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.

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.

VenCorps is an online community for discovering and cultivating the most creative solutions to a specific problem. It is the next evolution in collaborative innovation, where the community first helps to identify the best solutions and helps build out and cultivate those solutions. VenCorps connects entrepreneurs, investors and facilitators together in a community of shared interest.  In short, VenCorps uses the wisdom of the crowds to attract, screen and cultivate the most innovative solutions.  (Disclosure:  I am a significant shareholder of the parent company that owns VenCorps.)

Cash prizes are generally awarded to those people that are:

• Bringing an innovative technology to the market.
• 10x faster, smarter, better, cheaper, stronger, etc than current solutions.
• People with domain experience or a track record of success. We also realize the best solutions can come from first-time inventors too.
• Can reach millions in revenue within a few years of launch.
• Are solving a real problem with a big pain point.
• Are scalable, costing less per unit as the sales grow.

In the case of the Intelligent Transportation Society, the goal is to fund a company that can reduce environmental impact, strengthen economic productivity, move people more efficiently, or prevent accidents.

After the challenge was issued, 94 groups submitted solutions that were reviewed and voted on by a community of 4080 people.  (I am familiar with several of the entries and have advised some, so I have recused  myself from the selection process.) The nine best solutions were just announced, and will now undergo a much more intense round of scrutiny.  The nine finalists can be seen here.  With finalists coming from Hungary, Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States the origins of these solutions are as varied as their approach to make traffic history.

Here is a sampling of the finalists.

Intellione:  The company uses mobile phone handsets to monitor traffic congestion. Users can see where traffic congestion is occurring in real time and know their travel time and make a choice to take an alternate route. This impacts transit and commuter travel and hence is an important tool in mitigating greenhouse emissions. The systems also helps governments to see how their roads are performing and address safety issues and plan where to make their capital infrastructure investments.

Skymeter:  Since 1998 governments in Europe/Asia have cut congestion by charging for road use, a $2B/yr market in 2008. Now Request for Proposals ask for GPS tolling; integrators lack solutions that price reliably. Our Financial GPS system is the piece needed to win bids.

Avego:  We want to build the automatic, intelligent, real-time infrastructure that makes it no-brainer-easy for travelers to share their empty seats, thereby unlocking the excess capacity already travelling and wasted on our ‘congested’ roads.  We want to enables individual drivers to advertise their excess capacity and make it available to other travelers.

iCarpool.com:  One Web site for all modes – Carpool, Vanpool, Transit, Bike, Walk. One site for all travel types – commute trips, events, long distance trips and real time trips (through mobile phones and SMS). One site which enables you to find matches within all your networks – your employer, your residential community, your friends, your soccer club and more.

The reason is simple – there is an extraordinary network of bright people following the preparations of players for the draft. Many of them share information regularly. Over time, you start to see a general consensus emerge through all the collaboration taking place – which is highlighted by the striking similarity of many mock drafts. And lo and behold, when I watched the draft it was remarkable how similar the results were to most people’s projections.

Not only that, but the little “surprises” weren’t really scouting stories, at least early on. When Rubio dropped to #5, many fans knew exactly why (contract buyout questions and what teams he’d happily play for in particular). And perhaps there still might be a case that a great scouting staff can locate a good player late in the draft, as San Antonio was once known to do – but I’m not convinced this is the case anymore. I’ve noticed over the last few seasons that many of the players that were noted as the late round “sleepers”, and turned out to be just that, were pegged by many, many mock drafts in advance.

So frankly, that’s what I might do if I was an owner right now caught in a cash crunch – fire most of my scouting staff, and redirect the money to making sure I have a great GM. Long suffering Clippers and Timberwolves fans, among others, will tell you the importance of having a uniquely qualified mind in that spot…

The first extreme-scale collaborative game created to tackle the world’s problems was the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) World Without Oil. Created by the non-profit public media company ITVS, this ARG explored a world where oil demand had outstripped supply by 5%, and it challenged the ‘citizens’ of that world to cope. If you’re interested in learning more about it, check out Anthony D. Williams’ great post about World Without Oil and the idea that games could be part of the solution to the climate change crisis.The game that I want to discuss is Superstruct, a massively multiplayer game aimed at forecasting the world in 2019 and finding the strategies that humans can use to stop the impending extinction of the human race. Five ‘superthreats’ were created by the game developers: a massive food shortage, pandemic disease, fast depleting energy resources, the erosion of civil rights, and a refugee epidemic. The game engaged more than 8000 players who together created the scenarios of the future. During the course of the game, one player addressed an urban food shortage by creating the idea of a virtual community that rural famers used to share farming information and tips for dealing with the difficult conditions. These rural farmers then brought their produce to be sold in the old, now closed down urban supermarkets that were once supplied by large, commercial farmers. Many players created such scenarios that were small steps toward a solution to the impending disasters they faced.

At the end of April, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) released their initial results from analysis of the game scenarios, and they plan to soon release “Superstruct Strategies” – 7 actionable strategies that emerged during analysis of the game. In their initial findings, the IFTF outlined three scenarios that for the future that emerged:

• The Long Crisis plots a path of slow response, resistance to change, and attempts to maintain current power relationships.
• Emergence follows a course of rapid adaptation from the bottom up, without much unifying direction.
• The Great Transition envisions a world re-made by technology, a challenge to the planetary dominance of humans as a species.

The three scenarios and 50 year forecast released by the IFTF are interesting, but seem quite extreme. The difficulty of using games to develop solutions to real world problems is that the problems are real and the games are not. Therefore, many scenarios that arise in games such as Superstruct that are more extreme than what the world will likely experience. However, the same characteristic that makes these games difficult to apply to the real world, allows people to freely express their thoughts and ideas. These games create an alternate reality that is a safe, creative environment, and isn’t that what every brainstorming session strives to achieve – a safe environment where ideas, no matter how outlandish, are considered? As we age, it becomes increasingly difficult to tap into that creativity we once had as children, and ‘thinking outside the box’ becomes highly valuable. These types of games can engage and encourage creative brainstorming from thousands of people around the world, and therein lies their value. The issues that the human race will face in coming years cannot possibly be solved by a few; only the intelligence of many minds working together will be able to provide solutions. The questions is whether games will be a conduit for that collaboration. I will be very interested to see the actionable strategies created by the IFTF from the game Superstruct. What I wonder is, will they be strategies that are unrealistic for today’s world, strategies that we have already thought of, or strategies that are extremely valuable?

The move from people to pigeons as carriers was important in that all the sudden there was a task performed over a distance that could now be automated. Nowadays, instantly sending a message to someone on the other side of the world is trivial — but that doesn’t mean that modern technology has yet been exhaustively used to solve older problems.

There’s plenty of old technology that still works — works well enough in fact that no one has bothered to replace it with a better, more efficient alternative. Here are a small list of examples:

• The Steam Engine. A.K.A. nuclear power. It’s pretty much the same principle, just instead of burning coal or wood to boil water and use the steam to move turbines, it’s nuclear fission. We’ve supplemented an old technology with new components, but the base principle hasn’t changed in 300 years.
• Physics. More accurately, Newtonian Physics. It’s easy to forget that just as things like steam engines and the internet are tools, so are ideas like laws of Physics. The set of tools for modeling the Physical world that Newton and his contemporaries invented were, and are, extremely useful and accurate. They’re also inaccurate and have been superceded by ones that take into account a larger picture of the universe.
• Government. The oldest governments of today were built for a different world, structured to address different issues, for people with different priorities. The election of representatives worked well for people whose lives were spent largely on farms and in factories, unable to travel the distances required to participate in the democratic process. The stability that has made governments reliable in the long run also makes them resistant to change, after all, you go with what you know. Governments are, to their credit, now adapting to involve citizens in the process of running their country, but it’s necessarily a slow-going process as this new technology is tested and accepted.

In the business space, the drive of competition should drive the constant reevaluation of all technological assumptions in favor of more efficient alternatives. But the same might not be true in other areas of society.

In the three examples above, all work well in their native context, especially Newtonian Physics. If you’re calculating how long it takes to fly between Toronto and New York, you don’t need to take into account relativity, so there’s an argument that, in that context, the older tool is just fine. This leads us to the question: should we be aggressively looking for ways to apply new technology to everything in our world, constantly re-evaluating old problems with modern eyes and modern problem solving skills? Or were some problems solved well-enough the first time, and we should focus our attention on other areas?

Similarly, when you look at your day to day life, how many of the tools and technologies that you use everyday seem like little more than sleeker versions of Historic designs — what items are missing from my list?

Wikipedia goes to great lengths on it’s NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy page to explain how and when an article can be considered “neutral:”

The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting verifiable perspectives on a topic as evidenced by reliable sources. The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as “the truth”, in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one.

This sounds great, but I’m concerned that the Wiki system as a whole might have considerable bias built-in. First, consider what Wikipedia is. It’s the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but not anyone does — instead, most prefer just to read (it’s the 7th most visited site online). Just as visiting the site is an opt-in process, so is editing it; the community that creates and polices content is very much self-selecting. This is where I think the problem arises.Something is only neutral within the context of its community. That is, an issue is neutral (in my mind at least) when it exists perfectly balanced between the centres of gravity of two or more conflicting views. Given that the population of people who edit Wikipedia is necessarily drawn from the people who read Wikipedia — but also have the inclination, be it technological or ideological, to edit the site — there is the concern that the editing community has a different makeup with regards to their opinions on issues than the reader community, and the world at large.

Wikipedia attempts to address this by saying that in order for something to be cited as a reference, it needs to refer to a reliable source — one that has a reputation for fact checking and integrity. There are two problems with this:

1. “Reliable sources” have bias built in too. Al Jazeera is reliable to one subset of people, FOX News is reliable to another. Fans of either source would be offended to hear that the other is placed on the same level as their own.
2. The community gets to decide what sources are reliable (because who else is there to, Wikipedia is a community based effort).

The first problem doesn’t have any easy solutions; individual bloggers may be telling the truth with every word they write, but until they have a sufficient following and track record, there’s not really any reliable metric to decide if what they’re saying is admissible. Wikipedians could do research to bolster one-off claims found on blogs, but this practice would be awfully close to original research, something the site strives to avoid.

The second problem is simultaneously easy and hard to solve. The more people edit Wikipedia, the more accurate the alignment of “neutral” to the Wikipedians and “neutral” to everyone else becomes (unless of course people with a specific agenda flood into the site en-masse to try and shake things up). But this is counterbalanced with the issue of getting people involved. Not everyone wants to edit Wikipedia, and not everyone who wants to knows how.

Interestingly, I read this result as meaning that Wikipedia is consistent from first to last. In principle, the more people edit Wikipedia, the better it gets; similarly, the more people edit Wikipedia, the more its version of neutrality becomes one that reflects the world at large. It’s a fantastic resource, and if we want it to continue to improve, at some point, we’re all going to have to get involved.

(A special thank you to my friends Danielle, Eve, and Josh, with whom I had the conversation that resulted in this post. Also of note is that XKCD, did, in some measure, address this long before we did.)

When most of us think of our digital profile, we think of the footprint that is created by our active maintenance – à la Facebook or LinkedIn.  On these networks, either we or those we “know” are responsible for maintaining our rich user profile that comes to define us in the digital world.  There is tremendous power in these networks for facilitating both our social and professional lives, but one of the associated challenges is that there are so many of them – how can one keep track of them all?  If you have maintained a consistent online handle, things can be much easier, but for those of us who haven’t, there are emerging tools such as UnHub that act as simple aggregators, allowing users to create a single destination where their many profiles can be found i.e. http://unhub.com/richardbranson without having to purchase and set up an independent domain.

For better or for worse, there is also another very important level of profile maintenance that is taking place in the background, requiring very little effort on our part – passive maintenance.  Programs such as ChoicePoint have become important destinations for comprehensive personal information by aggregating data from a number of public sources and privately held databases.  By serving as mass aggregators, with over 17 billion records in ChoicePoint’s case, such organizations are able to sell profile information for the purposes of insurance, reference checks (tenant, employee…) and many other uses.

While such services can be quite convenient, they are not without important risks, the tip of the iceberg being data integrity (what if information is wrong/outdated) and data security (they present a single point of failure in the case of compromise).

Curious to investigate my own ChoicePoint profile, I have attempted a number of times lately to take advantage of the opportunity to review my information for free (available once a year).  Interestingly, I have received the message below when seeking profile access from my office in Toronto.  Funny…I always thought Toronto was within Canada.

Now I don’t want to be alarmist, but we have all heard stories of online missteps that have ended in less than ideal circumstances, often due to oversharing of information.  Therefore, it is important to not only think about, but purposefully monitor and maintain your profile on the web – afterall, you are what Google or the aggregators say you are, at least to non-discriminant or lazy searcher.

Just the other day I was involved in a dinner conversation over which a colleague mentioned that they had seen an unflattering 1980s prom picture of another colleague at the table go up on Facebook a few hours earlier. The subject of the photo replied “Yah, sure glad I took that down.” Not seconds later did another friend chime in with “oh, that picture…you mean this one?”, triumphantly holding up their iPhone for all to see.  In the minutes that the photo had been up, it had been not only viewed, but saved for others to enjoy.  Now this story was all in good fun, but it raises the important notion of control over your digital identity.  Who is really in control?

Will online missteps such as an embarrassing/uncomfortable photo surfacing (or worse) matter as much in future to a generation who has grown up with eroded privacy expectations?  Or, will it be understood that perhaps it will only matter in certain relevant contexts?  Is the social contract that we have entered into with not only friends, family, colleagues, but also many of the programs/networks that we have integrated into our daily lives be “enough to protect us”?  Has anyone out there stopped for long enough to read a Terms of Service agreement lately?  I suspect that if we did so, we may not be so comfortable…

More to come on the happier side of the Pervasive Personal Identity in the next entry.  Until then, keep combing the vast Net out there to ensure that your identity that is becoming quite pervasive, and personal, is in fact doing you justice. 

A revolution is happening in government as the result of a new generation of government employees, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, and the Obama administration’s focus on transparency, participation, and collaboration. This revolution is often called “Government 2.0” and GovLoop is at the center of this movement.

Since its launch, GovLoop members have written over 1,500 blogs, started 1,200 discussions, posted over 450 events, shared 4,000+ photos and created over 200 videos.

GovLoop members have already:
• Developed a burgeoning “Acquisition 2.0” movement to employ innovative acquisition methods
• Been the leading source of government input into the Obama Administration’s Open Government Memo
• Established a repository of best practices on items including Social Media Policies, Government Hiring and Government Twitter Use
• Launched a top-rated podcast “Gov 2.0 Radio” (http://gov20radio.com) with guests like Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly media, http://oreilly.com) and Craig Newmark (founder of Craig’s List, http://craigslist.com)
• Helped GovLoop.com win the prestigious Federal 100 award and stand as a finalist for the 2009 ACT Intergovernmental Solutions Award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, check out posts one and two.)

If it’s designed and implemented carefully, the GCW that I’m proposing would offer us insight into at least four high-level questions:

1. How can the global community allocate its resources more effectively?  It’s all too often the case that fundamental questions such as this one are either ignored or don’t receive their due attention in the rush to make “progress.”  We need to understand how people, technology, and money are being allocated.  This examination would allow us to take stock of where we are in the fight against global challenges and determine where we need to go.  
2. Which players are best suited to accomplishing a given task?  For example, is an NGO more equipped to engage in nation-building than a government?  On what variables, if any, does the answer depend?  Identifying players’ comparative advantages would lessen the extent to which they tread on each others’ turf and create deadweight loss.
3. What geopolitical patterns emerge?  Do certain problem-solving paradigms work better in certain countries or regions or in application to certain global challenges?  Intuition suggests that bilateral negotiations between developed and developing powers will be instrumental to slowing climate change, whereas grassroots, experiment-based initiatives will be instrumental to reversing global poverty.  The more extensive the GCW becomes, the more likely it is that it’ll be able to flesh out that intuition and, again, eliminate deadweight loss.
4. Can we predict where global challenges will go in the future?  Forecasting has long gotten a bad rap on the grounds that those who attempt it advance specious claims to sell books, get on TV, and, more broadly, gain attention.  I agree that one who forecasts to be fashionable doesn’t contribute much to our understanding.  I’d argue, however, that as time passes, engaging in long-term strategic thinking on the basis of objective evidence will only grow  more imperative.   

 
Alright.  Three blog posts about one idea might seem like overkill, but (if you can’t already tell) I’m excited.  If only by virtue of the fact that others are starting to embark on similar projects, I’m convinced that the GCW has extraordinary potential if we get the details right at the outset, work hard, and dream big. 

What do you think?  Please feel free to contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu.  I look forward to hearing from you!

Mark’s other rules of engagement are as follows:

1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days 
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered
7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else
8.  You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download
9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.
11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.
12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
13. No mult-level marketing programs (added 2/10/09 1pm)

So far, he’s received more than 1,500 comments including quite a few promises of impending business plans.

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for part three in the coming days.)

I briefly introduced the GCW in my first post.  For more details, please check out a short primer that I drafted, which discusses its high-level mechanisms, functions, and goals.  My thinking evolves by the second, and I’m talking with lots of people to figure out the nitty-gritty of how this framework would actually work.  As I do so, I’m happy to see that projects in the spirit of mine are starting to emerge.  Here are three recent examples:

1. The November / December 2008 issue of Foreign Policy spotlights Raj Kumar’s Development 2.0 project, devex.com, which allows site members to, “depending on their level of access, post projects, form networks based on common interests, browse and monitor upcoming bids, find job opportunities, and get in touch with experts on the ground…At the heart of the site, though, is its massive projects database, which currently lists more than 47,000 projects on everything from rural sanitation in Bangladesh to policing in the Palestinian territories – searchable by region, country, donor, project type, or status.  By aggregating this information in one place, Kumar says, Devex gives everyone a chance to find out about opportunities, not just the well-connected…”
2.  MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence just announced an initiative to harness “collective brainpower and computing power” in the service of addressing global challenges.  The “center is developing an online deliberation tool that allows experts in a wide range of fields to get together to share ideas.  Unlike existing online discussion forums, the Climate Collaboratorium requires users to catalog their contributions and connect them to points that have already been made.  Such ‘argument maps’ help eliminate the repetitive, unhelpful comments and tangents that render most online discussion forums unhelpful.  The researchers are also connecting their deliberation tool with computer-based climate models, so users’ suggestions about different parts of the problem can be more easily combined and tested.”
3. The World in 2009, a publication of The Economist, profiles a digital mapping project that  aims to improve how money is spent in Africa: “The kind of maps which in the past had been  held to ransom by secretive African governments will pop up in African internet café in 2009.  Many will be annotated ‘wiki’ style, with layers of information added and verified by  an online community: street names for all, distribution of infant deaths for development workers, livestock density for agricultural officials, Catholic primary schools for a local bishop, and YouTube videos on the best snorkeling spots for tourists…[by using digital maps] teams of epidemiologists working together with medical workers texting in information from their mobile phones will do a better job of tracking exotic pathogens before they become mass killers.  Similarly, aid workers in 2009 will use digital maps for real-time information on famines and conflict, starting with an acute famine in Ethiopia.”

What these undertakings, among others, demonstrate is that a GCW could be an immensely powerful tool for addressing global challenges.  For the most part, they’ve tended to focus on specific global challenges or specific countries.  We need to go a step beyond and focus on the big picture – all global problems in all countries.  

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming days.)

I’m new to the Wikinomics blog, so I thought that I’d say a few words about myself.  I graduated from MIT last year with degrees in Political Science and Management, and now I’m a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, a think tank in D.C. 

I recently entered Change.org’s competition to propel ten ideas to the fore of the Obama administration’s agenda.  Although my proposal to establish a global challenges Wikipedia didn’t make the cut (it came in 66^th place out of about 8,000 ideas), it generated a lot of interest amongst NGOs, consulting firms, and policy organizations.  Here’s the short (and kind of wonky) idea description that I submitted to the Change.org team:

There are currently about 20 global challenges (for example, climate change and infectious diseases) and 200 countries.  A “global challenges Wikipedia (GCW)” would empower us to address those challenges efficiently and systematically.  It would have three parts:  

1.  The global challenges repository (GCR) would be a 20 x 200 matrix.  Its cells would contain
   (a) A history of that global challenge in that country;
   (b) An inventory of the players – the international institutions, governments, businesses, NGOs, and individuals – that are addressing it, and how; and
   (c) A profile of the issue, financial, and logistical networks between these players.   Government-commissioned expert teams, one per global challenge, would ensure the accuracy of contributions to the GCR.
    

    

2. The solutions portal would also be 20 x 200.  Its cells would contain
   (a) Descriptions of policy initiatives that have been successfully deployed against that  global challenge in that country in the past;
   (b) A thread on how to address that global challenge in that country; and
   (c) A thread on how the aforementioned players can collaborate without replicating each other’s efforts and wasting resources.  The expert teams would ensure that contributions offer solution-oriented comments. They would evaluate the ability of the solutions that have worked for a given country to be tested in and applied to others [(2)(a)].  They would also monitor the discussion threads [2(b), 2(c)] to identify areas of consensus and accordingly articulate new solutions. 

    

3. The case studies of past successes and write-ups of new solutions would be inputted into a 20  x 200 solutions repository, which would offer a dynamic pool of insights for application to new challenges.

The impetus behind the GCW is simple – one of the main problems that we face in addressing global challenges is that there are too many players in the game.  It seems like not a day passes without the announcement of a new NGO that’s devoted to mitigating global poverty or promoting corporate social responsibility.  This outpouring of awareness, enthusiasm, and effort is, of course, wonderful in theory.  The problem comes, however, when these players start clashing – sometimes because they’re unaware of each other and sometimes because they compete with each other.

A subtler, but no less important problem is the uniformity (or lack thereof) of their objectives.  Global poverty offers a great illustration.  Some players want to tackle it in a specific country.  Others want to address it in a specific region.  Yet others want to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.  Complicating matters further is that there’s often a conflation of goals.  For example, reducing global poverty and promoting global development are often interchanged even though they have very different meanings.  Collaboration is far harder, and far less productive, if the collaborating parties don’t have the same end goal in mind.

Our task, then, is to rein in the chaos and make the problem-solving resources that we have – people, technology, and money being the big three – as efficient and productive as possible.

–

That’s part one! What do you think?  Please feel free to leave a comment below, or contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu. I look forward to hearing from you! 

According to the founder, amuktrade.com’s principal goal is to facilitate quick speculative asset pricing based on user estimates and equally novel quick cashless trading through exchanging of shares of large, illiquid assets like real estate. So assets that are currently hard to price would be priced (virtually) by leveraging the collective wisdom of the site’s users. Users can then exchange their virtual asset shares by join trading communities where they can hedge risks, diversify their portfolios and share investment rewards.  

What problems might this solve? The founder has turned her attention to real estate. A homeowner, for example, could decide to sell fractional ownership interests (i.e., shares) in their home, allowing them to acquire and/or keep their homes without paying the high cost of full ownership. For someone facing foreclosure, selling a 49% of the ownership interest in her home is surely better than having to sell it or lose it entirely. Selling and buying shares in commercial real estate and vacation properties is already common, so why not personal real estate? Could be handy in a time of crisis, but I could also see how this could potentially accelerate the kind of absurdly risky and opaque behavior that triggered the crisis in the first place.

Love to hear your thoughts on this.

While you’re at it, just saw another note from the founder of OurRaceCar – you should check out his site, looks pretty interesting (along the lines of MyFootballClub, but with significantly less diving ).

Every so often in my adventures on the Internet, I come across something pretty far out there, and I do what I can to spread it around. This is one such discovery. A small disclaimer, this relates to TV from the ’80s, so if I missed the boat and this is old news, my apologies.

Earlier today a friend was telling me about a TV show from the mid-’80s, St. Elsewhere. In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it is revealed that the entire show took place in the imagination of a minor character, Tommy Westphall, a young boy with autism. Here’s where it gets good: with the TV crossovers.

Some of the characters from St. Elsewhere once visited the Cheers bar, that means that the Cheers bar was also just a figment of Tommy’s imagination. Since Frasier was a spin-off of cheers, everything that happened on Fraiser was also imaginary. On Fraiser, Niles and Daphne read the comic strip from Caroline in the City, so Caroline & company are also imaginary, and on and on and on. This is just one avenue, and it continues and branches and expands beyond all reason:

In a 2003 article published on BBC News Online, St. Elsewhere creator Tom Fontana was quoted as saying, “Someone did the math once… and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall’s mind. God love him.”

The Internet, true to form, has an index of all such cross-overs, and has mapped out the entirety of the universe that exists inside of Tommy’s mind:

Click for the full sized PDF

The final count is 282 shows that exist in this imaginary universe, all tied together in some sort of bizzaro social-network. If you’re a real trivia buff, you can read the index of how all the shows are related. Hit ctrl+f and search that page for the name of your favorite show — it’s probably in there. They even tied Firefly (and therefore Battlestar Galactica) via the Weyland-Yutani corporation! In it’s own way, this is the kind of peculiar, off the wall thing that you really could only find on the Internet, I don’t think this would have seen a wide publication in print.

If there’s anyone who’s hanging in to see if there’s a Wikinomics angle to this after all, how’s this: what is described above is a great example of how links in a bunch of seemingly seperate entities can, when examined from a suitable distance, tell us something (debatably profound) about the much larger collection.

While connections in tv shows are as trivial as you can get, as more and more devices become intelligent Internet enabled, and more information about how we go about our lives becomes aggregated, and links between data of every type are discovered and catalogued, what sorts of emergent observations will we then be able to make, again of course, from a suitable distance?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call this type of disease monitoring Syndromic Surveillance, where they use information about things that often happen before a diagnosis to gauge the likelihood of a public health concern. I had done some work at school in 2005 looking at a project from the University of Pittsburgh called Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS), which used over-the-counter medication sales as a tool for predicting community health issues. The sales data is collected through the National Retail Data Monitor Program, which uses the UPC data from each sale, and aggregates them. Any spikes determined statistically significant seem to correlate well with emergency room visits, and appear to do it faster. A study of the system’s effectiveness suggested that electrolyte sales and medications like Gravol/Dramamine spiked before children started presenting in emergency rooms for care.

Google has now weighed in with their Google Flu Trends which, instead of using OTC sales data, uses search keywords. The idea is that if you’re searching for terms like “flu” and “cough medicine” there’s a good chance you need them. Pretty neat.

I think this has the potential to be even more sensitive than the RODS program, as people only buy medicines when they’re sick enough to need them. They might Google about their symptoms before symptoms necessitate the meds, adding to the early-warning lead time.

To think even bigger, could this type of predictive use of Google search words bear fruit in other disciplines? Like, has anyone taken a look at a stock price’s volatility as a function of its search traffic (or keywords paired with a company name)? Perhaps some negative web chatter could presage rough times for the mentioned company, ideally beyond the typical rumour-mongering.

I know. The stock idea seems like a stretch. It’s just that the markets have me feeling unwell. Or is it the flu? Maybe I’ll ask Google.

The traditional knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers do little active work in matching a question with a resident subject expert, instead relying on the community to keep an eye on the topics they’re best equipped to answer. A new social search service (still in beta) called Aardvark.im from the folks at The Mechanical Zoo aims to actively feed questions to self-proclaimed “subject authorities” who take it from there. As you pose and answer questions you build your “knowledge network”—a social network of your conversation participants. The question routing is done via Aardvark’s algorithm, which according to a VentureBeat article, will involve favouring “friends-of-friends” as the first-line recipients, but does the expert finding for you.

The cool element about Aardvark is that it’s a seamless merger of a knowledge market (a la Yahoo! Answers) and real-time conversation tools (Twitter). Want to know where you can get a good sandwich in your neighbourhood? A quick tweet polls the experts in your city, and you have your answer in real-time. Seems like the service could be structured for use within a company intranet too. For example, you could post a question about quarterly performance numbers or about warehouse inventory levels, and the question would get routed to the resident expert in each department, with the responses in real-time. From my experience, that would trump those long email chains that go back and forth trying to find the right person to answer a specific question.

Speed depends on the number of users on the network, which at around 1,200 the service is pretty small (Aardvark is still in beta)—but given that this is a version of an “applied” Twitter, and that beta invites are in short supply, it’s likely Aardvark will find quick cachet with the nation’s sandwich seekers. And other folks too, I guess.

Central to this development is an increased sense of autonomy from human interactions (such as self-repair, stabilizing feedback loops, and self-directed traffic management) and “smartness,”  — something that already exists in an ever-increasing form in the computational clouds of Google and Amazon, which are constantly learning about how it is that we use language, and form an understanding about how collective human behavior can be used to anticipate the actions of an individual.

These two systems are able to “manufacture intelligence” and sell it to the humans that participate in the system (by adding raw usage-information that these clouds use to refine their understanding). This money is then invested by the curators of the cloud to expand its computational power and scope, and the organism grows. While it seems like there’s an intentional blurring of the line between the hardware/software itself, and the companies that use them to deliver the services, I think it’s fair to respond that a corporation is a fairly abstract entity, and if Google were able to do it’s job of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful with fewer employees and more computing power, its shareholders wouldn’t mind so long as the share price continued to rise. So such an organism could be viable as a company.

The final phase of the development towards something lifelike (or maybe even alive) would be self awareness, in which the Internet could map itselfs to determine whether the information it’s delivering comes form within or from without.

All of this, I suspect and hope, is still a few years away. So we don’t yet need upper-year university ethics courses on the proper and just treatment of packets and subroutines, but I find it gives a new perspective to my everyday internet-habits if I assume that each search I make, and every book I buy online, could be contributing, to an infinitessimal degree, to the creation and emergence of a new form of life; and that this process is happening in a surprisingly innocuous and organic way.

I look forward to reading your thoughts on this new approach to the global marketplace.

So how does it work, you ask? The site allows would be site developers to post a link to their website as well as a slogan up to 120 words and a 300 word description of the sites functionality. Also required are an explanation of why you think the site is the next “big thing”, as well as information about the creator, any funding received, the number of employees currently working on the site, whether the site has generated any revenues to date, and whether or not the developer is seeking investors. The administrators of KillerStartups.com will then select up to 15 sites per day which will be posted on the site and open for review. Reviewing the site is left up to internet users who give the site a numerical score as well as listing commentary and criticism.

Though the premise behind KillerStartups.com is quite clever, I find it wanting in terms of the actual commentary being put forth by users, which to this point seems overly simple and often lacking constructive information. Typical is feedback along the lines of, “I loved it”, or “A cool networking site”, which is important in that it relays that the site is being well received, however it provides the developer little with which they can use to improve the design or usability of their site. However, having your site posted on KillerStartups.com is a win no matter what the rated feedback, as any manner of exposure for a fledgling site can be beneficial, simply put, the more hits received, the better.

So were I to encounter the site posted on itself my rating would have to be as follows, “An excellent concept that fosters a collaborative online community, and seeks to create an environment where parties come together to shape the online landscape today and tomorrow. However, more rigid standards for online rating would ensure that feedback received is both relevant and constructive and not simply an all encompassing statement like, ‘way cool’ or ‘needs work’”. The idea behind the site is for developers to find out exactly what needs work, or what makes the site way cool, but the simple fact that KillerStartups.com exists is a positive step toward the increasingly collaborative vision of Web 2.0.

Having already launched a number of innovative projects that are increasing the transparency of the US government (including MapLight and Congresspedia) the Sunlight Foundation foundation believes it can help increase participation in the legislative process by providing a forum where all legislation proposals can be subject to open public review in real-time.

Some will argue that the legislative process in the US already invites input through a variety of channels. As our collaborator Beth Noveck notes in a forthcoming report for nGenera (not yet published, but watch this space):

Corporations participate through lobbyists and notice-and-comment rulemaking. NGOs funnel information to government through think tanks and their white papers and publications. Interest groups lobby and enlist their members to respond—usually with postcards and email—in rulemaking and legislative policymaking.

The problem is that the traditional “notice and comment” process tends to favor an entrenched machinery of lobbyists that represent well-connected and often deep-pocketed interests. How many ordinary citizens are even aware of the “notice and comment” periods and how many of those citizens will find the time and resoucres to make formal submissions? I’m guessing that the answer is very few.

So what is different about the more open and collaborative process that the Sunlight Foundation aspires to create with PublicMarkup.org? 

One, it provides a neutral forum in which to debate policy issues. Two, by collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, it makes participation in the legislative process more accessible to citizens. Three, PublicMarkup.org could conceivably evolve into a more robust platform for wiki-drafting, complete with tools for collectively filtering, rating and analyzing evidence, discussion forums for deliberation, and a wiki for drafting recommendations. Finally, by establishing a granular division of tasks (e.g., adding links, tagging and rating content, posting comments in a forum, drafting and editing recommendations, etc.), a collaborative process helps ensure that citizens with a limited amount of time can still make meaningful contributions to the process. 

It’s the group dynamics that ultimately set this new collaborative approach apart from the traditional processes for rulemaking.  In a conventional rulemaking process, atomized and often competitive groups submit comments that they hope will influence the legislative outcome. There is no incentive to compromise and there is often no dialogue whatsoever among the interest groups. When the period for comments is closed, it’s then up to a small group of public officials to sort through the commentary and reach a decision.

With a collaborative process, some of the burden of collecting, sorting, analyzing and drafting shifts to the public, leaving public officials in a position to steer and referree the process. An opportunity space opens up for deliberation, reflection and perhaps even compromise among multiple stakeholders.  

Here’s how Noveck put it in her forhcoming report:   

In a collaborative government, public participation is not pro forma.  Though the recommendations made by private citizens are not binding, they are taken as serious contributions to the decision-making process.  At the same time, collaboration assumes that stakeholders are qualified to make useful contributions to the subject- or industry-specific work of the agency.  As such, a government agency that solicits public feedback employs a system to evaluate the input of the self-selecting private citizen.  Only it is not the government agency that initially evaluates public feedback.  Initially, ratings and recommendations remain in the hands of private citizens.  Their recommendations are vetted by groups ancillary to the government agency.  These groups comprise the very individuals who have volunteered their expertise in the first place.  This alleviates some of the burden that participation outside of organizational boundaries creates for government officials.

Will PublicMarkup.org attract a critical mass of participants? And, will members of the US Congress actually pay attention? It seems unlikley that the latter will happen this time, but if the site evolves into a vital hub for policy debates with a diverse group of participants, then politicians will ignore forums like PublicMarkup at their peril.

What is a studbook? I’ll let the FAQ at Studbooks.org, answer that one:

A studbook is literally a register in which the origin (descent) and characteristics of the registered animals of one race or species are drawn up. In case of the ESF, this concerns a group of reptile and amphibian species. A studbook can arrange a number of things: management of an animal species in captivity, countering inbreeding by working with breeding programmes and knowledge collection and publication.
This means that the studbook keeper keeps track of which animals are being cared for at which location and which animals reproduce, the goal of this being to guarantee the genetic health of the population on the long term. Animals and their offspring can be exchanged between (aspiring) studbook members, with the studbook keeper possibly playing a mediating / advising role. The studbook keeper can be consulted if there are questions regarding the husbandry and breeding of the species.
Once a year, the studbook keeper publishes an annual report, in which mutations and successes of the past year are noted.

The FAQ also explains why studbooks are important:

Especially for species that are in danger of extinction (in captivity and/or in the wild), it is vitally important to keep the gene pool of the population as broad as possible. The smaller the population, the bigger the chance of risks that come with inbreeding. With every individual animal that dies in a small population (such as the European captive population), part of the genetic variation disappears that is necessary for a genetically healthy population. The same applies for an animal that does not reproduce: this individual is genetically `dead` for its populations future existence, unless an effort is made to breed with the individual.
The collection and transfer of knowledge means that an effort is made to collect, and eventually publish, as much information as possible about the husbandry and breeding of a studbook species. This way, one person can be consulted instead of `the wheel having to be reinvented` again and again.

In essence, through collaboration, these zoology “dating sites” can best match breeding pairs based on data captured in various sources and tabulated in a common space. Steve Feldman, spokesperson for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums which oversees the majority of studbooks for exotic species in the United States was quoted in the Sunday New York Times ”to paraphrase an old Jeff Foxworthy joke, it’s important that your family tree forks. This way we can have a genetically diverse population.”

Price comparison sites such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping already help users find the best deals by comparing retailers. However, most of these sites only include prices from online sources as opposed to physical stores. Some physical retailers have begun to put their inventory and price information online, however, comparison between them is usually cumbersome. (Not to mention the frequent inaccuracies)

Other forays into the physical world include Craigslist and eBay mashups which place real-estate, used cars and other goods on a map. These services are excellent in helping people locate things, but do little to make the markets for similar goods more efficient. Japan is one of the countries ahead of the curve. A shopper can use their mobile phone to scan QR codes on items like books and compare them to online retailers such as Amazon.

Perhaps the best example of sharing useful information on physical goods is GasBuddy.com, a website that compiles gas prices in the U.S and Canada. Volunteers text or go online to enter prices for gasoline and diesel at fuel stations in their area. The work of thousands of volunteers creates a price map that can be accessed online or though a mobile phone. Although this is unlikely to equalize gas prices across the country, local differences are less likely to persist. The maps also give analysts and regulators a better picture of the differentials across the country.

As the internet, and increasingly mobile technologies, allow people to compile information on various goods and services, the pricing power will slowly shift from sellers to buyers. Buyers in a given area essentially begin to act as one. This shift could have a profound effect on the retail industry.