A group of Kingston residents, fed up with students’ intolerable behavior and the inability of police and university administrators to stop it, have turned to transparency as a weapon. On Homecoming, and for the past month, members of SaveOurNeighborhood.ca have been patrolling Kingston’s student neighborhood to take pictures of young people committing debauchery and posting them online for the world to see.

By subjecting individuals to a greater level of personal transparency, SaveOurNeighborhood.ca hopes to eliminate unwanted behavior by stigmatizing perpetrators, their parents, and the university.

We have seen Facebook profiles revolutionize the transparency of our personal lives. And we have seen “inappropriate content” on them become a liability to our personal and professional reputations. But we have also maintained, and increasingly exercised, control over who gets access to that information.

But students do not choose to be in pictures on SaveOurNeighborhood.ca. In fact, the express purpose of each photo is to be a maximally visible liability to a student’s reputation. Individuals are now subject to the same hostile transparency inflicted on companies by activists, on politicians by journalists and smear campaigns, and on celebrities by gossip rags.

This is not the only example of the internet fueling a hostile increase in the transparency of individuals’ personal lives. High school students have begun using Facebook to create hate groups for disliked classmates. We have all been–and likely currently are–members of an informal group of friends that bond over a distaste for a common acquaintance. It’s horrible, but it’s true. And while you may not be mean to this person’s face, they probably know that you’re not their number one fan. The novel feature of the Facebook hate group is that it’s public. It’s meant to publicly stigmatize someone outside, and long after they’ve left, the hostile social network. The victim’s university classmates, dating prospects, potential employers, and even children will examine all the unpleasant things written about them years ago by high school bullies.

I used to know a young woman who suffered from a disability. When she added me to Facebook, I saw that someone from her hometown high school had posted a cruel comment about her handicap on her wall. It can be difficult to make new friends when their impressions of you can be so directly influenced by old enemies.

The Wikinomics Blog has often argued that companies need to embrace transparency. And particularly, not to stifle but to engage with critics. Should this principle be extended to our personal lives?

How should students respond to SaveOurNeighborhood.ca? Change their behavior to protect their reputation? Demand photos of them be removed? Or engage with the community group to publicly address their concerns?

Should Facebook hate groups be disbanded by school administrators? Or should they become forums for students to find out why it is that no one likes them?

And should our profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and LavaLife, be places for friends, employers, coworkers, and romantic partners to critically and publicly–and hopefully constructively–discuss our personal and professional shortcomings?

It seems clear that our personal lives are being subjected to increasing personal transparency, and that transparency is increasingly coming from sources that are hostile towards us. As a society we have three choices: increase our conformity, hide behind renewed privacy rights, or begin to talk openly, honestly, and publically about what we don’t like about each other. That last option might not be as bad as it first sounds.

This brings up some interesting questions. Whose responsibility is it to submit a tender bid for open source? Do governments have the responsibility to consider it even without a bid? And can governments really justify spending a lot of money on things they can get for free (even if the free version has an interface that is intimidating to white-haired public servants)?

But more importantly, governments are missing a tremendous opportunity by ignoring open source. Imagine if even a fraction of the millions of dollars most governments spend on proprietary software was spent on open source initiatives. First of all, the software would become far more customized towards what government needs. Second, rather than funneling tax payer money to one company, it would be an investment for every company in the economy. Third, it would create skilled jobs. Fourth, it would help create the critical mass necessary for open source to overtake proprietary software: something that would benefit the entire economy.

As citizens, I say we start demanding that our governments leverage open source software to save money and invest in our economy.

Great (or annoying, depending on your opinion) marketing gimmick for getting people onto the campaign’s text message list, but even more exciting are the other ways in which that list is being used.

First off, Obama uses it to tell supporters the time and location of rallies close to where the live. For a political campaign, mobilizing supporters is a core competency. But it can be difficult to do, especially when events are spur-of-the-momment. Phones often ring unanswered, emails get snagged by spam and sit unread in mailboxes for days. Text messages are received and read pretty much instantaneously, and irrespective of where the recipient is. They are also more personal than a mass email or recorded telemessage, meaning its more likely people will pay attention to them, and much less resource-intensive than a person-to-person phone call.

Second, Obama texts his supporters policy updates. I know: BORING. That’s what I thought at first. But think about it. If McCain attacks Obama, Obama’s supporters know the rebuttal before they have even heard McCain’s attack. And, they’re going to be spreading that message to people they know. Conservative TV commentators have long been accused of reciting talking points sent to them straight from the Republican Party. Whatever your view of the ethics behind that, you must admit it is an effective way to get out the message. Replace those TV commentators (which generally attract audiences with median ages of over 60) with hundreds of thousands, even millions of ordinary people of every race and every class in every corner of the country, and you have a pretty big bull horn.

Meanwhile, John McCain has yet to use text messaging at all. And I don’t just mean his campaign, I mean him personally as well. LOL I can’t wait till November.

One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life – and government – would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.

7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.

“Luke Smith,” said the newscaster on the monitor, “who only yesterday controlled more proxy votes than any other advisor, has been reduced to irrelevance. Almost all of Smith’s supporters abandoned him last night after he tried to use their proxy votes to pass a bill that would have allowed him to collect millions of dollars through a dummy public service provider.” The country’s voting platform gave all citizens the ability to vote on every bill. But many gave their votes by proxy to advisors.

“I wonder how Smith thought he could get away with it,” thought Donald. Open Collaboration Platforms (OCP) were now mandatory for any agency that received government funds. They gave citizens access to all of an organization’s internal activities, including documents and meeting. Not only had these allowed greater collaboration between governments, businesses, citizens, and civil society; they had greatly enhanced oversight, and made it difficult for anyone to get away with corruption.

After the newscast, an ad played. These ads helped pay for the other content Donald watched. His friend Ralph had forwarded this ad to him. “I just signed up. Its great,” said a message from Ralph. The ad was for a new bank account from UniBank. It had low credit rates and high savings rates. Donald thought it sounded good, especially since profits were being used to support internet access for children in the developing world.

Donald decided to follow the link from the ad to the bank’s website. He clicked on Open a New Account and was taken to the government’s Central ID Management System (CIDMS). CIDMS linked all private and public sector databases that contain personal information, both to facilitate data sharing across databases, and to give individuals the ability to manage their privacy.

Donald confirmed that he would like to allow UniBank to create a record of him in their database. He then received a request from UniBank for access to his credit history. He allowed it. He was then asked if we would like to share his name and contact information with UniBank. Donald declined. Because all of his information is shared over the CIDMS, UniBank didn’t need any personal information about Donald to confirm the information he had shared. Providing his name and contact information might have allowed them to give him a more personalized service, but Donald didn’t trust them not to share his information with other companies.

After the account was setup, Donald electronically transferred all of his money and information from his old bank account. He saw that he had a bill from the Hospital of New Delhi. Donald was getting surgery there the following week. He was originally going to go to the local hospital, but there was less of a wait at New Delhi, and besides, it was supposed to be much better. The bill had already been automatically forwarded to, and paid by, the government’s Health Fund. He had also just received his latest electronic paycheck. It outlined exactly where his taxes went: ten percent to education, five percent to the police …

Looking at the clock, Donald realized it was already 7:30. He had to get going. He rolled out of bed, got ready for work, and headed out the door, remembering to take the trash to the curb. In his car, Donald logged into the Car Pool System (CPS). People who wanted a ride could enter a request into the CPS. Car owners were then notified of people they could pickup along their route. In return, the car owner got paid a portion of each passenger’s daily transit allowance.

One of the passengers Donald picked up that morning was Sarah Johnson, the president of the neighborhood council. The council had been formed early in the year, when over half of the neighborhood agreed to create one in an e-vote. Neighborhood councils had authority to improve neighborhood roads and parks, put-up stop signs, and run community programs. In order to pay for their work, neighborhood councils were given money from the city on a per-capita basis.

“You guys really need to improve that park,” Donald said, referring to the park across from his house.

“We’re working on it. You should check out the design proposals on the OCP,” said Sarah.

“I will.”

After dropping off his passengers, Donald went to work at the city planning commission. He logged on to the commission’s online planning map. In addition to displaying current and proposed by-laws, the map provided an interactive, 3D model of the city, including 3D mock-ups of current and proposed buildings. The map was available to all citizens, who could use it to comment on and suggest modifications to proposals.

The Transit Commission had recently uploaded plans for a new subway line. Emergency Services was concerned that the design would make their response difficult in the case of an emergency. They were using the platform to work with the transit commission to solve the problem.

At the same time, citizens had been asked to help design the outside of the new subway stations. Donald’s job was to lead this group of volunteers, and make sure their design stayed within budget.

Before he left work for the day, Donald logged on to the central government’s voter platform and reviewed a list of “upcoming votes and issues that may concern you.” One of the big issues of the day was a bill to ban designer genes. It had actually been drafted by the janitor in Donald’s office. Donald gave his votes by proxy to the New World Party. But the party had not made a decision on this bill. Donald voted against the ban, as the voting system had predicted based on his past voting history. This system of tracking voting behavior had previously suggested Donald transfer his proxy vote from the popular Conservative party to the niche New World party, which he had found was much more in line with his views. Donald donated his monthly allowance for political financing to the party so that it could grow, and garner more influence.

When Donald got home from work, he saw his garbage still sitting on the curb. Donald had switched to a new, environmentally conscious garbage company, but it never picked up his garbage. He logged into his garbage collection account, run by the city government, and switched back to his old company. Now his weekly garbage pickup allowance would be given to a company that actually did their job.

It was getting late, and Donald had a date that night. After a quick shower and a change of clothes, Donald hopped back in the car.

“Would you like to pickup passengers?” the CPS prompted him. Donald declined.

“Probably not the best way to impress the ladies,” he said to himself.

WILL: To start off, why don’t you give us a bit of background about yourselves, your company, and both the process and motivation behind the development of ProtoShare?

ANDREW: Sure. We started Site9 back in 1998 as a web development company. We were always building tools to make ourselves more efficient, and we saw that a much bigger opportunity for us was to develop those tools into a platform we could sell. Our first product was Launch, which is an end–to-end web development solution. One of the aspects of Launch that customers really responded to was that it gave them the ability to create prototypes of websites: visual and interactive mock-ups that allowed the entire development team and their clients to have a common understanding of what the final product was going to be. And what we started to realize was that by taking that functionality, and enabling a greater level of collaboration within the development team and between developers and their clients—including those without technical experience—we could make something really powerful.

BLAKE: And with the advent of Web 2.0 technology and the whole architecture of collaboration and people working together online, we started thinking, “That’s how we enable collaboration.” You don’t just run your program on a server in someone’s company; you run it on the Internet where people anywhere in the world can participate in the project. You can have a team with people from all over the world working together.

WILL: What’s the advantage of a prototyping tool?

BLAKE: Everybody in web development should be prototyping. You want to move in an inverse pyramid, from abstract to concrete, working your way up. But a lot of people don’t prototype. And those that do, they often use things like Visio or Photoshop. So it’s flat. When you take that to a client—along with your big spec document—and say, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to go here. You’re going to here. You’re going to have this,” they all say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” And then, when the project is close to being done, they say, “I don’t like this.” And then you’ve got all this rework that could have been avoided if there had been more communication earlier on. So the advantage of a prototyping tool like ProtoShare is that it makes prototyping easier for developers, and provides the interactive and collaborative capabilities that get clients to engage with a prototype.

WILL: So how does ProtoShare enable collaborations?

ANDREW: ProtoShare enables two tiers of collaboration. First, it allows a bunch of developers to all work on the same project simultaneously. Instead of the typical development paradigm in which everybody has their own copy, and if you’re lucky you’ve got source control, ProtoShare allows everyone to work off of the same web-based copy, so it isn’t hard to keep track of changes. But in addition to that, ProtoShare enables collaboration by bringing all the stakeholders who aren’t developers and who don’t have technical experience into the process. One of problems we constantly ran into as web developers was engaging with clients. Before we got started on a site we’d give clients a long paper document with the layout and the parameters and all sorts of other things. But for clients, if it’s paper, they never get engaged. ProtoShare engages clients by giving them the ability to go online and see a live, interactive prototype that they can comment on and use to see the progress of the web development process over time.

WILL: How much access and control do you give to those non-developers?

ANDREW: We have two categories of users: builders and reviewers. Builders are generally members of the development team, and they can add things, edit things, move things around. Reviewers can be anybody from marketers to CEOs to project managers. The reviewers get to see and interact with the prototype in progress. They can create comments—we have these pins that they can drag over the page to indicate what they’re talking about. And the developers can control what the reviewers see. So if they’re not ready to reveal something, they can hide it. But for us it seemed to be a pretty natural breakpoint between the tools we give to developers and those we give to the high level people who don’t really care how the sausage gets made, they just want to see what’s going on.

BLAKE: We had an internal discussion about the division, and used our experience with Google Docs to guide us to a certain extent. There a lot of aspects of Google Docs we really like. But at the same time, it creates a kind of free-for-all. And when you have a project as complicated as web development, our feeling was that it should be a little more structured than that.

WILL: Do you have a successful case you would like to share?

BLAKE: One of our first customers was a company called Accero, which was designing their own software as a service offering. They had a few developers work on it, but then they also had about 50 different people giving their feedback—everyone from the CEO to the marketers, everyone who was involved in the project. It should be a nightmare to keep track of and incorporate feedback from 50 people. But ProtoShare gave them the tools to do it. They did in 72 hours what would normally have taken them a month, because they were able to collaborate online, make contributions easily, and have everybody on the same page.

WILL: Is there a way to move projects from ProtoShare to Launch?

BLAKE: There’s not right now, but I think our long-term plan is to have those two separate software branches merging. The issue with Launch is—it’s really powerful and we’re really proud of it and we feel like we did a lot of great things with it—but it’s pretty complicated to use. Really only developers can use it. Our idea with ProtoShare was to take this prototyping functionality—which was one of the features in Launch that customers really responded to—combine it with collaborative features and make it easy enough for anyone to use. And from there we’re going to see what other aspects of the Launch functionality we can ultimately add. In our minds, the great vision for the future is that when you finish prototyping, the site is already built.

WILL: Moving forward, what would you say is your biggest challenge?

BLAKE: I think the biggest issue for us is going to be being careful about choosing which features we want to add. We want to keep it lean and mean. We want to keep the feature set something that’s highly useful and flexible. Like I said, I’d like to get back to that paradigm where when you’re done with the prototype, you’re done building your website, I think that would be an ideal world.

The National Enquirer claims that Edwards fathered an illegitimate child with his web video producer, but without any substantive evidence to back it up, it seems that none of the US networks (except truth-crusader Fox News) have covered the story.

The Wikipedia entry on Edwards was locked after a 37,000-word debate concluded that the scandal, and the sources that reported on it, did not meet Wikipedia’s standards of reliability. Yesterday, however, users voted to unlock the article and include a compromise statement that references the scandal, but only in regards to its influence on Edwards’ chances for the vice presidency.

To me this illustrates how Wikipedia and social media have the potential to provide far more reliable and balanced sources of information than traditional media.

An ongoing criticism of Wikipedia is that it is unreliable. You just can’t trust it. Who knows where that information is coming from. Well call me crazy, but this story shows that Wikipedia is applying a higher standard of reliability than the US’s most-watched cable news network (not that that’s saying much).

On the other hand, Wikipedia struggles with the issue of censorship and bias. You just can’t trust Wikipedia because its edited by a bunch of conservatives/liberals/people-I-don’t-agree-with. They aren’t telling the whole story. Of course that argument can be made with the mainstream media as well. But when a major network or newspaper is biased or commits censorship, people complain and/or go somewhere else for their news, they don’t solve the problem. In this case, Wikipedians thoughtfully discussed the issue, reached a compromise, voted democratically, and solved (or at least moved towards a solution for) the problem.

In a media environment that seems increasingly unconcerned with factuality, biased, and obsessed with scandal, Wikipedia seems so … mature!

Of course, I knew there must be a web 2.0 solution to this problem. So I went surfing around. It turns out that 416-TAXICAB (a company that charges users to connect them to the first available cab company so they don’t have to put up with busy signals) runs the Toronto Taxi Lost-and-Found online notice board. Great idea. But from the looks of it, its only being used by people who have lost things, not those who have found them.

In other areas, however, the internet greatly improving on our traditional methods of lost and found. A few examples:

• When Matt Preprost found a lost camera, he decided to post the photos on the net. Within days he had not only returned the camera to its rightful owner, people from around the world were sending him photos from lost cameras they had found. IFoundYourCamera.net reunites people with their lost photographs, sometimes decades after they were taken.
• TheLostPets.com runs databases for lost dogs (FidoFinder.com) and lost cats (TabbyTracker.com). Those who have lost or found missing pets can post information (including a reward), and search through other entries.
• Pet Harbor allows users to search US and Canadian animal shelters for lost dogs and adoptable dogs, as well as post information about found dogs. This service is used by local governments, including the City of Toronto’s Animal Services Department and Sutter County, California.

Anyone got their own examples (or any info on my laptop!)?

Last week he was fired by concession company Aramark for not checking the ID of a 22-year-old “mystery shopper.” (The legal drinking age is 19, but apparently he is supposed to check the ID of anyone who looks under 30.)

In response, unhappy fans have joined forces on Facebook to demand that he be rehired. The Official Bring Back Wayne Facebook Group has grown from 2500 members on Wednesday, to 9000 on Friday, to almost 15 000 today. The momentum is just picking up. And now, if you search for Aramark on Facebook, Bring Back Wayne is the number one result.

Aramark has not yet hired him back. But they would be foolish not to. This is turning into a public relations disaster that will come back to haunt them when it comes time to renew their contracts, not just for the Rogers Centre, but for universities across the country. They have nothing to gain from firing a popular employee for not checking the ID of someone who was well above legal drinking age, and for not following a rule that I’m sure many feel is a little over the top. (If you were at a baseball game and the beer guy kept slowing down service and interrupting the game by insisting that people who were clearly of age, but looked 29, pass their IDs up and down the isle, wouldn’t you be a bit annoyed?)

But Aramark, like so many companies, is not used to listening to customer complaints about internal policy. Even if they make an internal decision that upsets a large group of customers, only a few have the time and naivety to phone and complain. And I can just imagine what management thinks of them: “whiners who complain about everything and who have no respect for a company policy that took months to decide on, plan for, and implement. Change the policy? That just don’t understand it. They weren’t at the meetings.”

Ah, but they do understand. They’ve worked in those companies and enforced those policies themselves. And if they complain about everything, its probably because they have everything to complain about.

It used to be easy to maintain the myth that the complainers were an irrelevant and uninformed fringe group. Not anymore. Now, with barely any amount of time or effort, social networks are allowing them to form into a cohesive and public opposition to your company.

Smart companies see this as an opportunity to engage with customers and build the company around what customers want, not what a committee meeting decides is a good idea. Those that choose to propagate the myth that complainers are irrelevant are sure to find their own relevance steadily diminished.

To change that, Free Government plans on electing the politicians. The community, which is also a political party, is looking for candidates to run in the 2008 US Congressional election. If elected, these politicians will be contractually obligated to vote according to the results of an online poll of constituents (for their vote to count, users will have to first be confirmed as registered voters).

The idea of direct democracy itself is fascinating and becoming increasingly possible. But proponents of it normally talk about the need for us to change the system of government. Instead, Free Government is engaging with the old system and building their new system on top of it. Last week I posted about how the big tech companies’ new patent alliance is a work-around for ineffectual IP laws (that our failing government has been unable to update). Similarly, government’s inaction in the direct democracy arena could be corrected by Free Government’s simple work-around.

The plan, though, is not pure direct democracy. Those who prefer not to make their own voting decisions can delegate their votes to advisors. These advisors then, become sort of like elected representatives. But there are a few important differences:

• They are never running for election, making their decisions less susceptible to variations in the political cycle.
• Their power is never “locked in.” If they make a bad or corrupt decision, constituents can immediately and retroactively take their power away.
• Those who do not win are still engaged in the process. When a candidate loses an election, we shut this (often) highly qualified person out of government, rather than give them an opportunity to serve their community. A corporate HR department would cringe at such a policy. Free Government’s system allows those less-popular “advisors” to continue to engage in the policy making process.

Wouldn’t it crazy/amazing if these guys actually got someone elected and we could see how it worked? I haven’t talked about the challenges of something like this, and there are many. But we are in serious need of some innovative ideas for saving our increasingly ineffective government. I think this may be the best one I’ve seen yet.

I’d love to know what everyone else thinks.

From Dan Slater at the WSJ Law Blog:

To head off concerns that the group will use litigation as a strategy, Allied Security Trust will sell the patents they acquire after they’ve granted themselves a nonexclusive license to the underlying technology. “It will never be an enforcement vehicle,” said [AST CEO] Hinman. “It isn’t the intent of the companies to make money on the transactions.”

(Too bad they are selling the patents instead of making them public, along the lines of projects like Open Invention Network and Patent Commons. )

The need for AST underscores how broken our intellectual property legal framework is. Rather than foster innovation, as it was designed to do (and was perhaps once effective at), it is allowing rent-seeking patent trolls to tax business and stifle innovation.

It is disgraceful how incompetent government has been at acting on intellectual property reform. But AST is an example of how businesses are addressing government’s failings by using their market power to make the intellectual property environment more open and collaborative.

Government has traditionally been seen as the instrument for openness and collaboration within an otherwise competitive economy. But I think that is changing.

Companies, not governments, are increasingly leading efforts to deal with social ills: car makers are following Toyota’s lead in going green, Starbucks sells more fair trade coffee than anyone else in the world, and shoe companies like Nike and Reebok are voluntarily audited by the non-profit Fair Labour Association. Legislators have tried, and failed, to act on all of these issues. But companies have made progress.

In my post The End of Capitalism, I argued that we are moving towards a post-capitalist society in which power within companies shifts from shareholders to stakeholders,  and the source of value within companies is its social value. This trend may include the replacement of our governance institutions (developed in parallel with capitalism and now losing their legitimacy and effectiveness) with a much flatter, collaborative, and business-led model for government.

• Wikinomics has won the Highams Business Technology Book of the Year award. One of the judges, Mark Samuels, blogs about the decision with some kind words for the book.
• Doug Cornelius posts enthusiastically about the prediction markets presentation put on by Hagai Fleiman and Jeff DeChambeau at last week’s nGenera Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
• 6th grade teacher Bill Ferriter has an interesting post at the Teacher Leaders Network about using Wikinomics princples in education.
• Another teacher, who just started their blog (and doesn’t seem to have posted their name), discusses the challenges of teaching children the skills necessary for a wikonomy. (S)he also remarks at how education 2.0 innovator Vicki Davis reached out to her after she saw the blog. Isn’t it great how web 2.0 brings people together?
• And according to this guy, John McCain’s proposal for a $300 million prize for battery innovation is “straight out of the wikinomics playbook”. I wonder how Don and Anthony feel about that.

If you’ve ever seen a floating molecule in Second Life, chances are it was created by Dr. Andrew Lang, a mathematical physicist at Oral Roberts University, otherwise known as Hiro Sheridan in-world. Hiro recently demonstrated working prototypes of several different tools in collaboration with Jean-Claude Bradley, a chemistry professor at Drexel University, known as Horace Moody. The demonstrations included a molecule rezzer that allows a user to name a compound in text chat and watch as it builds itself in front of you atom by atom, and a docking simulator that demonstrates how molecules bond together to form more complex structures.

Check out the rest of the article and more images here.

For about as long as corporations have been the dominant form of value creation in society, they have been viewed as enemies by social activists. Naomi Klein’s No Logo documents the rise of a social movement in the 1990s that is specifically anti-corporation. The 2003 book and film The Corporation has taught a generation of socially concerned youth that corporations act, by flawed design, like psychopaths. “The corporate model is broken and must be changed,” is perhaps one of the most unifying mantras across the diverse range of social activists.

And here’s this guy Ben, starting a network for social change, and he incorporated it? Did he not get the memo?

Actually, I believe that this is an example of a much larger trend that is remaking the model of the corporation, blurring the line between businesses and NGOs, redistributing corporate power from shareholders to communities, and marking the beginning of a post-capitalist society.

Change.org isn’t about making money, Ben told me, but it has equity investors and a “sound business model.” The site is free and has no advertising. But rather than support themselves by raising money, they charge NGOs for some higher-end consulting services, and use that revenue to pay for the rest of their work. The hope is that their business model will allow them to become completely self-sufficient.

Change.org acts like a business, and has a business model that could be used to make money, but chooses to be concerned with social rather than monetary profit. The same idea is found in micro lending: small loans given to entrepreneurs in developing countries. These loans make money, but more importantly, they create social value.

As NGOs become more business-like, businesses are becoming more socially-responsive, because their power is being redistributed from shareholders to communities. Wikinomics argues that businesses’ value is increasingly coming from their communities. As corporations own fewer and fewer physical assets and lose their ability to control their intellectual property, employees and customers are able to bypass shareholders and recreate a business in a new image overnight. This is even more true in an era where value is created by prosumers and outside-collaborators.

In order to keep their communities, businesses need to make the case that they are contributing to positive social change. A global talent crunch is forcing corporations to compete over employees, and one of the biggest sells is providing jobs that have a meaningful social impact. Customers are increasingly making socially-informed purchases, and increased transparency is giving them more information to do so than ever before.

Naomi Klein and others saw the rise of socially-concerned brands like Starbucks, Apple, Nike, etc. as a corruption of progressive values. But what has been overlooked is the fact that, in creating these brands, these companies have handed over power from shareholders to consumers.

When Greenpeace launched its GreenMyApple campaign to get apple to become more environmentally friendly, they did not attack the company, but created a community of appreciative Apple customers who wanted the company to do a better job at espousing their values. And guess what, they won.

We are moving to an era where NGOs behave like corporations, social activists collaborate with the businesses they are trying to change, and companies get their value from their ability to attract collaborators by showing how much social good they are doing. The corporation will survive, but it will be controlled not by the owners of capital (shareholders), but by the community it serves.

YouTube plays the role of editor in the new program, selecting films from a pool of applicants. An interesting role for them to adopt, but one I am guessing they will abandon in due course by providing revenue sharing to all their content providers (or at least those who attain a sufficient audience).

Its interesting that this program is being rolled out with independent films and not mainstream TV and movies. I’m curious to know the reasons behind that. But what’s so crazy is that it means that its easier and cheaper (and more legal in many cases) for me to watch an independent movie from Norway (one of the films currently featured) than anything the major studios are creating. Could this be another nail in the coffin for the “established” content providers?

So what do you think? What does YouTube’s Screening Room signify in our evolving media environment?

Starting tonight, a designated representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox and channeled via Twitter. (Link)

The moderator will pose questions for the candidates’ reps to answer. The debate has no set end date.

Now, it would be way better if 1) the candidates themselves, not just their reps, were participating; 2) all topics, not just tech, were included; and 3) questions came from viewers, not just the moderator.

Still, isn’t this cool?

But does it deepen the political discussion by creating an ongoing, real-time, and open debate; or does it take the sound bite to the extreme by boxing candidates into 140-character maximums?

Thoughts?

There seems to be a growing popular perception that the Internet is ruining our attention spans. I disagree.

Have you ever found yourself on a plane with nothing to read but some horrible in-flight magazine? Do you actually finish the articles, or are you a skimmer? I’m a skimmer, but I don’t think that’s because I have a poor attention span.

Choosing not to finish reading something you have no interest in isn’t a sign of an attention deficit, it’s a sign of good time management.

In his article, “Is Google making us stupid?”, Nick Carr discusses a study of Internet research sites: “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.” From the study itself: “users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts.”

Hmm… So it’s a problem that researchers, who are searching through massive databases to find articles on a specific subject, are choosing to rule-out the relevance of certain articles based merely on their abstract? What are the abstracts for again? Oh, right!

Steven Johnson makes a convincing argument in his book, Everything Bad is Good for You, that our attention spans are increasing. As I pointed out in my post yesterday, YouTube videos from US presidential candidates tend to be more popular if they are longer.

The Internet has a lot of amazing content. But unfortunately, it has even more that wouldn’t make it into that in-flight magazine. It is part of human nature to skim and discard multiple pieces of content until we find something worth focusing our attention on. Today’s technology just allows us to do this on a much wider scale.

That’s a good thing.

It is no secret that Obama has blown his opponents out of the water on YouTube. 

• Seven of the videos on Obama’s official YouTube page have drawn more than a million views, with his speech on race pushing the 5 million mark. Not one Clinton video has made it to a million, and McCain’s most viewed clip has drawn less than half that.
•  The cumulative viewership of all the YouTube videos Obama has posted in the last three weeks is almost 2 million, while neither Clinton nor McCain has broken 400 thousand.

Is this because Obama just coincidentally happens to appeal to those young and wired voters who use a lot of YouTube? Partially, no doubt.But Obama is also using YouTube more effectively. Specifically, he is posting longer and more insightful videos.

Consider, for YouTube videos posted by the candidates over the last three weeks: 

•  The average length was 7 minutes.
•  Three of the four most-viewed Obama videos are over 20 minutes, and the fourth is 13 minutes long.
•  The only two Clinton videos that were longer than 20 minutes (all the others were less than four minutes) were in her top-three most viewed.
•  For all three candidates, on average, longer videos get more views:

Longer clips are preferable because, rather than regurgitate what is already on TV and in the papers, they provide us with greater insight and ability to scrutinize. It’s a myth that NetGeners don’t follow politics on TV. Its just that we know that watching CNN for 5 minutes isn’t much more informative than watching it all day. We go to YouTube for greater insight, to use that NetGen norm of scrutiny, and short clips consisting of ads and quick sound bytes don’t  provide that opportunity.It is interesting that, in the chart above, Obama and Clinton attract, on average, the same number of views for videos of the same length. That makes a lot of sense, because you would expect viewers to want to watch videos of all the candidates.Part of the scrutiny that NetGeners bring to following politics is a desire to be informed of all perspectives. At school, living in a house full of politics majors and Obama supporters, my housemates and I spent a lot of time watching his YouTube videos. The thing is, we always wanted to watch Clinton and McCain videos as well. But we could rarely find ones that were insightful. If they had done a better job at providing useful content, we probably would have watched their videos as much as those of our candidate.  I get the impression that Clinton and McCain both view YouTube as a way to engage with a younger, and in their minds less mature, audience. Instead, like Obama, they should see it as a way of bypassing the mindlessness of mainstream political coverage, and engaging in a higher level of civic dialogue. The first step is longer videos. (We’ll have to hope that Nick Carr, Mark Bauerlein, and other boomers will have the attention span )

Minneapolis-based PowerObjects Inc. was frustrated by the inefficiencies of collaborating by email with their development team in Pakistan. Rather than develop a wiki, or use a teleconferencing system, they built a robot.

Little more than a screen and camera mounted to wheels rolling around the US Office, “POGO is able to transmit video images and audio of those who interface through it on either side of the world. It can also be manoeuvred from Pakistan through the local IT office of PowerObjects to sit in on meetings among staff or with clients,” (says their press release).

What’s more, Jim Sheehan, PowerObjects COO, says that POGO was less expensive than the video conferencing system they were considering.

Click here for a video of POGO in action.

Once upon a time, computers were cut-off from each other. To interact with the data on a computer, you needed to be at the computer. By connecting all of those computers together, the Internet has largely made location irrelevant in our ability to interact with digital data. Yet the Internet has done little to allow us to interact with the “real world” remotely.

I think that that is starting to change. As I posted about earlier in the week, mobile devices are starting to evolve into remote data-collection tools. POGO is a remote action tool. And while it is certainly not the first example of one, the fact that it was created by and for the end user as an inexpensive and convenient solution to a problem that exists in businesses around the world makes me think that it is a sign of things to come. 

Rex Lee, who heads up the Collaboration Services group over at Bell Canada, has known and corresponded with nGenera’s Mike Dover for years. But they had never met in person until our Talent 2.0 conference last month. The experience of “finally” meeting someone you already know virtually, inspired Rex’s fascinating blog post: Social Media and The Speed of Trust.

Steve Hodson, who posts about tech and web 2.0 at his WinExtra.com blog, was a guest writer for Mashable yesterday. He argues that web 2.0 businesses are going to make money from donations, not advertisements.

Ditto, which says it aims to “do for opinion what Wikipedia did for facts,” has listed Wikinomics as one of the Rockstars of Web 2.0.

Andrew Dubber lists Wikinomics on his New Music Strategies blog as a website to read for aspiring musicians.

InterGovWorld reports on last week’s Lac Carling conference on web 2.0 and government that included Wikinomics co-author Anthony Williams.

The supporters who have responded to Hill-Dog’s call are almost unanimous: they will never vote for Obama, and they want her to “keep fighting.” Some are calling on her to keep campaigning until the convention. But the more popular opinion seems to be that she should run as an independent.

“Please run as an Independent… The democrats have not stood by you…Its the 18 million people that did.” -CKFL

“They have totally skrewed Hillary, lets get her on the ballot ourselves!!!We need each other not the DNC or Obama, I refuse to support him!” -bb in nola

Now these people may not represent the vast majority of Hillary’s supporters. And an independent run may be totally unrealistic (I have no idea). But they may be right about not needing the Democrats. The comment wall is already (in 12 hours) showing signs of turning into an organizational hub for an independent run. sarge02535 has posted a list of deadlines and signature requirements for getting on state ballots. Supporters are announcing that they have just made donations to the campaign.

In a web 2.0 world, what makes party loyalty so important? In fact, what makes even having a party so important?

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Another question is, when political campaigns are defined by web 2.0 and mass collaboration, what are the roles and responsibilities of leaders? Lets assume that Clinton’s goals are more or less in line with the Democrats, and that they have a better chance of winning if they unify around Obama. It is great to engage supporters in decision making. But the comments being made on Hillary’s website today are divisive. As a leader, isn’t it her role to unify Democrats, even if her supporters don’t want her to?

A recent report on mobile technology use by NGOs that Paul blogged about last week included an innovative example of how mobile sensing technology is revolutionizing data collection.

“According to [Eric]Paulos [of Intel Research, California], in many cases our knowledge of ambient air quality is limited to ‘a small handful of government installed environmental monitoring stations that use extrapolation to derive a single air quality measurement for an entire metropolitan region.’ He argues that this ‘sparse sensing strategy does little to capture the very dynamic variability of air quality that depends on automobile traffic patterns, human activity, and output of industries.’”

A pilot program in Accra, Ghana overcame many of these issues by equipping seven taxi cabs with mobile, GPS-equipped carbon monoxide detectors. The merged data created a detailed and dynamic map of air-quality data across the city. Not only is this information valuable for researchers and planners, the taxi-drivers themselves started using the information to avoid high-pollution areas on their routes.

According to the report, “Mobile sensing represents an important shift in mobile device usage from communication tool to a ‘networked mobile measurement instrument.’” They may be on to something.

The idea of using mobile technology to enhance data collection has been around for a while, most notably in areas such as personal health monitoring and inventory management. But these uses are only starting to take off, and there seem to be many more to come.

Here are a few other examples of mobile sensing at work:

• CarTel is a project by MIT researchers that uses mobile sensor devices embedded in cars to collect data on traffic congestion and optimize travel routes.  
• A project at the University of Cambridge has equipped bike couriers with carbon monoxide detectors hooked up to mobile phones to collect air-quality data for the Cambridge area.
• Nokia’s recently released Eco Sensor Concept is a phone that collects data on the environment, weather, and a user’s health. It would also allow users to share information, enabling mass data-mapping projects.
• The BBC recently reported on a test that equipped public busses in Berlin with sensors and cameras linked, using mobile technology, to traffic control centers. “The scientists believe the data could be used to give motorists automatic warnings of traffic jams, as well as helping control centres respond to dynamic conditions on roads.”

Highlights from the Orwellian document include:

• the creation of an international, copyright enforcement body with the power to force Internet service providers to hand over customer information without a court order
• empowering boarder patrol officers to, without a warrant, search data on any laptop, iPod, or cell phone

Even if IP theft was a major crisis, which it is not, these measures would constitute a gratuitous infringement on our freedom of privacy.

But more importantly, this is a destructive approach to dealing with today’s very real challenges to the traditional intellectual property model. Rather than encouraging innovation, these proposals would merely prop-up media companies too narrow-minded to adapt to new realities, while harming their customers.

It is true that these are just proposals. But what is also alarming is that ACTA is being negotiated in secret. Further, because its a treaty, the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office can adopt it without approval from Parliament. And Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice has refused to make any comments on the leaked document. This lack of openness and transparency illustrates a deep-seeded, and largely irrational, opposition to the principles of collaboration within our political institutions. I hope that Canadians, and those in other effected countries, demand better.

novhk (pronounced “invoke”) calls itself “The First Community-Managed Eco-Friendly Surf-Inspired Clothing Company.” The Los Angeles-based cooperative has been recruiting members since December and, with over 2800, is set to launch on June 5. For $50/year, members will help make major business decisions using a web-based community platform. 35% of profits will be distributed to members in the form of merchandise credit, with the rest being used for reinvestment and charitable donations.

It is unclear how involved members will actually be. Merchandise credit is not as enticing as cash. And, there is no incentive scheme to reward those who contribute more to the business.  Still, this is a fascinating business model that combines principles of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and social responsibility. Could it be a model for the future? 

Highlighting some of the places that Wikinomics is appearing in the blogosphere.

The Connected Republic has announced a wiki discussion of Government 2.0, using seven principles that they have developed as a starting point.   

The Cambrian House Idea’s Section has a post by DaveH who is looking for help on his new open source loom project. 

Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal discusses our Government 2.0 Project.  

The South African Business Report writes about Cape Town University’s application of Wikinomics principles. 

Blogger Carl Dowse has posted an old video clip of Don speaking on BBC Newsnight.  

Blogger John Pana talks about the pre-internet use of Wikinomics principles by Richardo Semler when he revolutionized Semco.

Charlie Huenermann, from Utah State University, questions the motivations of participants on open source projects.  

RISMedia puts Wikinomics on their list of top 25 books corporate America is reading.  

Emma Wallace, Director of Social 8, a management consultancy specializing in Enterprise 2.0, recommends Wikinomics as a tool to convince the uninitiated of the benefits of mass collaboration.