“If there is one shocker on election night in the presidential race, cast your eyes to Georgia. 1,994,990 people voted early in Georgia. 3,301,875 total voted in Georgia’s presidential race in 2004.

Let that sink in.  [Early voters are overwhelmingly organized by the Obama campaign. – ed.]

“The pullout was greatly exaggerated,” began Caroline Adelman, Georgia Communications Director, Obama for America. The pullout, of course, refers to the publicized redistribution of Obama staffers to other states when it appeared the Illinois Senator had no chance to win. Obama’s skeleton staff of 53 is at least four times bigger than any other Democratic presidential effort in Georgia’s history…. With 33 offices and 175 separate staging locations, at least one in every one of Georgia’s 159 counties, Obama’s operation seemed shockingly energetic for a state not on most pundit radars.

Adelman credited wunderkind field operator Alex Lofton, now in Ohio, with setting up the infrastructure before he was considered too valuable not to have in a more competitive state. “He opened up all the offices, he trained all the kids, did conference calls twice a day,” Adelman explained. “He was 23 and doing things in a way twice his age couldn’t accomplish.” Such are Obama’s young brilliant organizers the campaign’s great underwritten story. [My emphasis.]

“Really, in Georgia, that’s all we needed,” Adelman said. “The rest of it was neighbor to neighbor. People needed to see people in their own neighborhood” talking about Barack Obama. …

As the interview progressed just around the noon hour yesterday, we found ourselves pressed by a steady stream of volunteers elbowing us out of the way to get to the phones. In a flash, an already buzzing office grew packed. Volunteers think Obama is going win Georgia.

We asked about the insanely long lines, and whether that would hamper voting. First, we learned, Barack Obama has “Comfort Teams,” which are all volunteer forces who don’t campaign, but simply bring water, hot chocolate and snacks. “No campaigning, no materials,” Adelman said, just making sure the people who have to wait in long lines aren’t hungry or thirsty. …

We pressed Adelman on why outside observers should feel confident that Georgians will stay in line, as long as it takes. Adelman paused for a moment, looking for a way to capture the intangible. Finally, with the air of a woman who’d seen early voters up close, she shrugged.

“I just think our voters are going to stand in line.”

But I’ve got to say, there’s a reason why we do so few of these live events these days. It’s not just the $200 tickets — @#&#! the Rolling Stones for setting a new standard in crazy live-event prices! (>smile< — Really, they deserve it.) It’s the pain in the ass of dealing with all these media oligopolies just to have a little fun. Anytime you want to show up to something in-person, it’s a nightmare of logistics. Wanna watch at home, at your leisure, when and where you like? That’s easy, thanks to BitTorrent.

Why would anyone go to a live event again?

I know it’s old news, but it still rankles. Almost every media business has been built on a natural oligopoly model, which is why we have 1 TicketMaster, 4 TV networks, 1 local cable option, and 1 or 2 major theatre chains (in disguise, by the way, under multiple seemingly competitive brands). The internet, of course, has cleared the way for digital delivery of most media content — which is why we can get it easier, faster, simpler there (let alone free).

The media companies are like the pharmaceuticals. They claim they need high prices to pay the talent (in pharma, the R&D). But in fact, they pay more in sales and marketing costs than to talent! Give us an optional “pay what you believe is right” button, and many of us will take that over the current obsolete models every time.

What part of the TicketMaster experience is fun? Getting kicked off the website every 10 seconds? Logging in at the precise time the tickets go on sale, just to find all the tickets are sold out? Paying the insane “transaction charges” on top of the already-crazy ticket price?

(The only good news here is that the performers are finally getting their fair share of the proceeds. Years ago, I saw Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie — all just before they died. Then, I saw Ella Fitzgerald, seemingly just *after* she died! She was struggling on stage, telling the same two jokes in alternation literally between every song. Why did she need to tour in her 80s? Because she never got the money she deserved in the first place. The same can’t be said of Leonard Cohen, whose current tour is at least in part an attempt to make back the money he lost by trusting an unqualified “financial advisor”.)

Of course, the live show is the point — and it’s often great. But at some point, the pain of getting there outstrips the fun of being there.

This nutty situation doesn’t just apply to live music. We tried to see a movie the other day, and had the same experience. We had bought tickets using Air Miles (what else are they good for? Search me), but of course it turned out they weren’t valid for a Saturday night show (read the fine print). Then, of course, there’s the crazy prices for popcorn and drinks. And then 10 minutes of trailers and commercials. Why do I have to sit through commercials after *paying* for my show?

Even TV is a pain. Our latest craze at home is *Battlestar Galactica*, which we watch by downloading the old episodes. 41 minutes per episode, and they expect us to sit through another 20 minutes of distractions and commercials?!

The only thing missing on BitTorrent is the ability to pay the people who made the content. I’d love a “pay what you think this is worth” button. For those who are wondering, I’m not a fan of just buying the stuff on iTunes, only to find it works only once, or I can’t build it into my home videos for my friends….

Maybe one day, we’ll be able to send people money over a DNS protocol, much as we can currently find any website. In the meantime, I know this rant is old news, but the idiocy of our media business models irritates me still.

Goldcorp has been one of our Wikinomics poster children for their Goldcorp Challenge, in which they engaged the outside world to help find gold on their property.  What a great success that’s been!

Today, another part of the outside world disrupted (mildly) Goldcorp’s shareholder meeting in Toronto.  “[CEO] McArthur faced a barrage of questions from protesters upset over the company’s policies with its open-pit mines and the use of cyanide and arsenic to extract gold from rock in Guatemala and Honduras” (CP).

It will be interesting to see — can Goldcorp engage the protesters as they engaged the world’s creative minds?  Or will they feel the need to shut the protesters out, as so many corporations seem to find expedient?

Photo:  Deepak Ramachandran, walking to work.

In the very short run, it means we should all be able to run cross-company comparisons at a much greater level of detail than before — not just, for instance, comparing revenue or book value; but also, comparing items that appear in Notes to the financial statements.  (Think of contingent liabilities, or stock option valuations.)  Also, the data is much more likely to be truly comparable, because the companies will be tagging it themselves, rather than relying on teams of data-entry staff in India or elsewhere.  Just as CFOs carefully manage their “adjusted operating income” or other specialized measures they use for forecasts, they will want to carefully manage how their numbers look in standard comparisons with their main industry competitors.  For more detail on XBRL as it stands today, see this white paper from Bowne here.

In the longer run, the XBRL approach could bring about a much more radical shift in the relationship between investors and corporations — hopefully bringing the “prosumer” worldview, where consumers now help co-produce many goods and services (see Wikinomics, the book), to a new “provestor” community, where investors can engage with corporations more successfully.

Imagine the following roadmap (in no particular order):

• Step 1.  Corporations publish data in a standard cross-company, machine-readable format, to a single, open-access standard repository in each major jursdiction (e.g., the SEC the US; similar agencies in Korea, Japan, China, the EU, etc.).  [Currently underway in multiple countries.]
• Step 2.  Someone publishes the separate national XBRL repositories to a common global repository (e.g., on ManyEyes or Swivel), for true cross-company comparison across geographies and accounting standards.  [Currently feasible, though not in practice, to my knowledge.]
  • Step 2a.  The DNS infrastructure extends so that investors can find the relevant XBRL data, signed by the relevant corporation or oversight agency, using simple “xbrl://” calls, just as we now find websites through our browsers by typing “http://” or “https://” calls.  [Requires major changes to internet routing conventions, but not unhead-of.  FTP and other protocols exist already alongside HTTP.]
• Step 3.  Analysts, either “informed amateurs” or professionals running subscription-based financial blogs (see, for instance, Psychology of the Call or www.rightside.com), start to publish forecast models also in XBRL, tied to the global repository.  These could provide segment-level detail or other sub-analyses, and could also become the basis for “consensus” forecasts and deltas vs. actuals.  [Would require some additions to XBRL, either ad-hoc or eventually official, to include forecasts for line-items rather than just actuals.]

I’m sure we will see all this, and much more, over the next 20 years as Wikinomics hits the financial markets.  In fact, I see a huge opportunity to mitigate risk through crowdsourcing, with measures that go beyond Step 3 here.  (This is the topic of a future blog post.)  In the meantime, these early steps by the US, Japan, Korea, China and others are a great step forward towards transparent, meaningful data all investors can work with.

PS — Christopher Cox, SEC Chairman, has a cute sense of humor.  In  last week’s speech (see video here), he harkened back to the announcement of EDGAR, the SEC’s online repository of financial data — by referring to a 1985 article in Women’s Wear Daily.  Who knew that wwd.com makes a better resource on the SEC than, say, the Wall St. Journal?

The idea behind Worldsourcing is really the dawn of the truly global enterprise. Global enterprises operate on a truly global scale; operate with porous corporate boundaries (interacting with “outside” partners in much the same collaborative way that “internal” departments work together); and bring that global approach to all functions (not just manufacturing and customer service). Let’s look at each in more detail:

* Truly global scale. Worldsourcing companies have no single corporate headquarters, which means their senior management teams are often culturally, and physically, dispersed throughout the globe. This gives them a much deeper insight into the challenges and opportunities of globalization than their “multi¬national” brethren.

* Porous corporate boundaries. Worldsourcing companies have porous corporate boundaries – meaning they manage a portfolio of “internal” (same owner) and “external” (different owners) resources in most aspects of their work. This is why we call them truly global enterprises, and not just corporations. The very best cul¬ti¬vate the same kinds of trust-based, highly-collaborative relationships with their partners that they have with internal colleagues – a far cry from the SLA-driven, contractual relationships that often characterize “strategic” outsourcing relationships.

* Across all business functions. While some business leaders have managed global scale and porous relationships in one or two key functions (e.g., manufacturing and software development), Worldsourcing companies take this approach across all business functions – including marketing, product development, sales and customer service. For instance, a product development team based in India may work with a marketing team based in the Netherlands to create new value propositions for sale in markets from South Africa to Japan. This brings global creativity to bear where it matters most: not just in cost-reduction areas such as manufacturing, but in the core functions of business success – innovation and customer relationships.

Lenovo is a great role model in this new world. Another leader worthy of careful attention is Arcelor-Mittal (see this article from The Economist). More traditional “global corporations” such as GE, Coke and Procter & Gamble, deserve mention – but most of these are more truly multi-nationals than global enterprises. They still generally have a strong headquarters, often in America; they still rely preferentially on internal (owned) resources; and they still treat marketing and product development from a central hub.

The other companies that merit attention are the truly global professional services firms, arguably the first truly global organizations. Most notable among these are McKinsey, Accenture and Goldman Sachs, for their true “one global firm” organization and business models. But again, these firms have had little or no success with porous enterprise boundaries; rather, they keep most functions in-house.

On the location: nice part of Detroit; fun workstations; colour scheme strong on primary colours; and the expected great cafeteria. Kudos for the healthy food, and the plates and cutlery made from sugar cane and corn starch. Everything was compostable, and they tell me they do in fact compost it with the food.

Oddly, the building was empty. I gather they’re new in Detroit, and I’m not totally sure why they need such a big space anyhow for a sales office. Perhaps growth will make the place buzz, but it’s not obvious how.

The Apps themselves have made a bit of progress over the past year, when I last looked at them. Most notably:

• Google Sites, launched just Feb 27, is a decent start as a wiki. As the name suggests, the idea is for each page to look more like an html page than a mediawiki text page. Editing is very simple and intuitive, but there’s very basic formatting functionality (html, not any wiki markup).
• The most impressive feature is how easy it is to embed a Google Apps document in a wiki page. Just drag and drop (or insert URL), and the info appears as in the original document. For instance, you can stick a spreadsheet in. Anyone can edit the document just by double-clicking, and the content is automatically updated in real-time. For instance, if the embedded spreadsheet refers to a stock price (see below), then whenever anyone views the wiki page, the latest stock price will appear automatically, and will update real-time while you stay on the page.
• This *dynamic content linking* is the most interesting thing I saw at Google. It applies to all the Apps. You can even turn bits of App content into Widgets. For instance, here’s a quick rundown on the possible:
  - type “Pfizer” in a spreadsheet cell
  - in next cell, type a lookup for the stock symbol, from Google Finance; the spreadsheet automatically fills in PFE
  - in next cell, type a lookup for stock price of the symbol, and spreadsheet automaticaly fills in the current price; this updates automatically
• you can even create a gadget based on the price field, and that can appear anywhere, and it will update automatically.
• (I wish I could insert a sample spreadsheet here, but we don’t seem to have the spreadsheets enabled in this community.)
• By the way, we got a quick preview of an upcoming release of Google Docs, and it looks like a significant upgrade. Still not for power Word users, but at least closer.

It’s the dynamic linking that provides the opportunity to turn “shadow IT” inside-out. Normally, one of the big complaints about all the spreadsheets / Access DBs / etc. that proliferate in corporations is that they’re isolated, not dynamic (need to access user’s PC to get information), don’t link back into main systems, etc. But if the documents reside on a SaaS platform like Google’s, many of those complaints go away.

In fact, I could develop a sophisticated calculation / algorithm to process data from multiple sources within a Google Spreadsheet, then make the result available through a gadget to anyone else in the organization. Presto! My home-grown VAR system becomes the bank’s whole infrastructure for managing risk! (Just kidding.) But really, my personal work *can* become a critical component in an Enterprise activity, even some degree of automation.

Sadly, of course, it’s a bit early to declare victory in this direction. The Google Apps seem to crash often (e.g., when embedding a large PowerPoint in a Site page); the Sites editor is clunky, and goes wonky now and then; the slideshow loses all the graphics when it imports from PowerPoint; the spreadsheet can’t do any very sophisticated formulas; etc.

But the direction is clear. A platform, even something as simple as Google Apps, can provide a huge leap in flexibility and productivity just by making dynamic information available, and manageable, by regular users using familiar tools.