Some time ago internet memes were confined mostly to the periphery of the Internet, but some made it into the mainstream–think LOLCats and RickRolling. These two and their fore-bearers originally spread on message boards, forums, and irc channels; parts of the internet that weren’t especially welcoming to casual users. But the face of the internet has changed: it’s now easier to use and more people are on it. And it’s more social. Lots has been written about how it’s easier for messages to go viral on social networking sites like facebook because people have a built-in friends list, and their peers are likely to be more receptive to a message that comes from a friend.

Lately on facebook these mainstream internet memes really seem to be taking off. A few weeks ago women everywhere were posting status updates that were only one word long: a color that corresponded to that of their bra. This was allegedly to raise awareness about breast cancer, though it’s equally plausible that the idea was simply to “confuse boys.” Shortly thereafter, “doppelganger week” began, and people started changing their facebook pictures to photos of celebrities that they vaguely (or wishfully) resembled. Next was the “post the urbandictionary definition of your name. Finally, and most recently, has been a political meme going around seeing if an onion ring can amass more facebook fans than Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper (and boy can it ever).

These four memes have taken over my facebook newsfeed, and likely those of just about everyone else who shares more than a few friends with me. Viral marketers would love to get this kind of reach, but doing so largely remains a dream. So why not change the rules of the game a bit?

Urbandictionary is clearly benefiting a great deal from being the center of attention in this way, but what’s to stop other companies from joining-in on the trend and showing that they “get it”? Various breast cancer societies could have easily hopped on the bra-color bandwagon. New York Fries or Pizza Pizza (the only places I can think of off the top of my head that serve onion rings) could roll out a “Prime Minister Onion Meal,” and any number of celebrity gossip magazines could use the doppelganger meme to great effect.

After all, if these trends simply “happen,” then there’s no intellectual property concerns to worry about, the message already exists and is popular (making it a proven commodity), and it shows people who already feel like they’re a part of something that the marketer/company is also in the know. Macy’s tried this by hiring Rick Astley to sing “Never gonna give you up” in 2008’s Macy’s day parade, but I think the best has yet to come in terms of marketers latching on to, and reflecting back, the spontaneous culture of the internet.

For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Read the full essay here.

6. The world needs better governments.

Some governments in Central America and Africa are just holding on and many are dysfunctional.  But governability is becoming an issue for G20 countries as well.  One leader said the US is on the brink of being “ungovernable.”  One Chinese executive responded thusly when asked to defend his country’s lack of democracy:  “So we should adopt the American system where lobbyists run everything and nothing happens?”

Democracy was still seen as an unstoppable force but in many regions of the world it is becoming stalled, and in some cases losing ground.  Basic democratic institutions are at risk and in danger of failing part due to the economic crisis in poor countries.  The best predictor of democratic survival is per capita income.  In some countries portions of the government have been captured by interest groups. Other non-democratic countries are proving competitively stable and economically healthy.  And the current economic crisis shows that national governments and domestic regulation are inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global economy.   There is also danger of protectionism and isolationism.

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

The much-discredited phrase from the dotcom period is not just geek speak.  The Internet and Social Networks were central to many of the discussions here.  The digital age seems to be coming of age.  I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. It got a lot of buzz at Davos.  A few minutes into it the session we solicited questions from Facebook.  6,000 questions appeared in first 2 minutes.

The growing consensus is that new business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society.  I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging – changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles.

Most leaders love that a web company – Google –  is taking on China. The circumstantial evidence that the China-based hacking of Google was conducted by authorities looking for information about activists was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Talking to Google execs I’m convinced they not going to back down.

8. Girls, women and gender. A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women’s emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse.  The expected worldwide increase of women’s income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China’s expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest in the so-called Girl Effect, i.e., investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world.  In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men.  But every year of schooling increases a girl’s future earnings by 20 percent.  And by earning more and influencing how dollars are spent, women would acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically.  Countries should be more aggressive in finding female candidates for public office, and look outside the regular channels. But increased financial and political power brings responsibility. Woman could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9.  We need new measures of progress

There is growing agreement that GDPs and GNPs are flawed tools for measuring the health of country, and we should instead emphasize the idea of Gross National Well-Being or something similar.  Just as some companies have moved to “triple-bottom line” reporting for their impact on society, many economists argue that GDPs and GNPs measure activities that are detrimental to society and ignore activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic will increase drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP.  Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP.

There is no lack of research and creativity on this issue, as some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthily a country is growing.  The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and encourage their widespread adoption.

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

Like a park in a village we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations – especially intellectual property – through patents, copyright and trademarks. If someone infringes your IP, summon the lawyers out to do battle.  That’s often the wrong approach.  Contributing to “the commons” is not altruism; it’s the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example is when more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling.  Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology – breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders. Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people have such great potential. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us if we don’t want to pass on a deeply damaged planet to our children.  At the final session at Davos, we heard from six inspiring young people on stage on their hopes and ambitions.  There were more than a few tears in the audience.

1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able. Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle. In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed. The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy. The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom. Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change. We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways. They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well: “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better. US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos. Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock. This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4. Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected. The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis. Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs. To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin. But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance. Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use. CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

When I originally started looking State of the Union addresses, I simply found transcripts online and did a manual count of words in text documents. This was laborious, but provided some interesting findings (note sites like Speech Wars can now automate this process). Last January I highlighted Wordle and used tag clouds to create a visualization of State of the Union addresses from notable past Presidents. This year, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching sentiment analysis, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that vendor Crimson Hexagon and CNN had teamed up to analyze public sentiment towards the 2010 State of the Union in real-time. Check out the video after the jump.

The impact of the new technology was not lost on the news media. The Huffington Post picked up the story and reported that, “The moment that ends up being most pivotal in changing the way the media covers big, live events may well have happened on CNN, where John King used the ‘Magic Wall’ to analyze almost 150,000 Twitter responses to President Obama’s speech.” In the article, CNN’s Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, David Bohrman is quoted as saying, “Twitter is all noise, but to be able to harness it and group it and actually intelligently cluster it and derive moods and opinions from it is very interesting.”

Whatever you might think of Twitter (Jon Stewart used the Magic Wall as an opportunity to make fun of both CNN and Twitter), this is exactly the type of technology companies are starting to think about for managing their brands, conduct market research, and pre-emptively deal with customer issues. The next level of granularity that sentiment analysis vendors are starting to offer is the ability to go beyond positive and negative sentiment to look at why sentiment is the way it is. Why are people pro-Obama? What types of issues are most often related to “Obama is too liberal?” This type of analysis is available, and I’ve seen demos from some vendors that offer fairly sophisticated drill-downs. However, some people remain sceptical about the general accuracy of this capability, as well as the limitations of most systems to crunch this type of data in real-time. Maybe we’ll see this for next year’s State of the Union—I’m hoping so.

The group’s approach starts with facilitating partnerships and maintaining “a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs.” Included in its professionals’ network are developers, specialists, communicators, first responders, and project managers, but also “people who just want to help.” Everyone who volunteers usually gets to work on projects that align with their specific talents and interests, but, when dozens of people gathered in Boston on January 23 for a CrisisCamp event for Haiti, a group who intended to create software to identify Twitter messages sent from Haitian refugees did not have all the right programming tools and dived in to work on a non-technical task.

At CrisisCamps, people brainstorm and develop ideas. Special camps tend to address an individual event or create problem-specific tools. CrisisCamps often happen in several locations at once; camps for Haiti, for example, happened on January 30 in New York, Chicago, Montreal, Washington, DC, London, Toronto, and Mountain View, CA, and are scheduled for February 6 in Ottowa, Calgary, London, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City.

Because the next crisis is around the corner, at so-called Hack-a-Thon events, Crisis Commons volunteers prepare for future critical needs by developing new tools. The group’s web site explains: “We’re about responding to specific requests and needs. But we’re also about supporting just good ideas. Before a CrisisCamp, organizers reach out to responder organizations – governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others – seeking requests for technological supports. We organize into teams to support those requests. But we also develop around things that are just good ideas.” All tools are open-source.

The group has a blog for updates on camp activities and outcomes and uses a wiki (http://wiki.Crisis Commons.org/wiki/Main_Page) for project and volunteer coordination. Anyone who wants to organize a CrisisCamp starts by by filling out a form with basic personal information, background information about skills and interests, and the purpose of the camp. Crisis Commons sets a limit of just one camp per city per day to ensure all local resources are located in one place for maximum impact.

Some of the projects already completed include:

• GPS maps of Haiti, along with instructions for downloading the maps into a Garmin navigators. The maps are available at OpenStreetMap.org. Haiti Crisis Map (http://haiticrisismap.org/) includes multiple overlays that show, for example, destroyed buildings and refugee camps and satellite images from multiple sources that is used for tracing in Open Street Map.
• A Haitian Creole-to-English translator for the iPhone
• An alpha version of We Have We Need Exchange (http://wehaveweneed.org), a site for relief organizations to post immediate needs so donors can respond quickly. Categories of need include food, fuel, medical, shelter, telecom, transport, volunteers, and other.

The impact of Crisis Commons’ CrisisCamp events on participants can be profound. Co-founder of Crisis Commons, Noel Dickover described the work he’s doing in the Haiti camps as “more important than anything I’ve ever done in my life.” Thom Goodsell, a software developer at Humedica Inc. in Boston, who participated in the Boston CrisisCamp on January 23, explains the value of Crisis Commons this way: “No one here is going to save a life directly. What we are going to do is build infrastructure to help them do their jobs better.”

Crisis Commons benefits from the desire of people to help in concrete ways in events where they cannot participate on the ground. Social network technology makes it possible to assemble people with and without technical skills to make real differences in virtual ways. Crisis Commons is an example of the potential for good that’s often overlooked or invisible on a day-to-day basis when people think about social media and the Internet, which are often derided as trivial and time-wasters.

With the conspicuous exception of global warming, Harper acknowledged that many challenges face the world, but told delegates that the two most appropriate arenas for discussion and decision making are the G8 and the G20.  He described the latter as “the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation.” And each country should be guided by “enlightened self-interest” and a better “attitude.”

But the mood in Davos is that the planet is facing urgent, complicated, 21^st century problems, and we need to craft 21^st century systems to develop the answers. We should involve all of our planet’s best talent in the solution-seeking process, including the private sector, civil society and individual citizens.

Doubtless Harper placed emphasis on the G8 and G20 because this year’s meetings will occur in Canada and he is the Chair. But that doesn’t mean he should be indifferent to the enormous contributions that could be made by others, or closed to the exciting new approaches to solving global problems.

Following last year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, many delegates went on to participate in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative in meetings around the world. The Initiative brought together diverse stakeholders to develop fresh solutions to the many challenges facing our small and fragile planet.  Much of this year’s Forum was devoted to discussing the proposals developed by the Initiative.

The Initiative itself was driven by the belief of Forum members that our international collaborative processes are tired and too constrained to meet current needs.  In Davos, the failed Copenhagen global-warming conference was frequently cited by delegates as a metaphor for the inadequacy of existing processes. To be sure, no one is suggesting that nation states do not need to sit down and hammer out accords. But many Davos delegates believe that such meetings, while necessary, are by themselves insufficient to grapple with the thorny issues confronting us.

Davos delegates feel all issues on the global agenda should be addressed in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and are frustrated many government leaders aren’t embracing this view.

Had Harper come a day earlier, he would have heard French President Nicolas Sarkozy deliver a withering critique of how the planet’s issues are managed today. “From the moment we accepted the idea that the market was always right and that no other opposing factors need be taken into account, globalization skidded out of control,” Sarkozy said. Many systems in the world, including capitalism, were in serious need of reform.  “Each of us must hold the conviction that the world of tomorrow cannot be the same as the world of yesterday.”  A text of Sarkozy’s remarks can be seen here.

While Harper promotes the notion of enlightened self-interest, that got us nowhere in Copenhagen.  . And the irony of Harper’s remarks is that many here think one country with needing a better “attitude” on climate change is Canada. And it is an uphill battle for Canada to turn around its reputation as “the dirty old man of the climate world.”

In fact Harper further damaged Canada’s reputation on this issue, and undermined his approach to global cooperation in a panel discussion after his speech. When questioned about Canada’s position he said that countries needed to take into account the economic costs of being green.  To be sure Canada, as an energy producer has more complex issues than European countries. But some in the audience were disturbed by the remark.

Liberal MP Scott Brison said to me that Prime Minister Harper was “the only leader at Davos who didn’t understand the opportunities for economic growth and jobs in becoming a green nation. Environmental laggards will become economic laggards in the emerging global carbon-constrained green economy.”

Yes the G8 and G20 meetings will be important and they may even make some progress on climate change.  But today there are collaborations involving millions of people, along with governments, private companies and civil society organizations that are actually doing something about climate change. Government leaders need to listen to fresh thinking about how to harness this power, rather than relying on old approaches that have the world stalled.

In other words, the company takes a mixture of structured and unstructured data (including 150,000 + stories a day), applies an algorithm to it, and comes up with a single score that ranks the potential of each start-up they look at (40,000 and counting).

I have no clue how good it actually is right now (if anyone could let me know that would be great), but at minimum I think it’s a very cool idea. And I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that such an approach could be applied within a big enterprise to assess the potential of various ongoing projects.

Think about it: companies have (or should have) far more structured data about their own employees than YouNoodle has on start-ups; the unstructured data on the web is open to them as well. Now imagine if a company was using all the collaborative platform tools that are potentially at their disposal in order to know what people are working on, have worked on, how they’re connected together, etc. Might there be a way to take all of that information, and use it to come up with a per-project “YouNoodle Score”? And if there was, could you imagine how valuable that might be?

The venue was a conscripted hairdressing salon that was pressed into service by the Forum as a meeting space.  We were like sardines. But the energy in the tiny room was high.

To recap: The Xchange is a Web-based marketplace where companies can collaborate and share intellectual property which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Ten organizations have already signed on. The Xchange is the first step in a journey towards more sustainable innovation, and the more companies that get on board, the faster we’ll all make progress.  More info can be found here. http://greenxchange.force.com/

In Wikinomics my co-author Anthony Williams and I argued that we’re living in a world where new approaches to collaboration enable new business models that enable companies to create better value for consumers.  We said companies need a portfolio of intellectual property – some that they own and protect, some that they licence and some that they share.  The Green Exchange is all about achieving that.

Nike began the announcement with a cool video that made it clear that sustainability is not an obligation, it’s an opportunity.  Companies can choose to be ahead of the curve or behind the times.  The goal is to create an innovation community.  No one is “giving away” their intellectual property; the exchange includes a licensing protocol.

“Nike is today committing to placing more than 400 of our patents on GX for research, demonstrating our belief that the best way to stimulate sustainable innovation is through open innovation,” said Mark Parker, Nike president and CEO. “Our hope is this will unleash new innovation to help solve current obstacles to sustainability issues.”

Example: Possible cross-industry benefits of making available Nike’s Environmentally Preferred Rubber. Used in Nike footwear the rubber contains 96 percent fewer toxins than the original formulation. By licensing the technology on GX it could be used in other company’s footwear, or it could hypothetically be used by Mountain Equipment Co-op for bicycle inner tubes. In this way Mountain Equipment Co-op could bring a greener product to market more quickly and cheaply than it could on its own.

Parker explained that initially the company’s lawyers opposed the Xchange.  They felt intellectual property was always meant to be kept under wraps and guarded.  But they’ve all come around to see the value of the Xchange, not only to the environment, but also bring competitive advantage to the company.  When Nike’s patents are put into the commons, any improvements made to the patents will be available to Nike.

Parker said universities are a great source of intellectual property. What is needed – and what the Xchange provides – is a standard protocol whereby IP can bust out from the university and be helpful more broadly to business and society.

John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, said “There is so much duplication of effort and wasted resources when it comes to sustainability. We need to make it easier for individuals, companies, academia, and researchers to collaborate and share best practices.”

This idea of a patent commons came up at another session.  Currently the planet has many commons like the ocean, air and space.  Much of the Web is in the commons. It’s time we added an additional area:  know-how related to sustainability.

A little place on the Internet celebrating creativity and the everyday moments of inspiration that LEGO® enthusiasts call “CL!CK.” Come to inspire and be inspired.

The community is tightly tied to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, providing tags (#legoclick and legoclick) so that users can take ownership of their new ideas and post those ideas out to the world. The Cl!ck community highlights individual’s random posts on its site, so as I went back and forth to the site I actually saw updated Tweets and posts about what people were thinking about and doing with Cl!ck. Marketers at Lego also did a fantastic job putting together a video to introduce the concept. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s well done and very engaging.

We should not be surprised at Lego’s recent step into more collaboration with customers, especially since they’ve been working on it since the early days of their Mindstorms project. Lego Mindstorms, originally released in 1998, developed programmable bricks, electric sensors, and motors so that Lego enthusiasts and other inventors could create robots or whatever they wanted. At the time Lego was still targeting only kids with Mindstorms, but this initiative revealed how much of an adult following they had. In 2005,  Don Tapscott commented in an Optimize Magazine article(now Information Week):

Within three weeks of their release, user groups had sprung up, and tinkerers had reverse-engineered and reprogrammed the sensors, motors, and controller devices at the heart of the Mindstorms robotic system—and sent their suggestions to Lego. The company, at first uncertain about how to respond, threatened to launch lawsuits. When users rebelled, however, Lego finally came around and eventually created a Web site where customers can co-create products. Now each time a customer develops and posts an application for Mindstorms, the toys become more valuable.

Even years ago Lego recognized how important collaborative customer relationships were to the growth of the brand and the company. Lego’s CL!CK community is clearly an extension of its ongoing collaboration with its customers.

In conjunction with the CL!CK  announcement, Lego also release a free iPhone app that allows users to take any image and convert it to a mosaic Lego image. It’s easy to use and downloadable at legoclick.com or  iTunes.

While the iPhone app seems fun and is an interesting way to keep your brand in front of consumers, the CL!CK community could actually produce new innovations, benefiting both Lego and those inventors who generate new ideas. The launch and campaign around the site has been impressive so far. I look forward to seeing CL!CK success stories and possibly new social product development processes emerge from this as well.

Christopher White, a University of Alberta graduate student, responded to the prorogation by forming a facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament (CAPP). People joined in droves. To date, the group is almost 220,000 users strong, and there was hardly a single time I logged into facebook for a period of 2-3 weeks when I didn’t see that at least 4-5 more of my friends had joined the group. I thought then, as I did before, that this was just armchair democracy, and no one really cared about the issue with more energy than it would take to click a link, and people on both sides of the issue agreed that that was a very likely assessment. When facebook invites started going out asking Canadians to rally in their prospective cities on January 23rd to protest, I was skeptical that turnout would exceed more than a few hundred in any one place.

Boy was I wrong.

On Saturday I went downtown to take a look at the protest, and snuck onto a nearby patio to get a view of the turnout.

(Click for full)

By my estimate, there were some 3200 people in Toronto’s Dundas square, not all of them were there to learn about the Gumwich. Whether or not the protests will make a difference in the long run remains to be seen, as we’re still pretty far from an election, and it’s entirely possible that only a few of the attendees voted for our current ruling party. But this clearly puts to rest the idea that civic engagement online begins and ends with clicking a button to join a link.

I’m glad I was wrong, and I’m glad that I was around to witness this social media-organized peaceful assembly for political action.

A couple of years ago the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, launched, to say the least, a rather bold undertaking to use the Internet to turn Davos into a 365-day experience.  Not unthinkable I say.  After all hundreds of millions of people collaborate on social networks, wikis, blogs and brainstorms to do everything from making friends to creating encyclopedias, writing disruptive software projects and helping a devastated Caribbean island recover from a horrific earthquake.  So why couldn’t such tools be used to fix what’s wrong with the world on a year round basis?

Call it a Digital Davos.

But WELCOM (stands for World Electronic Community) got off to a slow start.

There were numerous technical challenges in getting the right companies assembled to  do the work: there was no integration between WELCOM and the system of information kiosks at that Davos attendees use to sign up for sessions and communicate with each other;  the project was viewed by some as elitist – restricted to the few thousand world leaders that might attend Davos; and there were enormous challenges getting CEOs, politicians and leaders of the civil society to actually use the platform and change their behavior to solve problems on networks.

But it looks like this year these issues have been addressed and WELCOM might actually be ready for prime time.

To begin, the technology is now first rate.  After a false start, WELCOM now has a group of partners, companies like Accenture (ACN), Adobe Systems (ADBE), BT Group (BT) and TIBCO that are putting some real muscle into the work, primarily on a pro bono basis.  The platform has good basic functionality and The Forum has a good team figuring out how the system should evolve and improve.  It’s not just another Facebook. Users can videoconference, exchange documents and video and audio files, store material online, co-edit documents, brainstorm and more.

Second, Accenture has fully integrated WELCOM and the onsite Kiosks, so you can sign up for sessions from laptop or Blackberry, reducing the Kiosk lineups.  There is a wealth of material online about the topic being discussed and the delegates in attendance.

Third, one charge frequently made against the Forum is that it is elitist, but the Forum has made great strides in making its work and proceeding open to the public. Linked to WELCOM is a Social Media Outreach designed to engage the broader world.  For example, one of the sessions I’m helping to lead deals with social networks.

But check out the description and the twist:

The World Economic Forum will explore the growing influence of social networks in a workshop at the start of the Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos. The discussion is moderated by Loïc Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic and will include, among others Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning, George Colony, CEO, Forrester Research, Don Tapscott, NGenera, Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn, Owen Van Natta CEO, MySpace.com and Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter.

Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. We want to hear from you:

1.   “How are social networks changing society?” 2.   “What are the most important implications and risks for society?” 3.   “What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?”

 You can join the discussion on a number of social networks and platforms.

1) Leave a comment on the Forum blog

2) Become a Fan of the Forum on Facebook

3) Join the Forum group on LinkedIn

4) Befriend the Forum on MySpace

5) Join the Forum network on Ning

6) Reply to @Davos on Twitter

7) Record and upload a video on YouTube

With initiatives like this, the 2010 meeting promises to be the most broadly inclusive ever.

Finally, The Forum has a sophisticated user engagement plan. Rather than trying to convince Barack Obama to be on WELCOM chatting up a storm with Nicolas Sarkozy and Ban Ki-moon they are beginning with the participants most likely to use networks to solve problems.  First up are wonks like me – members of the  Global Agenda Council’s that I wrote about in my last post.  This includes constituencies such as academics, scientists, journalists and other who love to discuss and communicate ideas.

They also appear to be focusing on young people who are more likely to turn to networks to collaborate.  In 2005 the Forum has established the community of Young Global Leaders, consisting of hundreds of leaders under the age of 40 from around the world and myriad occupations and sectors.   These young adults are recognized for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.  With many of them being part of the Net Generation, they understandably will fully exploit the tremendous potential a system such as WELCOM has to offer.

The Kiosk integration is also a nifty way of drawing attendees into WELCOM.  Everyone at Davos needs the Kiosks to sign up for activities and communicate.  Now they need WELCOM.

I’ve been using WELCOM for the past year and it’s a solid step forward.  But the Forum is still in the early days of curating the behavioral changes needed for the collaboration at Davos to be extended all year long.

But enough of this, I’ve got to get signing up for some sessions.

Music to my ears.  Evidence is mounting that the world and many of its institutions are stalled and need reinvention — from the financial system, the old model of government, the media, our energy and transportation systems, our cities, the university, science and even democracy. Needless to say, transforming these is a daunting challenge that will require the efforts of many parts of society.

“Global multi-stakeholder cooperation lies at the heart of the Forum’s mission to improve the state of the world,” says Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum. “We have to rethink our values – we are living together in a global society with many different cultures. We have to redesign our processes – how do we deal with the issues and challenges on the global agenda. And finally, we have to rebuild our institutions.”

Most significantly, our systems for global problem solving are broken. Says Professor Schwab: “We have to look at the Forum meeting in the context of what’s happening in the world … and we see that, clearly, the present system of global cooperation is not working sufficiently. So we want to look at all issues on the global agenda in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and we want to address in particular the issue of global cooperation.”

While the Davos event is often misrepresented as a meeting of the business and political elite, this year’s 2,500 attendees will again include a broad cross-section of society, with representatives from business, government, the media, science, religion, the arts and civil society.

Nearly half of participants come from outside business, including more than 30 heads of state or government, at least double that number of government ministers, over 100 heads or top officials from international organizations and NGOs, over 200 leading academics, and more than 200 media leaders.  There will be over 30 social entrepreneurs present, and there will be almost as many labor leaders as central bankers participating, with over a dozen representatives from each category.

Like me, many attendees will have participated in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative, which began following the 2009 Forum. The Initiative is a multi-stakeholder dialogue addressing many of the challenges confronting our world today. Over the last year we have been developing recommendations to help adapt and improve the structures and systems of international cooperation.

Now, I appreciate that such an initiative sounds grandiose. Is it delusional for the Forum to try and pull off such an ambitious undertaking?  My response: If not the World Economic Forum, then who?

To achieve new models for global problem solving we have to overcome a major obstacle: The world is organized around nation states based on national economies and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The idea of national sovereignty dates back hundreds of years with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. After World War II there were many bold initiatives to create better systems of global cooperation, including Breton Woods, The United Nations, The General Agreement of Trades and Tariffs (GAAT), The Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later the World Trade Organization and now the G8 and G20.

But, as evidenced by last month’s UN Climate Change Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, the existing structures are increasingly inept at fixing what ails the world. Contrast the Copenhagen failure to the growing global networks and movement of millions of people motivated to turn back warming.  Evidence that the solution to global problems is not to create some global government.  Rather there are new possibilities on the digital age to create networks involving business, government and civil society.  The Forum is a case in point — a global collaboration that is actually making the real progress in solving global problems on many fronts.  I for one am in!

Some might say this is all just talk and no action.  Wrong there too.  At the 2009 meeting, I participated with Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, in presenting an idea called the GreenXchange (GX) project to a group of about 80 CEOs of large companies. Over the last year several other companies have been working to incubate this idea and this year at Davos it will be formally launched. My company, nGenera, is supplying the GX’s technology platform pro bono, because we think this idea is so important.

The GreenXchange is a clearinghouse for unpatented innovations (“know-how”), patent pledges, and patent licenses related to sustainability. Companies participating in the GX will be able to make both patented and unpatented “know-how” available for research uses and commercialization on standard and transparent terms and conditions.

Nike conceived the GX because there is too much duplication of effort in sustainability, and collaboration on shared challenges is a proven way to reduce costs and increase innovation. Companies face very similar sets of sustainability challenges — how to reduce resource consumption and achieve greater efficiency — but without the ability to share learning and best practices in response to those challenges, good solutions fail to take hold or make a broader impact. The GX was created to address this problem by making it easy to enable sharing and promotion of industry best practices leading to sustainability, while making sure that credit is given where it is due. The GX will also help reduce some of the barriers separating innovators from entrepreneurs in the sustainability space.

In the short term, the GX will make it easier for companies and individuals to identify, share, and obtain licenses to available technologies. The GX will enable rapid identification of commonalities in technology across industries and in turn identify gaps in available technology. In the long term, the GX will create a clearinghouse of public license offers for entrepreneurial development, innovation, and technology adoption. This is the sort of creativity the Global Redesign Initiative is designed to promote.

Contributing to the brainpower of the Global Redesign Initiative is the Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils – over 1,000 experts representing more than 50 thematic areas of international cooperation (e.g. Water Security, Pandemics, Migration). Approximately 3,000 participants drawn from the Forum’s industry, governmental, civil society, academic and media communities provided input.  They were selected as the most innovative and relevant thinkers to capture the best knowledge on each key issue and integrate it into global collaboration and decision-making processes.

I have spoken to many other members of the Councils over the last year.  Most of us were impressed at the high-caliber and sincerity of the discussions.  Our job at Davos will be to not only challenge prevailing assumptions, monitor trends, map interrelationships and address knowledge gaps, but to propose solutions, devise strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of actions.

I’ll be blogging and tweeting throughout to let you know how it’s going.  Stay tuned.

Last month my colleague Laura Carrillo asked if it will be Apple or Google to own the third screen. Recent events have provided an opportunity for a third contender in the quest for the third screen: Microsoft.

Tentative talks have been underway for weeks now between rivals Microsoft and Apple to replace Google with Bing as the default search engine on all iPhones.  The last time something like this happened it was Microsoft allowing iTunes on the Windows platform in 2003.

“If you have to do deal with the devil,” says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, “you might as well deal with the one that needs you the most.”

From Apple’s ban of Google’s apps on its store to the departure of Eric Schmidt from Apple’s Board of Directors last August, it has been increasingly apparent that over the past couple of years that tensions in the relationship between Apple and Google have been emerging.  Finally on January 5, 2010, Google unveiled its phone, the Nexus One, and officially entered the mobile hardware market. On that very same day, Apple acquired Quattro Wireless (Apple’s second choice after Google outbid them to acquire AdMob in fall of 2009), and entered Google’s sphere of advertising. It’s now officially war.

All of this time, Microsoft has assumed the archetype of the forgotten middle child; exactly where it wants to be. With dwindling market share of its mobile OS, why would anyone expect the company to announce its entry into the mobile device market? Microsoft has also repeatedly denied any intention of entering this market, much like Apple did before it released the iPhone.

Back in 2006, Microsoft launched the Zune as an alternate and competing product to the iPod, albeit five years later. It has never come even close to touching Apple’s share in the portable media player market. In 2009, Microsoft only had an estimated 2% as compared to Apple’s 70%. With a five-year competitive advantage and Microsoft’s lack of experience in hardware, this came as no surprise to many. Windows Mobile OS also trails in market share behind Nokia, Apple, and RIM. Q3 2009 reports tell it only has roughly 8% of the global share.

Could Microsoft gain ground in these areas with a phone?

Back in 2008, Microsoft purchased Danger, the producers of the Sidekick for $500 million and subsequently formed the Microsoft Premium Mobile eXperiences (PMX) group. Mary Jo Foley also writes of the Pink Project, the codename for both the set of premium mobile services and one or more Windows Mobile phones aimed at the teen/twenty-something market.

In Q3 of last year, Microsoft launched the Zune marketplace (U.S. and Puerto Rico only) and announced in December the decision to form a new organization within the Server & Tools Business that combines the Windows Server & Solutions group and the Windows Azure group, into a single organization called the Server & Cloud Division (SCD).

Over at Engadget back in April of last year, Nilay Patel rumored that Microsoft was getting ready to launch Zune software on telephone handsets and those rumblings are still going on today.

Robbie Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices at MS, has even gone on record saying, “There are other places where Zune logically could go that we don’t get to talk about yet.” Interview transcript here.

It sounds like Microsoft has been steadily working on putting all of the pieces together.

The Microsoft user experience has come a long way. On the software side, Windows 7 OS has been touted as being even better than Snow Leopard; a far cry from Vista, which was only release worldwide three years ago. I will also personally attest to the quality of MS Surface, its tablet device, since I had the pleasure of testing it out myself at IDS10 this past weekend. Microsoft has definitely stepped up its game in the field of interaction design.

With Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft could still be a serious contender in the battle for the platform and ultimate user experience. It has almost every piece of the puzzle: an operating system, mobile hardware (potentially) to load it onto, a search engine (with an opportunity to cut Google off of an information source and subsequent revenue stream), and the marketplace to integrate everything together (even with Xbox Live).

Could it be a step towards a seamless and integrated complete user experience? Here’s hoping we’ll find out more about WinMo7 at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, beginning on February 15^th.

IMHO, I will make one recommendation to the folks at Microsoft. For Microsoft to acquire anything beyond a specialty niche in the mobile computing device market, it is going to require a concerted effort. With an ecosystem of 100,000 applications, and with over two-and-a-half years with a product already on the market, Apple has a big lead. There is a lot of ground to cover in the smartphone market. The Zune trailed the iPod by five years. Don’t let another five go by.

Unlike information taxonomies that catalogue data or data security protocols that either allow access or deny it, context is dynamic; it changes. Advertisers have been thinking about this for many years. An ad for Bud Light Lime might not be all that relevant in the commuter newspaper, but it makes perfect sense behind a urinal in the men’s room of the pub, or on a billboard in cottage country. But that’s still a very 1.0 view of context. What’s missing is the granularity that takes this type of generic contextualizing (e.g. if you’re at the bathroom in a pub, you’ve probably been drinking beer; maybe you’ll like our beer) to a personalized one (e.g. we know you only drink at the pub after work, not during lunch, so at lunch we’ll offer an ad for coffee; after work, we know you’re favourite drink is gin and tonic, not beer, so we’ll suggest a new premium brand of gin).

While advertisers are leading the way, for most enterprises, this type of granular ‘what you need, when you need it’ approach to information is still far from reality. The good news is that the tools to sense and record context—rich user profiles, presence awareness, geolocation data, status updates, and lifestreaming information—are exploding all around us. You might think of much of this as information exhaust—the incidental, or ambient data that is created as a by-product of simply carrying on with our daily lives.

The anthropological view (circa 2007) of ‘exhaust data’ is that it has little information content, but lots of emotional and social content that contributes to identity, intimacy between individuals, and a deeper cultural understanding. However, as tireless machines work 24/7/365 to mine this exhaust data, the information content becomes apparent as well. The data will reveal important trends about individuals and their preferences, thus enabling context-aware machines to sense our needs and respond. What this means for enterprises is greater employee productivity as users spend less time looking for and filtering information, and better customer experiences as contextual information leads to greater customer intimacy and personalization. As Edo Segal notes on TechCrunch:

“These are streams of information bubbling up in realtime, which seek us out, surround us, and inform us. They are like a fireplace bathing us in ambient infoheat. I believe that users will not go to a page and type in a search in a search box. Rather the information will appear to them in an ambient way on a range of devices and through different experiences. [...] Humanity is constructing its own synthetic sixth sense. An ambient sense that perceives the context of your activity and augments your reality with related information and experiences. Increasingly, we will be sensing the world with this sixth sense and that will change the way we collectively experience the world.”

Indeed, Gartner believes context-aware computing will provide significant competitive advantage. I agree. The firm predicts that “By 2012, the typical Global 2000 company will be managing between two and 10 business relationships with context providers.” Technologists, enterprises, and academics are beginning to understand the importance of context and we’re starting to see products and services that reflect this. Consider the following examples:

• MIThril at MIT Media Lab is working on wearable computers that gather contextual information and provide feedback; projects include the Real-Time Context Engine and the Context Aware Cell Phone Project.
• Also from MIT, SixthSense by Pranav Mistry provides the “synthetic sixth sense” alluded to by Segal. This is some of the coolest technology I’ve seen in a while. For a demo, check out the TED Talk video below:

• Cisco Context-Aware Software is a mobile solution that integrates contextual information (including location, temperature, and availability of an asset) with business process applications.
  
• Marcopolo for MAC OS is an open-source, early example of context aware computing that triggers actions based on changes in location or activity.
• Research In Motion (RIM) appears to be pursuing context-aware security for the Blackberry. The company was granted a patent in August of 2009 for a mobile device that can change security settings based on its environment.
• Earthmine uses 3-D mapping to tag the physical world. Imagine having Terminator vision, but displayed on your iPhone. Tags, such as the ones shown in the picture below, could be customized to reflect any context.

 Feel free to share any other context-aware examples you know of.

“Or tell that girl in the car next to you that you think she’s hot?” Sure, but I was 20.

“Tell that guy his brake lights are out or the owner of the parked car that he sucks for taking up two spots?” Yup.

Now I can do all these things in public, with CarPong, “a social network that lets you send messages to other drivers.” Members post messages about other drivers on the Carpong site, using the other driver’s license plate to identify whom they are talking about. If the other driver is following their license plate on Carpong, he or she will receive an email alerting him of comments. Members and non-members can also see what other people are saying about them by typing in their license plate number on the site. It’s anonymous to the extent no one can see what you are writing about anyone else and, per most sites that enable conversation, only your user name and profile are visible. And, of course, it’s free.

So now I can “say” all those things I always said in the car, with the windows closed or perhaps open, at speed or stopped dead in traffic, when I’ve had a bad day, only other people can actually “hear” them now, just not necessarily in real time. (You can see messages in real time if you are using a smartphone while driving, but that is unsafe and illegal in many US states, some Canadian provinces, and many countries.)

Lots of the posts (go here) are exactly what you’d expect: criticism of other people’s driving skills. There is no shortage of bad drivers or people who are inattentive or just make mistakes. If someone saw a crime being committed – such as hit and run – and got the license plate, this might be useful, but I’d imagine they’d call the police first.

Advertisers I saw included an insurance company, Kaplan University (for criminal justice degrees), a local (to me) car dealer, local personal injury lawyers, the Nexus One, and a local law firm specializing in DWI and motor vehicle defense, which indicates that someone is seeing value in being visible on a site that is populated by drivers. If millions of people sign up and use this site, it may become a good place to site your online ad if you provide services or products to this huge population. Note: There were “250,844,644 registered passenger vehicles in the US in 2006,” according to Wikipedia, which cites the US Bureau of Traffic Statistics.

One of the founders, Tony Mastrorio, says he is trying to get towing companies to use Carpong to tell drivers when their cars have been towed and how to find them. (Might work, but why not try Twitter first?)

This looks like fun, but not much more than fun at this point. Let’s hope no one gets angry enough about what’s written about them to try to connect profile with posting. Let’s also hope no one you are writing about has a friend that’s on Carpong and can find you behind them or next to them.

Anyway, I was angry when I left: no one has posted about me.

It’s all part of the Open Government Directive mandated by the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo dated December 8, 2009. The Directive is a direct result of the work begun by the White House, under the auspices of an Open Government Initiative, in the early days of the Obama Administration. (We’re pleased, by the way, that Beth Noveck, a collaborator with Don and the Wikinomics team in recent years, has had such an important role leading the Initiative from inside the White House…congratulations Beth!)

I encourage you to read the Directive. It’s the antithesis of the kinds of 1,000-page government documents that get joked about on the late night TV programs. Instead, it is eleven pages long and has clear, unequivocal language such as “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

So, what can you expect in two to three weeks? Well, the first deadline in the directive actually already passed last week. To wit: “Within 45 days, each agency shall identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.” We discussed Data.gov and some of the terrific work going on in open source development of apps to tap into those rich data sets in my multi-part review of the inaugural O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit last year.

But, what you can expect by early February is that each agency will have created an “Open Government Webpage” to serve as its gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive. This is the place where each agency will provide information about its plans and solicit and receive input about its future. For the solicitation of citizen input, expect an already well-tested web 2.0 tool, like Ideascale, to power the process.

We’ll provide more updates in the coming weeks.  And, keep an eye on our partner website, The Collaboration Project, at the National Academy, for insightful policy updates on open government progress as well.  But, in the meantime, get in there and make your voice heard!

So at a high level, the major difference between the two is simple. The core of Yelp’s competitive advantage is it’s community of contributors; the core of Milo’s competitive advantage is driven by it’s inventory data. Both, of course, help people find products or services to purchase in their local area. My question to wikinomics readers is simple – given the option, which of the two would you prefer to own – and why? I’ve got a few of my own ideas on this, but would like to hear what other people think first…

Twitter and Facebook specifically are proving to be valuable tools for organizations soliciting donations. One of the more popular options ties together the huge adoption of social networking tools with everyone’s favorite communication device, your cell phone. The Red Cross developed a text option, so when the word “Haiti” is sent to a specific number, $10 is donated to the Haitian relief effort. The $10 charge shows up on your cell phone bill, so no need to worry about exchanging credit card information, or even visiting a web site. As one of my colleague’s posted “it’s easy peasy!” Within my relatively small network I’ve already seen the message about this option posted on no less than 100 status updates or Twitter posts. Last night The American Red Cross posted this on its Facebook page:

American Red Cross is confirming that you have donated $5 million by texting “Haiti” to 90999. You are amazing.

Pretty impressive for less than 2 full days work!

Of course, as with most outreach efforts there are always losers out there looking to make a quick buck with donation scams. On Wednesday the FBI actually released a fraud alert about donation scams.  Unfortunately social media tools become an attractive option for these criminals given the speed at which communications can reach critical mass. Thankfully the channel also allows for the revealing of frauds relatively quickly as well. I’ve seen a few posts pointing people to places where they can find lists of legitimate charities. This includes sites like –  the washingtonpost.com, NBC’s Boston affiliate WHDH, and most other local television news sites.

I could go on about the lessons that other organizations could learn from The Red Cross and other’s use of social media channels. However, today I think it’s more appropriate for us all to pause for just a minute, count our blessings and send thoughts and prayers to all of the families affected by the Haiti earthquake.

The consequences of this emerging field are intriguing, but it hasn’t met with widespread adoption when it comes to corporate employee engagement practices. I’d argue that far too many of today’s corporations operate under a model that is centered on how to make work life “less miserable.” And despite all the money that companies pour into employee engagement tools and surveys, companies are still bad at making work more meaningful, more fulfilling, and more engaging. What if anything can be done? And what can corporations learn–if anything–from the field of positive psychology and other scholars in this area?

Now this isn’t to say that there has been no progress towards integrating positive psychology with employee engagement. A few of my favorite explorations include:

• Abraham Maslow’s writings on “self-actualizing” and “peak experiences”
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” and “optimal experience”
• Tammy Erickson’s concept of “life’s lure”
• Lynda Gratton’s work on creating corporate “hot spots“
• Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey and strength finder assessment
• Academic research including: Positive Organizational Scholarship, Authentic Happiness, and the Quality of Life Research Center

But what’s interesting to me about these resources is that there is a common theme. In one way or another they all are trying to address the following question: how can we make work (and life) more meaningful, how do we unleash the creativity, innovation, and passion of employees? Or as one of my former clients puts it, “how can we ignite the passion of our employees?” If I had all the answers, I’d be a rich man. But I’d like to put forth a few ideas and hear more from you about others.

If corporations are truly interested in getting more productive and engaged employees, it requires much more than a simple once-a-year engagement survey. A real solution demands a new take on human resources, but it also requires corporations to rethink their leadership, management practices, culture, and organizational structure.

One possible starting point for corporations is to think hard about the lens by which managers view their employees: Is the company more focused on trying to fix weaknesses (analogous to the mental illness model in psychology) or enhance strengths (more akin to the positive psychology model)? If the organization is focused on fixing weaknesses, chances are that yearly performance reviews aimed at fixing problems are the norm; if the organization is focused on enhancing strengths, chances are that there is a cooperative effort between managers and employees to match the job challenges with individual skills.

I favor the latter approach because I believe the balance of challenge and skill is a key element to increasing employee engagement. Ideally, when challenge and skill are present in just the right quantities, “flow” emerges/results – this is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” If you are extremely challenged but lack the skills, you are in a state of anxiety. If you are not challenged and have moderate skills you become bored. But how can we infuse flow into typical employee responsibilities and tasks?

In terms of practical corporate application, I’d suggest if we want to get employees more engaged, more productive, more passionate, unleash their creativity we need to re-craft work around the individual and their particular strengths, and match the challenge to the skills of the employee. Easier said than done, I know.

I think leaders and corporations can find some lessons from the field of positive psychology and the shift from mental illness to mental health. Maybe if corporations focus less on making work “less miserable” and focus instead on what inspires and unleashes creative potential, someone might crack the employee engagement code.

What do you think? Which model does your organization subscribe to, and what would things look like if it shifted to the other?

The boon for small operatives and peer-to-peer commerce is obvious. It’s a technology that will enable what we at nGenera are calling “the new localism,” or the opposing force to globalization spurred by both a struggling economy that has encouraged protectionism and “buy local” campaigns (e.g. see 3/50 Project), as well as environmental pressures to reduce transportation-related waste and third-world exploitation by supporting local production (e.g. see 100 Mile Diet).

Using devices like Square, anyone—from street artist to backyard food grower—can be a legitimate vendor accepting credit card payments. According to Om Malik (who calls it the beginning of the iEconomy):

“This is truly disruptive. The reason Square exists is because of three macro trends: the pervasiveness of the mobile Internet, the increase in the use of electronic payment systems and most importantly, the availability of low-cost, always-on computers (aka smartphones) that allow sophisticated software to conduct complex tasks on the go.

The marriage of computing and connectivity without the shackles of being tethered to a location is one of the biggest disruptive forces of modern times. It is (and will continue) to redefine business models, for decades. Square is simply riding these waves.”

But competitors are quick to point out flaws in the Square model. VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron (VeriFone plans to launch its own offering, PayWare Mobile in 2010) believes “that encrypting data on the iPhone itself—instead of before the data is loaded to the device—presents a security risk. Beyond that, he’s wary of Square’s decision to have a merchant account for the company itself but not requiring individual businesses to have their own. Bergeron said VeriFone’s offering will require merchants to have separate accounts. ‘It would be like sharing bank accounts with your neighbor: It just doesn’t work,’ he said.”

The URL for Square is squareup.com, as in “square-up with friends over a dinner tab,” which opens one’s imagination to the multitude of scenarios where one might need to square-up a debt or pay for a service. Dorsey and team’s target market is small business owners frustrated with credit card payments.

But what of illegitimate businesses? I’m currently reading SuperFreakonomics, which deals largely with how incentives drive human behavior. The book got me thinking about some of the more subversive uses of such a device. Specifically, the chapter, How is a street prostitute like a department store Santa? describes Chicago prostitutes that charge between $300 and $500 per hour, which may not be the kind of cash you want to be carrying around in the type of neighborhoods that support that trade. Would it be reasonable for a John to ask, “Do you take Visa?” What about cell phone-enabled drug dealers? Illegal firearm sales? Bribes? Gambling debts? Black-market goods? I wonder what the receipts would say. Much like reports of prostitution on Craigslist, social media (software and hardware) appears to provide an upside for both the legitimate and the insidious.

Of course, cash carries its own benefits as well. Most notably, it cannot be traced—a characteristic that the underground economy depends on. The cash transaction protects both the buyer and seller that require discretion. Also, for many legal, yet “under-the-table” transactions such as paying small vendors, contractors, or laborers, cash payments are preferable because they leave the door open for fudging income tax reporting.

Still, while it’s fun to muse over the possibilities, I believe the downside will be vastly outweighed by the upside. I’m excited to see how this plays out and how quickly such devices will be adopted (or how quickly they will be supplanted by software versions).

As you may have noticed due to a technical glitch your posts just appeared in the last hour on wikinomics.com.  We have moved all these comments to the main discussion at http://dontapscott.com/2010/01/08/what-should-be-the-title-to-the-sequel-to-wikinomics/

It’s an incredible conversation with well over 150 great title ideas.

Thanks!

Don and Anthony

I had a beer with my 25-year-old daughter Jen and Laura, her friend from high school, before seeing a performance of The Nutcracker in mid-December. I mentioned something about Facebook, and was surprised by their animosity toward the site. They both agree that they did not like what it is (too serious, a soapbox for self-promotion, populated by arrogant and self-absorbed Gen Ys) and missed what it was (fun and a safe way to meet people in college, a closed community). They both also did not like that it was now a place for parents – yes, me – to go. (Note: My daughter has friended me but 21-year-old son says he won’t.)

Their perspective is, of course, is easily dismissed as useless information because it is entirely anecdotal. I personally know other people in their 20s and 30s who do use it and share enormous amounts of information and photos.

And Facebook Statistics clearly don’t support the notion that it is fading in importance, even among younger people: 350 million members, each with an average of 130 friends, 8 friend requests per month, and 3 event invitations per month. Facebook crossed the 200 million member mark in April 2009, so membership has increased by 75% in some nine months or by more than 16 million members per month. Facebook has more than 101 million members in the US as of December 31, 2009, and according to CheckFacebook.com, of the 95 million US members it had as of November 3, 2009, slightly more than 50% are between the ages of 18 and 34. Facebook is growing overseas as well but numbers in any country are dwarfed by US membership, with the UK coming in a distant second with some 22.6 million members. The largest growth rates over the last 12 months are in the Philippines (2046.8% growth), Indonesia (1536.7% growth), and Thailand (1063.8% growth).

Nevertheless, there seems to be some increasing disillusionment with Facebook, though I know of no definitive trend in any age group that has been reported, other than among members 55 and older, whose ranks diminished by some 600,000 in April and May 2009. Type “Facebook sucks” into the Google rectangle and “about 19,600,000″ results show up. (This is so unscientific I won’t even make a claim about validity.) But there are also some thoughtful, reasoned articles about quitting Facebook that intrigued me:

• Carmen Joy King at Adbusters: “The amount of time I spent on Facebook had pushed me into an existential crisis. It wasn’t the time-wasting, per se, that bothered me. It was the nature of the obsession – namely self-obsession. Enough was enough. I left Facebook.”
• Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times writes about friends quitting: “If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.”
• Singer Lily Allen, quoted by Anita Singh at showbusiness.com: “I just had this revelation that Facebook, blogging, all those things were becoming a total addiction. I’d be with my boyfriend or my mum and they’d have just got half of me. So I put my BlackBerry, my laptop, my iPod in a box and that’s the end . . . We’ve ended up in this world of unreal communications and I don’t want that. I want real life back.”
• Hannah VanderPoel at North by Northwestern, a Northwestern University online publication: “Ultimately, my own self-prescribed hiatus from Facebook was fueled by three factors. One was to rid my life of unnecessary distraction, mostly in an attempt to finish my homework. The second was the hope of re-learning how to socialize in ways that don’t involve typing public messages to profile avatars that serve as pixeled representations of real people. Thirdly, it was the desire to regain the sense of personal privacy that I surrendered three years ago when I first created my account –- a move that I am retrospectively thankful for, given the controversy surrounding the site’s privacy policies (or lack thereof).”
• Boston University sophomore Brendan Gauthier: “I couldn’t justify the amount of time I was spending — no, wasting — on it. Why was I looking through my friend’s roommate’s girlfriend’s sorority sister’s photo albums? I didn’t even know this person, yet I could tell you what she did last weekend. . . . At what point are we willing to sacrifice real friendships for convenience? Since giving up Facebook, I’ve called my high school friends, and our conversations are much more gratifying than three words on our wall-to-wall.”

So, my questions are: Do you know people who have quit Facebook? Are you thinking about quitting yourself?

There are a lot of reasons for this success – but the one I want to focus on today is around the strategic use of purchasing thresholds. Like Woot.com, Groupon.com applies a maximum threshold to create urgency for customers – buy now before it’s too late! But the more interesting thing Groupon does is use minimum thresholds - the offer is only valid if enough people sign up.

There are two things that make this interesting. The first, and more obvious, ties to viral marketing. It’s typically hard for a company to “make” a marketing message, or sales offer, go viral. But by putting a minimum threshold on the offer (i.e. only valid if 50 people sign up), Groupon creates a natural incentive for interested customers to promote the offer through Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, and other channels.

The second ties to the ability to test price discrimination strategies. In these early days, Groupon members represent new customers for most merchants using the platform. In a typical case, if a company wants to test offering a discount to draw in new customers, they do so rather blindly. If (say) only 2 people take you up on the offer, it probably wasn’t worth the effort – let alone the cost if you have to communicate the message through traditional media channels. The minimum threshold gets around this – merchants can select whatever price / quantity combination makes sense for them, and walk away (without paying a penny) if the threshold isn’t met.

There are many other interesting aspects of the Groupon story I’ve been following in our research (you can read about a couple of other companies I’ve been watching closely here), as well as interesting challenges and opportunities the company will soon have to deal with. Given that Groupon has been so successful in using the Web 2.0 to create business around collective buying (while hardly being the first to have tried), they are definitely worth paying attention to.

Instead of resolving to do more this year, I’m aiming to do less. To slow down….Not to slack off at work, mind you…This mindset–to fight information overload and to focus–is quite prevalent right now.

Patricia also mentions a colleague who has gone on a technology diet and made a resolution to stay offline from 8pm to 8am every day. WOW! To my colleagues and friends that send emails at midnight, could you do that? Even just a few days a week?

This reformed behavior helps her digest her information overload, she says. “It’s the difference between snacking on information and sitting down to a meal.”

Personally, I love this idea! At a time where many believe, myself included, that we need to know everything the second it happens, and respond to messages as soon as they hit our Blackberry, would the world really fall apart if we waited just a bit? I understand that certain people can argue that their positions require this, President Obama would fall into this group, however for most professionals I think it is entirely reasonable to give yourself a break from screen time. Being available 24/7 is for convenience stores not people!

The good news is that the responsibility to change this falls to the individual. Of course, the bad news is also that the responsibility to change this falls to the individual. I know that I am guilty of setting quick response expectations.  I have often been praised for my rapid turnaround time and “efficient” work style, but does that have to mean answering messages at all hours of the night? I specifically remember turning around a brief research study overnight for a VP’s 8am client meeting. I was just coming off maternity leave, was up every couple hours anyway, so why not check email at 11pm? Wrong! The urgent request was there, I answered. It made me a hero for the day, but that needs to be the exception rather than the rule. The only way to make it so is for me and others like me, I know you’re out there, to shut down and reboot on a consistent basis.

Interestingly during a conversation with my Manager yesterday he congratulated me for staying offline during the holiday. While I did still check email, I did not respond to anything until I returned, actually following what I had written in my Out of Office message. Go figure! I started this resolution before the New Year even began!

Speaking of rebooting, another interesting note that Patricia brings up is Ariana Huffington and editor in chief of Glamour , Cindi Leive’s Sleep Challenge 2010. They have suggested that woman vow to sleep more this year. We all know the health consequences from lack of sleep, but woman still tend to be the most sleep-deprived individuals, specifically working single women and working moms.

…in order for women to get ahead in this country, we’re all going to have to lie down and take a nap….Rob yourself of sleep, and you’ll find you never function at your personal best. Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know your own mind — they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep.

OK, if these super-busy and powerful women can do it, so can I. So, 2010, I am putting it in writing. This year I will aim for less screen time, more sleep time, hopefully leading to a  more productive and balanced life. Oh, and I’d like to lose those last 10 lbs too.