable source (especially when other options are available).

Knowmore has the potential to bring a truly open participatory process into corporate regulation.  Using an interface and editing process similar to Wikipedia, critical mass could create a very accurate, transparent database to monitor corporate behaviour.  Tying this to consumers’ browsers might actually cause companies to rethink some of their policies.

So how do you get consumers to download this application?  Would they be interested?  How can we help Knowmore, or a similar application, reach critical mass?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

As they note in the article, Southern Ontario has had its share of very successful companies in the creation of new technology tools, such as Waterloo’s own Research In Motion.  Now, it seems that top-level leadership is waking up to the massive growth potential that exists in getting people and companies to actually use all of the newly-available tools, something we’re constantly pushing here at nGenera.

Here’s an excerpt from Ken Coates, Dean of Arts at the University of Waterloo: 

“The new economy will be driven more by the use of technology than the making of technology,” he said, citing companies that are working to adapt the social network technology of Facebook and YouTube to the way they deal with staff and even clients.

“This is the fastest-growing sector the world has ever seen, and we want to bring together people from engineering, the humanities, performing arts and a range of disciplines to work together to solve real-world problems,” Coates said.

“Whoever can figure this out will be the leaders in the new economy. Our goal is to devise made-in-Toronto solutions for i-banking, i-business, i-news, i-industry, i-medicine and i-everything.”

When using government expenditures to help us out of this recession, this is exactly the type of initiative that I think we need.  Coming out of this recession and entering a new age, we need forward-thinking plans to make us economically competitive.  I can’t comment on the viability of this particular plan (I don’t have all of the specific details), but I will say that in principal, this type of thinking is on track. 

With all the front-page media debate surrounding how we can save the auto industry, we often lack the necessary focus on developing the new industries that will drive our growth in the future.  Well done, U of T, Ryerson and Waterloo, I hope this plan lives up to its promise.

Just the other day, Skittles made a bold experiment:  they moved their Skittles.com homepage to a Twitter search page (see it here).  The new homepage is the same Twitter page you would view if your were to search for “Skittles” under Twitter search.  The only added features from the company are two pop ups – one that asks for your birthdate before you can see the site, and one on the top left that redirects you to Skittles information (as would be available on a typical company website).

The outcome?  It’s 10 a.m. right now, and on average, 10 people per minute are including “Skittles” in their Twitter feed, many of them just writing in in gratuitously to get their name at the top of the page.  Tweets like this one are common:  DaveMcCue: look Ma, I’m on the Skittles homepage! 

There’s also some like this:  spedteacher: Please RT: @andrewwarner wants to take over Skittles page. He’s lending $1 on Kiva for each retweet of this message–till midnight.

This is a great experiment, and there’s obviously lots of marketing benefits (even if it is just a one-time novelty), as well as potential downfalls.

Pros:  – Lots of people on Twitter now talking about Skittles, and all of their followers now see the word “Skittles” popping up.  The novelty factor encourages conversation as well (notice that I’m blogging about it).  Great way to get people talking about your brand, at no financial cost.  This morning, the Wall Street Journal posted their own blog on the subject. 

Cons:  – No company control over the dialogue could be a problem.  For instance, someone could tweet a derogatory comment next to the word “Skittles”, which would then show up at the top of skittles.com.  Atleast one website has already been launched to encourage this (I’m not going to link it myself, but if you’re really interested you can find it through the WSJ blog).  I should note that they do have one safeguard; you have to type in your birthdate before you can visit the site (must be over 18).

Overall, I don’t think this particular experiment represents a future trend for marketing, atleast not in its current form.  Skittles, in the long term, shouldn’t look to restrict their site to adults-only.   Still, it’s a great novelty, and it likely points towards a future where savvy brands will find innovative ways to use Twitter as a customer engagement tool.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  Is this a smart campaign?  Or, will it blow up in their face?  Should other companies take on similar endeavours?

(2:00 pm update:  Instead of Twitter, Skittles has changed this so that they now redirect to a Skittles facebook page.  I assume this was pre-planned.  I wonder what they have in store for us next?  What are your thoughts on this?)

LittleSis mixes Facebook-ish user interface with Wikipedia-like user editing to create profiles of the “powers that be” in both the private and public sectors.  Users who register as analysts can log in and add information to profiles of major figures like Barack Obama, Robert Rubin or Bill Gates.  The site focuses on 3 main factors about an individual:  Relationships (which includes Business/Government positions, other memberships, education and donation/grant recipients), Interlocks (people in common organizations), Giving (who they’ve donated to, as well as other individuals that have given to the same recipients) and the basic personal information.

Like Facebook, LittleSis also includes groups.  When I look up Citi Group, I can see their leadership and staff, but I also get a look at people and organizations that Citi has done businesses with. My favorite group feature is the “targets of lobbying”, where I learn that from ’99-’08, they lobbied the Senate and House 19 times.  They also lobbied the Department of Education 7 times between ’04 and ’07 (why would that be?)  If I go to the Department of Education group, I can follow up and see who they’ve done business with, who’s lobbied them, and which organizations have leadership and staff in common with the Department.  I can also check out which organizations have received donations from people who work in the Department.

The key to LittleSis is that it’s not Barack Obama, Citi Group or the Department of Education controlling their own profile and network.  Analysts like myself (I signed up for an account) are the ones doing the writing and editing, much like Wikipedia.  LittleSis also has a metric for determining which Analysts score the most points for making edits – a good system to (hopefully) maintain the integrity of the site.

At this point, there are a few shortcomings to LittleSis.  As I mentioned, the site is still in a Beta version, so it’s not a completed project yet.  Also, you can certainly question the accuracy of the information, and more importantly, the completeness of it.  I can read that a major CEO donated to groups x, y and z, but he may also have donated to a, b and c, with that information not yet uploaded.  As with Wikipedia, I think that a major prerequisite to a complete and successful version of LittleSis will be achieving a critical mass of users to police information and ensure the completeness of it.

Regardless of this shortcoming, I see a lot of potential in LittleSis.  Having this kind of facebook-like platform to follow donations and relationships among America’s elite is a fantastic development for public and private transparency.  Previously, we had to rely on journalists to follow the string and inform us about these relationships.  This website, if successful, allows individual citizens to see this themselves in a platform that’s very similar to the facebook sites they’re so adept at navigating.

The Sunlight Foundation is on the right track – let’s hope that LittleSis gets a strong enough user base to reach its potential.

“When we get to 2010, I want my campaigns here,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said as he held up his cell phone at the party’s Tech Summit on Friday. “I want whatever we’re doing to be within my thumb’s reach. We don’t want to just do what Obama did in ’08–that’s the floor.”

Republicans have some catching up to do, and atleast a few party members may need convincing of this.  One was quoted as saying that “Despite what the press says, we actually had an e-campaign in 2004 that did many of the things the Obama campaign did.  They just did it with many more people.”  I’m not sure I can agree with this.  As this article points out, 2004 was when facebook was still limited to universities, and YouTube didn’t even exist, making this a very difficult comparison.  A more telling anecdote is the 2008 election, John McCain had only four people working on his new media campaign.  Barack Obama had over 90.

So far, the party has started engaging on Facebook and Ning to collect input into some key areas.  For example, here’s their Grassroots facebook page, and here is their mobile suggestions page.  This may look like a good start, but it hasn’t exactly taken off yet – the mobile page only has 56 members, and a whopping total of 7 wall posts.

That’s not to say there weren’t some innovative suggestions to come out of the Tech Summit.  This article lists some of the best, notably: 

1) An iPhone app that shows you how your local congressman is voting, with his contact info.  2) A video game like Nintendo’s classic Paperboy.  Except in this version, the paperboy would be Barack Obama, and instead of tossing newspapers, he’d be biking up the street tossing wads of money away at houses.

Some suggestions, however, were less innovative.  One proposal was to use mobile ads to connect with hard to reach minority groups.  I’m not sure this would do much to create party support, as untargeted mobile ads would probably do little to boost engagement.  Rather, apps like the ones listed above might actually provide services or entertainment to users in a way that would improve their perception of the party. 

How much of this talking and brainstorming will actually translate into improved citizen relations for the GOP?  One bright spot might be their new National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, the RNC’s first black chairman.  Having been denied this job previously by former President Bush and Karl Rove, Steele now has big plans for updating the Republican image.  He says he wants an “off the hook” PR campaign that can apply the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip hop settings”.  According to Steele, this new strategy will be based on a campaign that is “avant garde, technically”.  This is a big change for the party that, in recent years, has targeted much of their campaigning towards a conservative base.

Based on all this, do you think the Republicans can take the “old” out of the Grand Old Party?  Can this “off the hook” campaign shake off the crusty image, and use new media to reach new voters?

This begs the question – how can Web 2.0 tools improve on this model and move beyond the suggestion box?

One innovative case of public policy consultation can be found in the city of Freiburg, Germany.  In 2008, the municipal government of Freiburg invited its citizens to partake in a participatory budgeting exercise.  The goal was to gather citizen input for the drafting of the 2009/2010 municipal budget.   With the help of software company TuTech Innovation, the Freiburg government created a website that used discussion forums, wikis and a new innovation – the budget slider.

Citizens who registered for the website could manipulate these sliders to create their own individual budgets, by moving the sliders up or down to either increase or decrease spending to any one of the 22 budget areas.  The key constraint was that the total budget had to balance to 2008 levels, so spending increases in one area necessitated economizations in another.  Citizens were also invited to provide written justifications for their changes. 

Following the completion of the process, all of the individual budgets were aggregated into one single “Citizen’s Budget”, which gave a clear picture of the participants’ wishes for the 2009/2010 municipal budget. 

Overall, 1800 citizens registered to use the website, with 1291 writing individual budgets (750 of whom provided written justifications).  Although this is less than 1% of the city’s population (217 000), it still represents a sevenfold increase over the roughly 150-200 citizens who might show up for an offline, townhall consultation process.

Building on the Change.gov model, this input was actually used as a focal point in the local government’s debate over the drafting of the actual budget.  In one case, 400 000 Euros were redirected to childcare spending, a change that may not have occurred without the widespread support that the measure received in the Citizen’s Budget.

Also building on the suggestion box model, the final Citizen’s Budget was drafted into a report that was published by the municipal government.  This allowed a great deal of transparency, as this budget could now be compared to the actual budget that was written into law, also providing an improved degree of government accountability. 

Overall, this case demonstrates the new relationship that’s possible between government and citizens.  Simple tools like the budget slider can add a whole new level of transparency to the public square dialogue.

Through this arrangement, Blyk users receive as many as 6 ads per day on their cell phone.  In many previous cases, this type of push-advertising mobile marketing has been a major failure in Europe.  But somehow, Blyk seems to have figured it out.  As of late 2008 in the UK, it was reported that Blyk ads were achieving a 30% response rate. 

Their marketing strategy has several factors that have lead to its success.  For one, Blyk is only available to 15-24 year olds.  They use MMS to send their ads, which ensures much better content than other, similar MVNOs.  Moreover, several elements of the ads, like music, are selected by user preference, thus improving consumers’ receptability. 

Blyk initially set a goal of reaching 100 000 subscribers in the UK by the end of 2008, but were able to hit that number by April of last year.  By September, they had over 200 000 - more than doubling their initial projections for the year.

Does this business model represent a coming trend for mobile marketing?  Would you be willing to receive 6 targeted MMS ads per day on your phone, in exchange for free texting and minutes?

This reminded me of an article from the Washington Post that appeared last week, “Well Connected Parents Take on School Boards”.   Parents are now using social networking, email blitzes, partnerships with business groups and data access to fight for a wide range of changes.  The battles they fight cover a broad spectrum of issues, such as pushing back school start times or redrawing district boundaries. In atleast one case, parents have even used the web to force changes on grading schemes (lowering the bar for an ‘A’ from a 94 to a 90, in percentages).

Many new parents today have grown up digital, and know how to leverage the web.  But many haven’t.   To quote a source from the article,  ”Schools need to be more concerned about the digital divide than ever before…We don’t want to create two levels of power, those with access to information and those without it.”  Clearly, this divide has the potential to widen the have and have-not gaps.  In the case of redrawing boundaries, for example, it’s very difficult to create a situation where all parties gain.  If the change was created by a computer-literate interest group, it’s reasonable to fear an increased disparity between socio-economic classes. 

As Web 2.0 tools start to reach an increased proportion of our population, there is (understandably) a push to increase citizen input into policy-making (such as Obama’s change.gov). In some instances, there’s even evidence of a movement towards small-scale direct democracy (see England’s “Vote for Your Park” program).

But an increase in collaborative policy-making has to be met by an increase in Web education and public progams to ensure universal internet access.  Reading the papers last week, I was somewhat letdown that in the America’s spending on broadband expansion to rural areas was being reduced in the proposed stimulus package (relative to what was initially proposed).  I think this is a mistake.

Moving forward, I see a wealth of opportunities for increased citizen collaboration in policy-making.  But let’s work a little harder at getting everyone up to speed.

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Essentially, anything that gives an advantage to national companies at the expense of non-national companies is trade-distorting, and thus a protectionist measure.  But during a global recession, it’s very difficult to avoid these actions.  For a simple example, take the auto bailout.  In North America, we assume that the auto industry is “too big to fail”.  But in giving a bailout to GM, Ford and Chrysler, we’re distorting trade – at the expense of German, British and Japanese auto companies.  Naturally, this issue has already been raised.

Now, a note on free trade.  Generally, most economists agree that free trade is good, and protectionism is bad.  Since the Second World War, regional trade agreements and the World Trade Organization have been, overall, reasonably successful in promoting global trade and lowering barriers to trade.  But let’s remember – we still don’t have absolute free trade.  Canada still has tariffs – you can read our official list if you’re that interested.  So although we have relatively “free-er” or “more open” trade than previous periods in history, it’s still not completely free or open, in any absolute sense.

Now as I mentioned, most economists will agree that we need to move towards free trade, not away from it.  Protectionism, and sometimes even bailouts, are often regarded as the “slippery slope” towards deeper recession (or even depression).

What makes this even worse, however, is the retaliatory nature of protectionism.  Just look at the “Buy American” clause in the US stimulus package, which prompted Canadian politicians to start talking about possible retaliatory measures.  Michael Ignatieff warned the US that Canada is a “force to be reckoned with”, while European leaders made open threats that this could spark a trade war.

But is this kind of rhetoric helpful?  Do our politicians really have to talk tough and make threats? 

Words like “war”, “threat” and “retaliate” all have very negative connotations.  The word ‘war’, in particular, is one generally associated with violence and malice.  Is this the kind of discourse we should have between North America and Western Europe, regions that are supposed to be close allies?  Using the term “war” angles this as state-versus-state conflict.  Is this how we want to frame this issue, at a time when global economic cooperation is more important than ever?

Politicians are savvy- they know the power of words (journalists too).  When they need to gather public support for a cause, they’ll often frame it as an us-versus-them issue – note the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” (on a sidenote, I’ve always thought that a barrier to progress on global warming was the term itself – “global warming” doesn’t sound very threatening – who doesn’t like warmth?  Why hasn’t anyone thought of a more threatening term for this?)

When the newspapers front headlines of “Trade War”, it’s likely to create public support for retaliation.  When public support goes up, it’s more likely that politicians will act on it.

So let’s go back to the auto bailout.  Was it protectionist? Yes.  Is protectionism detrimental to global trade?  Of course.  But did challenging times necessitate a bailout?  You could easily make this argument (as many economists have).  In a recession, states will do things like this, and yes, they will be trade-distorting.  But to frame bailouts and stimulus packages as acts of war is only going to make matters worse.

So let’s stop making threats of retaliation, and stop calling this “war” – this isn’t war.  Let’s not blindly assume that free trade is our ideological goal, and that any barriers to it are evil.  Instead, I’d rather see our politicians act with pragmatism, and come to new agreements on how the world can come through this crisis together.

People are already upset over the worsening economic condition.  So let’s choose our words more carefully, before the discourse of “war” causes national populations to villanize one another.

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In Japan and some part of Europe, this is old news.  They also started trickling into Australia last year.  But now, it looks like 2009 might be their year in North America, at least for a few early adopters.

The signs?  Well, first of all, QR codes have started to pop up in a few test markets (and not always where you’d expect).  In a New York subway station, a poster for “Notorious” (the new film about famed rapper Notorious B.I.G.) had a QR code in its bottom corner.  In San Francisco, more than 500 businesses are taking part in the first large-scale test of QR codes.  Vespa also tested the use of QR codes on some Toronto billboards last year.

Still, there’s some barriers to QR adoption in North America.  First, smartphones aren’t quite as prevalent here as they are in Japan.  More importantly though, Japanese smartphones generally come with QR readers preloaded on them.  Here, you would have to download and install an application onto your Blackberry or iPhone.

But while that may have been a bigger barrier a couple years ago, North Americans are increasingly willing to download new applications like this.  The iPhone, for instance, saw huge growth in applications last year. 

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has just released (this month) a mobile phone program (a beta version) to use for QR code-reading (or “tagging” as they call it).  Although there are a few key differences from typical QR codes, it’s generally the same idea.  With Microsoft Tag, users can not only read tags, but can create their own, too (interestingly, this is only the second time Microsoft has made a product available on the iPhone).

With more of a push from companies like Microsoft, and more pilot projects like the one in San Fran, could we finally start to see QR coding (and similar ventures) in North America?  I hope so, because some of these suggested uses would be pretty cool.

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Web.alive is a three-dimensional program that looks and feels similar to Second Life.  Companies can purchase the program and use the virtual environment for training, collaboration, hosting conferences, and most notably, sales and marketing.

The program is, if nothing else, intriguing.  This blogger speculated (albeit skeptically) about the benefits for using this “Second Life meets business world” technology for business communication.  He was impressed by Nortel’s licensing of the Unreal Gaming Engine to create an aesthetically appealing platform.  For a visual explanation, here’s a youtube link of Chief Architect Arn Hyndman talking about web.alive.

One company that clearly believes in this technology is Lenovo, the world’s 4th largest PC manufacturer.  Lenovo is the first business to make use of web.alive, and launched the Lenovo eLounge late last week.  The Lenovo eLounge is, at the moment, basically being used as a sales venue, where customers can view the products and speak to each other (and salespeople) in real time, through their avatars.

So on the day that Nortel announced bankruptcy, I decided to check out the technology that, in the words of their CTO Phil Edholm, “fuel[s] the engine behind Nortel’s success”.   Here’s a link to the Lenovo eLounge. If you aren’t interested in buying a Lenovo product, wait until after 9 pm to check it out – for reasons I’ll explain.

When I registered for my avatar and checked out the Lenovo eLounge last night, I was surprised who I ran into.  The other avatars in there (this was last night around 11 pm) weren’t Lenovo sales reps.  It was Nortel’s Project Chainsaw Design team, most notably Nick Sauriol and Brent Hadden, who were more than happy to chat with me about the development of web.alive and the opportunities it provides for enterprises.  On the day when Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection, this team sounded optimistic, and assured me that more companies are in the process of using web.alive to create their own virtual lounges.  They also explained that the Lenovo sales avatars generally punch out around 9pm, so the Nortel team hangs out in the lounge after that to answer questions, provide tech help and generally explain the web.alive technology to newcomers.  If you find anything in this article or the links here of interest, I’d definately recommend dropping by the lounge to visit the Project Chainsaw team.  These guys love to chat about their technology (given that the Lenovo eLounge is their pilot, and it’s been released for less than a week).  They’re also happy to give you a tour of the lounge and show off some of its unique features and services (which you can read about here under the “services” page).

From a sales perspective, think of traditional online sales, with facilitated customer-to-customer discussion, on-hand concierges, and the use of avatar technology that, so far, has been reserved mainly for entertainment purposes (like the virtual Barbie world, for instance).

Now, what’s my take on the Lenovo eLounge?  I would probably go back if I were looking to purchase a Lenovo product, but I think the site could be improved by more added features.  Aside from previewing Lenovo products and speaking to sales avatars, there isn’t a whole lot to do in the eLounge, so it won’t sell much on entertainment or additional features (although I enjoyed speaking to the Nortel team).  That’s not to say, however, that future web.alive-based sites can’t improve on this pilot (which I’m sure they will).

Obviously, there’s some issues, such as the financial health of both Nortel (as mentioned) and Lenovo (who recently announced restructuring).  Most of all, I question whether a Lenovo-only site has any benefit over companies that incorporate their sales “stores” into a larger realm, as Microsoft has with Second Life. 

That said, I do find this new site very intriguing and worth following.  When researching for a purchase, it’s definately easier to discuss verbally, via avatar, than to post on a message board and wait for a response.

Would you use this service if you were interested in a Lenovo product?  I’d love to hear your opinions on it.

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Reading the news this morning, I came across this story.  As you’ve probably heard, the U.S. deadline to switch over to all-digital broadcast television is just over a month away, February 17^th.  The problem, however, is that an estimated 7.7 million Americans haven’t switched over from analog, and risk having their televisions go black.

The purpose of this switchover isn’t to provide better quality television for couch potatoes.  Switching over to all-digital broadcasting incurs lower energy costs than analog broadcasting.  It also frees up analog airwaves for public safety use (which became a policy goal following 9/11), as well as increased usage by telecommunications companies. 

I’ll come back to this.

Also filling up headlines today was yesterday’s speech from President Obama, wherein he called for swift congressional action to pass his still-emerging economic stimulus package, which could cost, over two years, up to a trillion dollars.  That’s $1 000 000 000 000 – lots of zeros, eh?

You’ll notice I wrote “still emerging” in the above paragraph.  That’s because as of today, there’s an incredible amount of debate as to how this money will be spent.  Obviously, the usual suspects have lined up behind the usual causes – Republicans want tax cuts, Michigan wants support for the manufacturing industry, and most private sectors, from the airconditioning industry to the catfish farmers, have sent in their lobbyists.

My concern with this is that Americans will be facing an enormous public expenditure that’s basically just patchwork.  Infrastructure projects are merited in many cases, but the idea of solving this crisis simply by creating demand-side stimulus is flawed – they’d merely be putting bandaids over the fundamental problems that got us here in the first place.

As for my opinion, you have to keep in mind that I’m a NetGener.  So I see a lot of merit in a more digitized economy (and government).  If I was an American, I’d also, as a young person, fall within the demographic that’s going to have to carry the federal debt in the decades to come, so I’d want  to see money spent in ways that will improve the economy in the long-term.

Now, this brings me back to the top of this article – digitized television, the benefits of which I’ve listed above.  I can support public funding on this because it’s a good long-term investment.  What else do I think is a good long-term investment?  A national broadband policy to extend access across the whole country.  Digitized medical records.  More computers and internet access in schools.  Most importantly, America needs more funding targeted at actually teaching people how to use these new technologies (which is the main roadblock in the digitized television initiative I touched on above). 

Improving technology, digitizing the country and teaching people how to use these tools should be a crucial centrepiece in long-term economic planning.  This would facilitate the movement of more Americans towards mass collaboration, and other Wikinomics principles, the merits of which can be found in any of the blogs you’ll see on this site.

So if America is going to spend a trillion dollars on a stimulus package, let’s hope that Obama remembers these promises that he made back in November, and embraces a few Gov 2.0 and Wikinomics principles.