I’m currently reading Jaron Lanier’s manifesto called “you are not a gadget”. While I find myself nodding along with some parts, and occasionally shaking my head at others, my most common reaction to each chapter is that I’ll need several months of quiet reflection to even form a coherent opinion (which, based on what I think I’ve read, is part of the point of his book). It is unquestionably the most thought provoking body of text that I have read this year – and I hope to respond to various parts of it, if and when thoughts hit me, over the coming months.

The part I’ve been thinking about most today is “The transition” section, within the “what will money be?” chapter (page 106). The general idea is to allow people to earn from their “bits” of contributions, such as photos, music, or articles. It’s posed in response to his (very valid) concerned that society is losing its way as the value of “bits” people contribute trends towards zero in the marketplace, and all the rewards (if any) go to the people that aggregate them. If this continues, there will be fewer and fewer bits to aggregate, of worse and worse quality, in a continuous downward spiral that could have disastrous long-term consequences. He explains the consequences, and proposes a few ideas on how to avoid them – but you can read about those in the book.

Why I find this, (and Jaron’s book in general) so interesting is that it’s challenging the new orthodoxy of “the wisdom of mobs”, working in conjunction with powerful algorithms, is superior to the judgment and intelligence of individuals. At first glance, one my primary research areas – prosumer-driven innovation, or customer co-creation – we seem to be right in his line of fire. But as I’ve studied it over the years, my thinking on the subject lines up directly with Jaron more often than not (I think).

This research area was born out of the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. As the sub-title of the book is “how mass collaboration changes everything”, the idea is often viewed as synonymous with the “wisdom of crowds”. But I’ve went to great lengths over the years to explain how this common interpretation of this is often misguided. It’s often not about a “crowd” collaborating in any meaningful way; instead, it’s about finding the few uniquely qualified minds within the crowd that are both willing and able to make an important contribution. While not a prosumerism example per se, the first story in the book – GoldCorp – is a great example of this. Rob McEwen didn’t enable mass collaboration. He opened up the data about his property in hopes of finding those few people in the world that might know the best way to find the gold. That’s a very big difference.

Such contest models have their own problems built into them, as Lanier references regularly in his book. But at least they point towards some sort of financial compensation for the people that have the best “bits” to contribute, and have very little to do with the problem associated with the “wisdom of mobs.” This indicates a very different set of opportunities, and potential problems. The key challenge, then, is to adapt the model to instances where it’s not a “winner takes all” contest – one where a larger number of people can be rewarded for contributing “bits” to the creation of a new product or service.

I’ve been hypothesizing about this, and waiting for signs that it’s happening, for many years. While much of my research focus has recently been on marketing (which also puts me on the bad side of much of what Lanier talks about), my academic background is in economics – and I have a strong belief that financial compensation for contributors and creators is absolutely vital to the long-term success any prosumer-driven models. But examples of it actually working have been few and far between. That is why I’ve taken a relatively keen interest in Quirky – which I just recently discovered.

Quirky is a platform for social production, founded by Ben Kaufman. The core idea is fairly simple. If you have an idea for a new product, you can submit it to the site (for $99 – which presumably provides a decent “filter” for idea submissions). Each week, a winner is selected (through some combination of community votes and design team input). It then moves into the “influence” phase, where the community can weigh in on everything from specific product design to the logo representing it. Once this phase is completed, it’s handed over to Quirky’s industrial designers and mechanical engineers to create a 3D render. Next up is the pre-sell phase, where a minimum number of purchase commitments must be made before the company invests in moving it into production. If that threshold is met, it then moves into production – hopefully allowing many of the people to cash in.

Why I say “many” is that Quirky currently allocates 30% of revenue from direct sales, and 10% from indirect sales, to the community. What exactly the allocation will be is hard to say (and the company is likely still figuring out the best way to do it), but some “ingredients” include submitting the winning idea (or name, logo, etc.), making insightful comments, voting, rating, and committing to pre-sales. All of this activity is rolled up into an “influence percentage”, which is used to distribute the money. The rest goes to the company itself, which as I referenced above does a lot of the heavy lifting in actually turning an idea into a market-ready product.

Now whether Quirky itself will succeed, I (nor anyone, in my opinion) can really say. I think the biggest challenge comes in terms of scale. As one might expect, the examples provided on the site (to show how much money can be made) typically involve two key assumptions – lots of products are sold, and your individual influencer percentage is high. The end result is lots of money for your effort. Obviously not everyone’s influencer percentage can be high. As (hopefully, for the company) more and more people engage, each individual’s potential influencer percentage might decline further still (in relation to effort applied). If the percentages are small, the potential rewards are low – and thus much of the incentive to engage evaporates.

But at minimum, it’s an interesting idea, and I believe such experiments are critically important to the evolution of web enabled, and prosumer driven, business models. Someday, someone is going to figure it out. And what I find most intriguing is that, at its core, Quirky appears to be trying to find a way to reward individuals for their “bits” of contribution – which I think is absolutely key to making this web-enabled world work, and appears to be something that Lanier might approve of. But the process by which they are figuring out how to do it, which will likely involve layering some sort of algorithm on top of what looks like a “winner takes all” competition platform, seems to be tie directly to approaches he typically disproves of (or not – I’m sure there’s many nuances in the book I’ll have to re-read to capture).

So I’ll personally wait and see – and perhaps even engage in the community to get a real feel for how it works, and whether my own mind is uniquely qualified enough to add value anywhere. But in the end, I’m hoping both Lanier and Kaufman are right – there are ways to reward people for the bits they contribute, and this can be done within the context of a social production model.

This one is worth it: “What is the value of your brand?” by Uwe Hook, co-founder and CEO of BatesHook. He makes so much sense so often, I just kept nodding my head. The essence for me is this: A company’s values motivate, energize, engage, and reward the people that work there. A mismatch of an employee’s and the company’s values make work “work.” People who do something they love every day are not working; they are living. I particularly like these thoughts from Uwe:

“After the multitude of bubbles have burst, shareholder value and making money for the sake of money doesn’t feel that good anymore. And consumers are craving institutions that care and give back. This and the age of product parity lead to an avalanche of brands that suddenly care, that support businesses in making positive change, try to rebrand themselves as green or just transform communities around the world (right after they almost destroyed the whole financial system).

“Most of this comes across as advertising, not as a commitment. Because it’s not rooted in real values, we are starting to deal with caring parity: Suddenly everybody cares for the wrong reason. (emphasis mine) Consumers want us to care, let’s care. Brands purely jumping on the caring bandwagon are missing out on a huge opportunity: Stand for something. Have values. And express yourself as an organization based on these values.”

I can’t help but think of the swarming now to social media by companies not really committed to the value of the relationship with the customer. I read an interesting interview with Magic Johnson, head of Magic Johnson Enterprises, in Knowledge @ Emory. This quote from Johnson stuck with me: “You have to know your customer and you have to speak to that customer every day.” Social media are an excellent way to accomplish this, but, when customers get the sense they are being used or sold to more than listened to, social media are also an excellent way to turn conversations into sales pitches and turn customers and prospects into former customers and disinterested prospects. Johnson’s Magic Johnson Enterprises web site repeats a mantra for the company on the home page: “We Are The Communities We Serve.” The first part of the message is clear; the last word is the message. If social media serve the customer, the company wins.

Observing and discussing the events of everyday life has been in existence for a long while. In the Mughal courts, Akbar held a Diwan-i-Aam, where the common man was more or less free to put forth their concerns and hear about the rules that governed them. In fact up until, newspapers arrived in the seventeenth century (Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien,1605) reporting and observation were simultaneous and were the purview of the general public.

As journalism grew, it transformed from the crowd and into a specialized, organized collaborative group of people that banded together to report on vagaries of government and the elite.

“A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies, irrepressible, incalculable.” Edmund Burke, French Revolution (1837)

Though it started out as strict reporting of what was observed, it did not take long to transform in to a platform by which journalists sought to cast their own opinions on the events they saw. As they gained freedom from censorship, the ability to cast their opinion, write stories in a fashion that would support the viewpoint they espoused, gave them enormous control of the prevalent public opinion. Gradually this group grew to take on the characteristics of the class they reported on, they became large, resource rich and influential conglomerates.

“in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.” Thomas Carlyle, 1841

Then arose the critics. The public began viewing them with the same distrust that they held for the government and other big businesses. As it became clear that the free media was not necessarily so, the public turned to a new phenomenon, the internet. Blogs such as the Huffington Post sprang up as sources of ‘real news’ and since have grown to cause a serious dent in the readership of the established news media. Blogs, crowd sourced citizen journalism and the abundance of data on the internet gave the public insight and let them form their own opinions rather than have to rely on newspapers.

As it stands, crowd sourced news is here to stay. Now that initiatives have arisen that promote crowd sourced citizen journalism and even provide a revenue stream, this new model can be seen as a way to regain the public’s trust.

More importantly however, the proliferation of these crowd and collaboration centric signals a return to journalism to what it started out a being; common public freely viewing the goings on of those actions that affect them, on a real-time basis with little to no intermediaries to influence their observations.

Going forward, the adoption of community funded websites like Outside.in and Spot.us into the mainstream would solidify this last link and complete the cycle, as it would give a revenue stream while promoting news that is relevant, true and (for the most part) local.

On the internet, however, these common tools are either unavailable or extremely hard to convey. For example, consider these variations of 1 sentence:

“Ever seen a polar bear?” vs. “Ever seen a polar bear?”

On its own, it seems to be a plain, if odd, query. Italicized and bold font clarifies the stress placed on a particular word and gives the message a depth of meaning not previously available. Similarly, happiness or sadness is conveyed via ‘emoticons’ or a side-ways smiley face [e.g. , , :O etc]. Inflection and tone can be conveyed by specifying the tone in brackets or maybe typing in capitals.

As you can imagine, such additions take time, effort and are as a result, often left out. Also, given that status updates on Facebook or Twitter are not something people generally want to be very verbose, these little additions are generally omitted or assumed to be apparent.

In my view, there is a fairly simple way to get around both, the ambiguity and the effort needed to enrich online communication.

My answer: Colour Code the commentary.

This is based on the assumption that certain colours are universally associated with certain moods, tones and emotions – red is anger/stop, white is peace, green is go. Essentially – a simple algorithm that would automatically change the background or a strip on the side of a comment as certain phrases are used.

According to me the following benefits flow from such functionality:

• Readers get a richer picture at a glance
• Greater probability that readers correctly interpret the message
• Speed of communication increases since readers don’t necessarily need to read every word
• It would be invaluable for those who are looking to gauge the response to a product launch article
• It would reduce, possibly eliminating, the ‘noise’ in comments sections. This noise arises from people having to clarify their intended message as people try to decide whether you are being sarcastic, funny or facetious.
• It would be like emotion mining – in real time, upfront and open.

To kick off the discussion (and possibly such a development…are you listening wordpress?);

below are some color systems in existence today (notice they follow fairly similar lines)

Robert Plutchick: EMOTION – A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis
Mood Ring Convention
Colour Therapy (Modified. Original here)

I continue to follow Motley Fool closely, and wanted to point readers towards a recent interview (on Forbes) with co-founder Tom Gardner. There are three particular elements I believe should be interesting to Wikinomics readers – their community approach to developing investment ideas (which started in 1994), the meritocratic approach to their Caps community (as opposed to a democracy or “pure” wisdom of crowds), and the importance of transparency.

The first comes in response to the third question, which was focused on what distinguishes them from their competitors. Key quote:

“…we brought that subject to the Internet in 1994 and we did so by basically saying, “We want to hear your ideas. We want to talk together. We want to learn together.” And we’ve ended up attracting a lot of very bright minds to The Motley Fool.”

The meritocratic approach is described in detail on the second page. There’s interesting comments riddled throughout his response, including the fact that not only does the bottom 25% have no influence on rankings, they thought of making them a negative indicator before deciding that was too mean. But the key quote for me was:

“The difference for CAPS is it’s actually wisdom in the crowds because it’s a meritocracy. It’s not one person, one vote. We’re weighting it toward the better players. So the system can’t really be gamed. And what I’ve learned is that top quintile is very much worth studying. I mean, our five-star stocks have dramatically outperformed the market. One-star stocks have dramatically lost to the market. And so I take the five-star rating on our CAPS system quite seriously.”

Finally, the issue of transparency comes up towards the end of the second page. Key quote:

“So, transparency, even if we didn’t believe in it, the very nature of having an open community, which must be a shock to Wall Street system, the idea that your customers can talk to each other, and you actually want them to do so. It’s, we can’t hide, and we don’t want to hide.”

There are many other interesting tidbits riddled throughout the interview, so I strongly recommend Wikinomics readers take a look – particularly if they have an interest in investing.

Appearing recently before hearings of the House of Commons industry committee, Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion, urged the federal government to intervene to avoid the loss to foreign control of technology he called “a national treasure.”  RIM would like to acquire the assets.

He told Members of Parliament that allowing the sale to proceed and having Canadians lose control of Nortel’s next-generation wireless patents would be similar to Canada’s notorious decision to cancel development of the Avro Arrow aircraft in 1959.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a member of the RIM board of directors, said the government didn’t appreciate how bare-knuckle the global marketplace can be.  He likened Canadians to being well-meaning but sometimes ineffectual boy scouts.

Bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp. is auctioning off its assets to pay what it can to creditors. A key component of those assets is valuable intellectual property related to the next-generation wireless standard, known as long-term evolution, or LTE. Those intellectual property assets were created by Nortel with millions of dollars of support from Canadian taxpayers through the Scientific Research Tax Credit program.

Sophisticated participants in the global wireless market who identified desirable intellectual property in Canadian hands came bidding for those assets with their chequebooks wide open. As a strategist, I absolutely would have encouraged them to do what they did. In the end, Swedish telecom giant Ericsson was the winner of the court-sponsored auction, gaining licensing rights to Nortel’s 125 LTE patents, though not ownership of the patents.

However, had crucial Swedish telecom intellectual property been up for sale instead, there would be no chance that any foreign company would have even have had a sniff at it, let alone get $300-million in financing for it (as Export Development Canada offered to Nokia Siemens Networks in its failed bid for the Nortel assets). And that’s because the Swedish economic policy leaders aren’t boy scouts.

The time is now – right now – for the Canadian government to step up to the plate and use the Investment Canada Act review provisions to demonstrate that, like the leaders of Canada’s great global companies, it has graduated from scout status to being a full partner in global competitiveness.

The sale should not proceed.

I’m no fan, but the mainstream appeal is clear: the video has almost 13,000,000 views. I’ll allow Wired.com to explain what happened next:

On YouTube’s business blog, technical account manager Chris LaRosa and music partner manager Ali Sandler describe how Chris Brown and Sony Music managed to capitalize on the 12 million-plus times people have watched the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video, which shows Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party boogieing down to the Chris Brown song “Forever.”

“The rights holders for ‘Forever’ used [YouTube's content management tools] to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes,” they wrote. Not only did the song rise to No. 4 in the iTunes music store and No. 3 on Amazon, partly as a result of YouTube’s links, but Sony and Chris Brown also collect a share of revenue from Google’s text ads on the page itself.

The wedding video is inspiring people to click through from YouTube to Amazon and iTunes at twice the normal rate, according to LaRosa and Sandler. And the effect appears to be spreading to YouTube’s official music video page for the song, where they say the click-thru rate has increased 250 percent over the past week.

And the kicker:

Unfortunately the newlyweds depicted in the video aren’t making any money from the video’s millions of views, which would have surely helped defray their wedding and honeymoon costs. YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Neilsen confirmed that Sony is the one monetizing the video, and that the people depicted in the video are not part of the revenue equation.

This is very frustrating. Worse still is YouTube’s prideful gloating about finally monetizing a video.

Sony’s implicit logic is that because that they own the rights to the music they could have the video removed. Since it remains online by their good graces alone, they are entitled to all click-through revenue that the video generates.

This makes sense legally (it shouldn’t) and is exactly the kind of arrogance I expect from Sony. It’s also a terrible way to engender consumer loyalty. The increased Chris Brown sales would not exist were it not for the video. Taking advantage of content creators and then leaving them out in the cold is not a viable long-term strategy. If users feel that their work is going to be leveraged by others to great effect, they’ll stop sharing it.

An even more egregious example of the one-way flow of content control was South Park’s Internet Meme episode. Viacom felt entirely within its rights to take the likeness of iconic Internet/YouTube celebrities and use them in the episode to generate ad revenue. If those same Internet celebrities uploaded clips of the episodes that featured their claims to fame to their own YouTube channels they would receive takedown notices. This is completely unfair.

Both of these are examples of a larger issue at play which is tightly knit with copyright law. The use and compensation surrounding content between individuals and media companies is not bidirectional. YouTube is not only complacent, but jubilant at the prospect of allowing its users to be exploited. And worst of all, I had to listen to a Chris Brown song to write this post.

Something has to change.

The main problem is that people who contract such viruses are contagious before their symptoms become visible, making it extremely difficult to determine that a person has caught the virus before they transmit it to others. The Japanese government has recognized this issue as one of the main challenges in fighting potential pandemic and has planned an experiment to see if Japan’s advanced internet and cellular phone infrastructure can be used to help address the issue. As elementary schools are one of the main breeding grounds for contagious illness, the experiment will begin by giving each of the students at a particular elementary school a GPS-enabled cell phone and ‘infecting’ a few children with a fictitious virus. The students’ movements will then be tracked, and the parents of any children that have come in contact with infected students will be advised to take their child to a doctor so that students that do contract the virus can be diagnosed much faster, thus preventing them from spreading the virus any further. Due to the exponential nature in which viruses spread, even a small decrease in the amount of people infected by each carrier of the virus will have a major impact.

Although using GPS to track interactions can only inform people of possible infection and cannot predict the actual spreading of the virus, this strategy has the potential to be effective in slowing the spread of highly contagious viruses that warrant such extreme action. Equipped with the information that they have been exposed to such a virus, people can check with their doctors to ensure that if they have contracted the virus, they will be treated and not spread it further. Whether the health system could handle an influx of checkups in such a situation is a concern, but it is certainly better than dealing with a full-blown outbreak.

Despite the potential that this experiment has to lead to a strategy that could drastically reduce the spreading of an epidemic, the idea that the government could track people’s locations has caused great concern and cries of “Big Brother”. Privacy is a concern that many have when it comes to the internet, but most often, the discussions of privacy revolve around the danger of predators and the concern that corporations are gaining too much personal information about consumers. When it comes to fighting a serious epidemic though, the consequences of inaction are much greater and location information could be the best defence we have.

Many of our ideas about organizations and leaders were formed at a time when the primary operational challenge was one of getting people to perform tasks consistently and reliably. We leveraged best practices to achieve a uniform approach. We required that everyone be present in the same place and time, in some cases to get the work done, but at a minimum to allow us to gauge performance by watching in-process activities.

But more and more of the work that differentiates our businesses today depends on divergent or creative activities. Our challenge is one of creating environments that encourage people to become engaged, to take initiative, invest discretionary effort in a wide variety of collaborative activities, and, as a result, develop new approaches and ideas, provide extraordinary customer service, or ramp productivity. Think of this challenge as one of setting the stage, creating an environment that engages players from multiple constituencies. It is a “pull” rather than “push” approach to achieving business results.

Does your organization have the processes and practices, the leadership skills and the relationships among participants that you’ll need? Do you have the capacity to collaborate?

Over the last several years, our research has identified the characteristics of organizations that are successful at collaborative activity. With extensive data from teams from around the world, we identified ten factors that are highly correlated with successful collaboration:

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
2. Trust-based relationships
3. Prevalence of networking opportunities
4. Collaborative hiring, development, and promotion practices
5. Organizational philosophy supporting “community of adults”
6. Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
7. Executive role models for collaboration
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
9. Well-defined individual roles and responsibilities
10. Important, challenging tasks

Investing in these ten enabling factors builds an organization’s Collaborative Capacity – its ability and willingness to share information, ideas and insights productively. Conversely, productive collaboration is unlikely to occur is these factors are not in place. A journey to leverage the benefits of collaboration in your business must begin with assessing and, as necessary, building your organization’s Collaborative Capacity.

Think of this like beginning a manufacturing business. One fundamental question you would face is whether you have the right manufacturing capacity. Do you have the right facility? Is it well-maintained? Do you have the right permits and disposal mechanisms in place? And so on. These questions would be the foundation required before you begin any specific manufacturing process.

Or, think of it like assessing the talent in your firm. Most of you probably do an annual review of your workforce, asking: Do we have enough people to deliver? Do they have the right skills and training? Are they engaged?

Assessing your Collaborative Capacity is similar to these two analogies. Do you have the beliefs, processes, behaviors – the things our well-grounded research has shown to have a statistically valid correlation to collaboration – in place as a foundation upon which to build?

In upcoming posts, I’ll share ways you can assess your organization’s Collaborative Capacity and some of the approaches successful companies are using to enhance these factors in their organizations.

Becoming a Collaborative Enterprise won’t just happen. Many of today’s processes and practices – and the culture within many organizations – are not ready to reap the benefits that the new collaboration can provide. The ability to collaborate can be a powerful competitive advantage – but doing it successfully requires the right organizational context.

If you’re interested in learning more about tools to assess or build your organization’s Collaborative Capacity, please let us know.

Star Wars fans—and they are still legion, despite over 20 years of nonstop setbacks—fondly remember a sequence in The Empire Strikes Back on the planet Hoth, an arid wasteland characterized by deadly sub-freezing temperatures. In order to save Luke Skywalker from certain death, Hans Solo carves opens the dead carcass of a Tauntaun (described on the Star Wars “Wookieepedia” as an “omnivorous reptomammal” that the Rebel Alliance used for transport) with his Lightsaber and tucks his little buddy inside. Sure, it stinks to high heaven, but nestled under the Tauntaun’s thick skin and warm intestines, Luke is saved from a grim fate.

ThinkGeek’s April Fool’s joke was the unveiling of the Tauntaun sleeping bag, a plush replica of the beast featuring a “built-in embroidered Tauntaun head pillow,” “a glowing Lightsaber zipper pull,” and “the exact synthetic compounds needed to recreate Tauntaun fur.” Funny, right? Because who would want to sleep inside an animal’s, smelly intestines? Answer: The many, many people eager to fork out $39.99, that’s who!

ThinkGeek is now trying to actually produce said device and is negotiating with LucasFilm for the rights. It should fit in well with their other products such as the Star Wars Cookbooks, the R2-D2 trashcan and the Darth Vader USB Hub. And nothing says joie de vivre like a Yoda plush backpack.

The best comment from A.V. Club is by “Hack”, who says “Wow, an idea that was too stupid to fail. Someone deserves to be fired, then receive a huge bonus.”

From ancient philosophers to modern day journalists, the rules of engagement for discourse and collaboration have always been hot topics. In ancient times mass collaboration was limited to communities building churches, discussion in public squares, or monks taking turns to painstakingly write text. Today, in addition to facilitating public debate online, mass collaboration has the ability to build robust and super efficient software. Collaboration is central to Day Software’s ethos. Not only is Day Software born through mass collaboration but its software has social collaboration central to its user experience. We also embrace collaboration with our competitors. The last area is one I want to focus on for this post.

Last month we collaborated with one of our key competitors, Nuxeo, in order to advance an industry standard, which will benefit the content management industry as a whole. We used the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as our neutral “workspace”. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of Open Source software projects.

That word “community” is key.We teamed up with Nuxeo to advance the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard via Apache. CMIS is designed to benefit the growing number companies that need to securely manage a wide variety of online and offline content from different applications in a central hub. This is just one of many projects that Day collaborates with their peers via Apache. On the Jackrabbit project, numerous vendors leverage the community-driven efforts of building a standardized Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repository based on open standards

Despite our competitive differences, both Nuxeo and Day share the same collaborative Open Source mindset that is central and unique to the ASF. In contrast to the more onerous General Public Licence (GPL) model, The ASF model lowers the legal and creative barriers for commercial collaboration and innovation. When you sign up to Apache your day job (excuse the pun) is irrelevant. It’s an environment ancient philosophers would be proud of; the Apache community is working together, openly, equally, without bias and everyone’s contribution is valid.

Open Source is beneficial specifically because it is not proprietary. That means that the user is not locked in to any one vendor. In community Open Source, if a given vendor were to stop innovating, the community can take the product forward. Apache enforces a simple rule: new concepts under incubation do not graduate until there is a proper community that is not beholden to any one vendor. Apache also enforces the principle benefit of Open Source: no one vendor is responsible for driving or inhibiting innovation. Innovation happens.

Commercial Open Source firms – the ones driving much press these days – do not always follow this model. For many commercial Open Source firms, community and collaboration with their peers does not happen. This limits the benefits of the Open Source model, because while the software is accessible, true participation and joint collaboration does not happen.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, collaboration actually helps us to win marketshare and revenue. By serving up the basic product interoperability that developers and customers demand, collaboration frees up our time to focus on unique customer and market driven product innovations and invest more time in services and support. We are not afraid to say we are reaping the rewards of being a collaborative company. Open Source can provide the basis for a robust and profitable business model.

For us Open Source is proving to be a very strong, yet flexible backbone for our business. This should serve as an example to other technology companies that being Open Source is of benefit both to your customers, product development and profitability. The more competitors that join the Open Source community, the better all our products and services will be.

In turn, today I wanted to go back and re-visit what is probably my very favorite example of Wikinomics in action- Motley Fool (investment advice), which launched the Motley Fool Beta Caps community in the Spring of 2006. It’s a site that represents how a company with a “traditional” business model can embrace the principles of wikinomics, community and collaboration in a very thoughtful way – while actually making money in the process. The key is that they have used the insights from their community to enhance their core value proposition, rather than replacing it. (Note: you can read Don’s original post about it from December 2006 here).

So some people believe in the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which says everything that is collectively known about a stock is already priced into it – thus you cannot beat the market, which is the ultimate example of the “wisdom of crowds” in action. But many investors think otherwise (such as the most famous of all, Warren Buffett), and it’s important to remember that on the stock market opinions are weighted by capital – the “vote” of somebody managing a $100 Billion pension fund counts for a lot more than mine.

The Motley Fool is clearly not a believer the EMH, and built a business selling investment newsletters – basically their expert stock picks, which tend to focus on companies out of favor with the large funds and popular analysts. Given they were/are selling this unique expertise, one might think they would be highly resistant to any notion that a community – or the “wisdom of crowds” – might be able to identify the best stocks, as it could theoretically crush their business model (i.e. why by a newsletter when you can get the best ideas for free?). There are many, many companies that have reacted just that way to wikinomics-type developments. But instead, Motley Fool decided to embrace the notion, launching the aforementioned Caps Community in the Spring of 2006.

This community now represents the aggregated intelligence of some 130,000 investors (according to the press releases – it looks more like 60,000 on the site, with a subset of that being very active). The heart of this intelligence is a transparent stock picking process – when you picked it, at what price, and what you expected to happen, over a given time frame, with some description of why if you so choose. All if this information can be aggregated by user, by groups of users, and by the community at large. And the beauty of this community is that the knowledge created, and how it is shared, can be valuable to every investor – no matter what their mindset. This is something people often miss.

True believer in the “wisdom of crowds”? Obviously what the crowds is saying is of interest to you so you can do the same. Believer in the “madness of crowds”? Well then, it’s in your best interest to know what they’re thinking, so you can do the opposite. Believe that only a couple of people are likely to be great stock pickers? Then you can check out the top performers on the site over time – a luxury hardly available with (say) most mutual funds. If you want to get a feel for some of the different ways to slice the data, check out the Top Tens Lists page.

But that’s just within the community itself. Where Motley Fool gets really interesting, to me, is the tie-in back to their investment newsletter service. Every abundance creates a new scarcity, and the abundance of information available on Caps highlights the scarcity of time – it takes a lot of time to sift through all of that information on a regular basis. Moreover, my sense is that most investors are likely still a little hesitant to bet their retirements on the information from the community – whether it’s the crowd, EveryDayInvestor (the top-rated Fool), or some sub-group in between. Even with track records established, reading through the generally VERY short explanations for why particular stocks are chosen can give you pause – and we’re talking life-changing decisions here.

This is where the company itself jumps in, melding the community intelligence into their own offerings. Their staff regularly write blog posts and news stories that highlight potentially interesting stocks based on a combination of their own research, and the wisdom of the CAPs community. This one is a typical example – 5 Stocks Making Cash. They looked for companies generating free cash flow growth of 25% annually over 5 years, and cross referenced it with a intelligence of the CAPS community to generate a list of 5 potentially interesting stocks. They then provide a brief overview of one or two, while disclosing any of their own holdings. Similarly, you can check out their “4-Star stocks poised to pop” published on MSNBC a week ago, and many others can easily be found.

Wait a second you say – that’s still free information! Well yes, but it is fairly limited (they’ve done a little of the heavy lifting of sorting through the community intelligence for you), and very little context is provided. If you read through 100s of such stories and posts (as I have), you’ll note that most highly encourage you to use them as a base for your own research – or alternatively play somewhere between $79 and $199 for a newsletter that will do it for you. A typical example would be their Motley Fool Inside Value, which offers up two new ideas a month, and continuing, detailed coverage of all past picks. The more time you spend on the site, from my experience, the more interesting this offer is.

So if you tie it all together, it’s a compelling mixture. The community itself is valuable to the members, but also generates a lot of intelligence for the firm to leverage (and keeps potential customers coming back again and again). Those that never buy a thing  (preferring to do it all themselves) likely didn’t before either, and would be engaged with a different company if Motley Fool hadn’t done this, so there’s not much of a loss there – and there’s at least some advertising revenue here, plus the value of their contributions for everyone else. All the while, anyone that is a little hesitant to just taking that community intelligence on it’s own, or are too time starved to effectively do it, has the opportunity to pay a relatively small amount to have the rest of the heavy lifting done for them. <$200 a year is a mere pittance compared to, say, a 2.5% MER for most investors the Motley Fool would target. Pretty cool set-up.

Of course, the REALLY big underlying message here is that the Motley Fool better be damn good at what it does – this is all very transparent, so the whole model breaks down if the picks aren’t good. Simple as that. According to their comparison chart, Motley Fool does (and I feel more comfortable with it then other comparisons I’ve seen done in the past). And as far as I can tell, it’s one of the best examples of how a company can take all of this community and collaboration stuff to really enhance an already strong value proposition in a compelling way.

(Full Disclosure: I remain a “lurker” on the Motley Fool Site, after briefly testing out being a community member and deciding it wasn’t for me for various reasons. I am currently conducting an experiment where I purchase – with real money – stocks that emerge from some of these posts that meet 4 criteria: price has crashed recently, the story sounds logical and makes sense to me, it has CAPS community support, and one of the newsletters discloses ownership. I’m comparing the results to advice I steal/ borrow from the likes of Warren Buffett, The Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan, John Dorfman, and a variety of others. If it performs well, I will very likely become a subscriber to at least one newsletter, strictly because of the time issue).

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.)

Exploration
The real-world is … brimming full of people and places that you will never have a chance to meet or see, but this shouldn’t bother you because a lot of these people you would never want to visit or meet anyways due to opposite interests. Similarly, the Internet is a free for all of good site meets bad site, good person meets bad person, and personally relevant meets irrelevant – it’s the world wide web – you’re not expected to see everything, meet everyone, and do everything … it’s simply too big and you’d never have the time, money or attention for everything that’s out there. On the Internet you discover something new every day. Whatever it is that you discover tends to come your way via. targeted search, advertisements or serendipitous exploration. This is true of the real-world also, and so too is the reality that the most powerful drivers of online referrals are personal in nature, from people who you know and trust. In the end, what you end up finding is normally not even what you set out to search for in the first place.

More discussion below.

Forming Relationships
The Internet is … an informal network of both strong and loose interpersonal links. Why you care about who you know online depends on what they bring to the virtual table and the meaningful exchanges that take place between you and another person. In the real-world, the people who you know-of, but tend never to get-to-know, are your loose network. The fact that you see them every day and say “hi” when you walk by, but never anything more, doesn’t mean you’re friends … it just means that you’re capable of being friends… maybe. Casual communications (in-person) and boosting your ‘friend count’ (online) will only get you so far, but action (or lack of) will bring you together, and keep you apart.

Game Playing
The real world is … full of people, and as humans, we are naturally social. One of the ways in which people socialize is through sports or game-playing, which often incorporates elements of physical reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination, constant and long-term training, competition, and of course, teamwork and cooperation. Top sports players are 1 in 100. Once people are online, we’re thirsty consumers of entertainment, and one of the most active and online spaces for this is in the world of multiplayer and massively multiplayer (virtual worlds) games. Online gaming is a flourishing industry and it shares many similar traits to real-world sports, clubs/teams, and the surrounding fan-based community. Popular online games range from first-person shooters, to poker, to text-based games, and an elite core of competitive players emerges in most communities, some playing more than 100 hours a week (“MOM, i’m not playing…i’m training!”). Most games are driven by their competitive spirit, wanting you or your team to win, and the tangible or intangible benefits within the community, from cash prizes, to awards and informal reputation.

Shopping
The real world is … an always-on hub of activity related to commerce and personal purchases. When you see something you want, you carefully compare every item on sale, shopping at multiple stores, and often come back to the one with the best price, user and customer experience. Similar principles apply to an online retail environment. When you see something you want, you search around for the website with the best deals, but you pay just as much attention to the surrounding variables. An unattractive or poorly designed website indicates a potentially shady dealer, just like a cracked and sun-faded sign does for any physical property – it cries “stay away.” Similarly, online dealers that tend to get the best rating feedback, and the most personal referrals, are those that treat their customers fairly, with respect, and deliver goods in a timely fashion. Even more-so than in the real-world, online shoppers are happy to share stories of a good customer experience, and even happier to mass-distribute a story of a customer-experience story gone bad.

One final note – I don’t consider these described actions as any major shock – in truth, many of these examples follow conventions established socially in the real-world. In the end our perceptions are based on the behaviors we see when interacting with others in both the physical and virtual world. On this final note, I’d like to emphasize that since we can’t visually see other people in the virtual world, it’s important to recognize that the people behind the keyboard are changing too. As we discuss in our research, issues of technology, globalization and communication, among others, are strongly tied to the people who play in the global sandbox and the makup of these people across the world are constantly changing (also known as demographics). It’s interesting to think about how the Internet too will change over time as a byproduct of the changing composition of people using it across the world. In what ways? Who knows!

Joining me on stage were Webby-winning blogger Neil Pasricha of 1000awesomethings.com, founder of GovLoop.com (the online social network for the US government) Steve Ressler, word of mouth guru and social networker extraordinaire Sean Moffitt, Community Leader of the Globe & Mail Mathew Ingram, and Simon Pulsifer a leader of the Wikipedia community (he has made more than 1000, edits).

It was a wonderful discussion. For highlights, please visit #nGenInsight on Twitter.

There’s a couple really neat elements to this. First, the majority of all translations in this project are staffed by volunteers…

These volunteers have doubtless, seen a particular video and thought, “I want to help share this with the world.” Currently there are video translations in over 40 languages, and more than 1100 volunteer translators. All translations are peer-reviewed for accuracy, and are expected to follow a style guide for consistency across video translations. From an incentive perspective, volunteers are provided with recognition for their work, and can even create translator profiles in order to build up a TED identity, where their contributions are tracked. This is an entirely sustainable project because the workforce/volunteers benefit from getting involved, and this involvement is made easy using technology that simplifies the process. Benefits include the inherent satisfaction from translating a video discussion you’re interested in, as well as the professional reward of contributing to the well known and esteemed TED community.

What impresses me about this project, is not just the scope, but the way in which it uses technology in a simple and effective way to help so many people across the world. From a technical standpoint, here is what is in TED’s first May release (from the TED website):

Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter’s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.

The initial launch incorporates:

• Subtitles on every talk (available in English and any translated language)
• Interactive transcript (available in English and any translated language)
• Language-specific index pages featuring all the talks translated in that language
• Translations for headlines and talk descriptions
• The Translator Dashboard, allowing a bird’s-eye view on talks available for translation or review
• My Translations: a personalized page within each translator’s member profiles that shows the translations to which a translator has contributed
• Ability to sync user accounts between TED and dotSUB, allowing seamless transfer of data for translators

Perhaps what I like most about this project, is that TED is only the beginning – this ‘opening up’ of the world’s knowledge can only gain momentum and spread in other applicable settings. My colleague, Daniela Kortan, recently discussed Academic Earth in the context of a discussion on how the model for learning is changing. Academic Earth and other similar offerings can look to what TED is doing here, and say “that is the way, this is the direction for the future, so that we too can more effectively share our knowledge.” As we in society begin to better equip people with the tools to more effectively learn, more and more people will gain access to the same wealth of knowledge, inspiration, and a world-changing resource – information. Because, as we all know, knowledge is power.

Directed by Ivo Gormley, the film explores how the web is changing the many ways in which we can organize ourselves. From a democratic football club where the fans pick the team to a lending service where everyone can be a bank manager, Us Now brings together the leading thinkers in the field of participation and web culture to describe how mass collaboration could change society. As the co-author of Wikinomics:  How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, I was asked by Ivo Gormley to participate.

The UK documentary had its North American premiere 2½ months ago in Toronto.  One of many attending the premiere was Ruby Ku, a self-described 20-something SciBus student at the University of Waterloo.  Ruby was good enough to track down the URLs for many groups featured in the film:

1. School of Everything – a website that helps people who want to learn meet up with people who want to teach.
2. Zopa – a market place where people lend and borrow money to and from each other, sidestepping the banks.
3. Couchsurfing – a worldwide network making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit; participate in a better world, one couch at a time.
4. The People Speak – a campaign to engage young people on the global issues that will shape their future – an initiative from the United Nations Foundation.
5. Slice The Pie – a music financing company that aggregates thousands of people’s opinions about upcoming bands and allows fans to invest in producing albums.
6. MyFootballClub – join members from over 80 countries who own Ebbsfleet United and vote on all key decisions from team selection to financial budgets.
7. Mumsnet – a social enterprise + community of parents sharing their know-hows on the net and meeting up in real-life.
8. Open Everything – global conversation about the art, science, and the spirit of “open.”

It would be great to see the documentary go viral.  If you haven’t seen the film, please give it a try.  And if you like it (which you will) tell as many friends as you can.

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

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

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

Incredible Edible Todmorden was started by two women who decided that more local food should be grown and eaten in their town. The two have rallied the community to help them achieve this goal – a reminder that collaboration needs effective leadership. The town council was persuaded to donate public land. As has the old age home, railroad station, local school and a number of individual landowners. Hundreds of volunteers have been mobilized to help with the creation of gardens and orchards. Local businesses are contributing resources as well. The initiative is supported by a community website complete with RSS enabled news bulletins, blogs and maps. All in all, the initiative is an effective example of grassroots collaboration.

The story is even more interesting due to the speed in which it has spread. The initiative was started less than a year ago and picked up by a local newspaper. This quickly generated a story in the regional newspaper and ended up on the radar of the nationwide U.K. media. The BBC is in Todmorden this week shooting a documentary. Blogs like TreeHugger also picked up the story and quickly publicized it to millions of readers. The result is a number of similar initiatives that have been, or are being, launched across the world. One of the most advanced is in the nearby city of Huddersfield.

Although the local food growing movement is unlikely to solve the climate crisis, it may prove to be one of the puzzle pieces that will help society tackle this complex problem. Most importantly, it seems to be a cause that galvanizes certain communities into action. The combination of leadership and collaboration exhibited by Incredible Edible Todmorden provides a model while the various media forms have allowed for that model to be publicized and replicated across the world. It is likely that other successful grassroots initiatives will go through a similar process, and when added up, will amount to a significant reduction in our environmental impact.

And yet, increasingly people use the Internet as an avenue to express themselves and what’s important to them, and when someone, or many someones, tells you what’s important to them, as a person or a business, you normally want to listen. Enter Radian6 – self described as “a complete platform to listen, share, learn, and engage – both inside your company, and with your customers across the entire social web.” From what i’ve seen through their free product demo, this is no empty boast – Radian6 is the most comprehensive package of tools i’ve seen, for detecting, measuring, and responding to the voices of the many Netizens who are talking about your brand and the things that are important to it.

Continue reading below.

Tools for measuring Web activity have been around for a while. Alexa, Compete, Quantcast and a number of other sites provide limited statistics on who is visiting your site. Lexicon measures Facebook, Google Analytics summarizes search trends, and Summize was acquired by Twitter for its tweet searching capabilities. Each of these tools provides some interesting tidbits about what people are interested in and talking about, but in and of themselves, they provide limited value, largely because the information only uncovers a small piece of the puzzle, and the tools provide few opportunities to “talk back” and directly engage with the people who are interested in you or your business.

The Radian6 platform is intriguing because it is a complete package of widgetized tools that can be customized to measure the myriad of voices taking place in the Web 2.0 space, in real-time, involving a specific keyword or topic of interest. The tools are provided in a slick, easy to user interface, that tell you who is saying what, whether they’re communicating via a news site, discussion forum, blog, or a microblog like Twitter, and how influential the speaker is by web traffic and readership. This information is collected in a highly customizable format, and can be interpreted in meaningful ways on both a micro level, where the individual has a name, a face, and a voice, or a macro level, that communicates what people are saying en masse. On a micro level, the speaker may be someone who is saying good things about the brand and could be a potential brand evangelist or sponsorship opportunity, or perhaps someone who had a bad customer experience and who is spreading a tale of misfortune, one that could be resolved through direct contact with the customer, before it snowballs. These “ear to the ground” sensors provide a new solution to the age-old problem of metrics on the Web, and further, the Radian6 tools allow you to directly respond to the source of the message without leaving the site – a centralized portal indeed. You can identify the people who are talking about, and have the most impact on your brand, using a weighted “priority” meter that is based in content volume, readership and influence, and a number of other factors, so you decide who you want to listen and respond to.

I was impressed by the platform and am confident this 2006 startup will continue to grow in sophistication and attention… i’m clearly not the only person who thinks so. Here are but a few of many expressions of amazement that people have Tweeted:

antofc Radian6 software is absolutely earth-shattering.

gsherman saw a demo today of @radian6‘s social media monitoring product. Very slick looking. And it has a boatload of features. Cool stuff.

BrettGreene@AmberCadabra I’m blown away – Radian6 drills down to everything you need to mange a brand easily and thoroughly

lbrynleyjonesHad a great play with Radian6 – the social media monitoring tool. Watch your brand realtime, gauge sentiment and respond. Very neat.

The Flat Classroom Project is currently working in partnership with Don Tapscott on the Net Gen Education Challenge, linking students, educators, parents and business leaders around the world. Check out the joint initiative at netgened.grownupdigital.com.)

This blog post is in response to an invitation from Jeff Plaman at International School Beijing’s 7 Steps Towards 21st Century Education Ning, to write about global collaboration in order to raise awareness of possibilities and to share my enthusiasm for making connections and working across boundaries and borders. I often write about connective living as an educator, eg A Day in the Life, and try to emphasise the need to develop a personal learning network in order to make these connections happen. It is through connections and communications using Web 2.0 and other tools that collaboration opportunities can emerge.

I am often asked how I got started in global collaborative projects, and I am then asked how others can come on board as well. My history in classroom Internet-based, global goes back about 12 years with Global SchoolNet and Cyberfair, iEARN, and now more recently co-developing Flat Classroom Projects. However let’s not drag up the past, let’s focus on NOW and how the reader of this blog (You!) can get involved by joining and/or creating a 21st century global project, and all that entails!

Please note this is written specifically from my point of view and includes the work and projects I have been involved in so is therefore fairly narrow, but at the same time I think progressive.

Concept

The ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with educators and students in all parts of the world using common online tools has changed the way I teach in the classroom, as well as changed the way I work as an administrator. A 21st century educator is connected, communicates in a reliable and responsible way, and ‘flattens’ the walls of their classroom in appropriate ways to enhance the educational learning experience of all. Therefore, every topic, every unit of work, every opportunity needs to be reviewed in terms of how it can be made relevant through external contact and collaboration. Gone are the days where it was too difficult to bring the world into the room. You, the teacher, are only limited by your imagination! With tools such as Skype, wikis, blogs, Elluminate etc there is no excuse for not staging a real-time or asynchronous link-up to support your curriculum objectives. There is also no excuse any more for not participating in a global project, a more deliberated, designed, planned and executed approach to collaboration via the Internet.

I have written many times in the past about the concept of global collaboration.

• How to Flatten Your Classroom talks about taking that first step by connecting with others, then taking the next step and implementing a project
• Beyond the ‘wow’: Embed the flat learning experience for sustainability talks about going beyond the ‘wow’ factor and engagement and pedagogical shift
• Our flat classroom workshop outline via this blog post, and via our workshop wiki

Power and Practice

I equate practice with power. If you are practicing collaboration you have the power to change the world, one classroom at a time. The power of learning in a social and extended context, yet in a safe and supportive environment is achievable. I think sometimes schools and teachers give up too easily, put this in the ‘too hard’ basket too readily. Some blog posts about this include:

• My 2020 Vision for Global Collaboration, where I give more of the history of my involvement in global, collaborative projects, and talk about the ideals of embedding this into the curriculum, develop digital citizenship skills, unblock tools etc
• The Year of Global Collaboration 3.0, where I talk about the evolution of global collaboration to the 3.0 status. Let me copy the main points again here:

Global Collaboration 3.0

• Fully engaged teachers who communicate with all participants (other teachers and other students)
• Use of Web 2.0 tools for communication and interaction (networking) and for creation
• Different global classrooms work together on a theme/project and become one classroom
• Common assessment objectives
• High expectations for connectivity and collaboration on teachers and students (it is not enough to email once a week!)
• Extended community partners included in the project (other educators, experts)
• Output may be individual or class/school based but includes input from others
• Output uses multimedia and attempts to make a difference to the immediate or extended environment
• Teacher and/or student initiated, student-centered learning

Further to the idea of practice here are a list of resources for the Flat Classroom Projects over the past 2+ years

• Portal for all Flat Classroom Projects, including Horizon Project, Digiteen and the new Net Generation Educationproject with Don Tapscott
• Flat Classrooms Ning: an educational network for educators
• Flat Classroom Conference Ning

Also, here is a current presentation showing the 7 Steps to a Flat Classroom:

The magic of collaboration comes from seeing students andteachers find their own voice and take charge of their own learning. It comes from being given choices and ownership and empowerment of their learning path. In the blog post “The conference that changed lives” I share the amazing power of bringing together people from around the world, students and teachers who came to Qatar for a face-to-face gathering and the magic that occurred before, during and after this event. This post also shares the 4 student videos that came from the winning teams, and is witness to the power of collaboration of strangers. The video that opens the Flat Classroom Conference, found on the Ning, details the development of a collaboration between myself and Vicki Davis that has changed our lives, created a pedagogically significant body of work, and encouraged others globally to reach out and make this happen.

Finally, I think the recent blog post “Take One Hour to Go Beyond Reflections“, comes towards sharing the impact and true magic of global collaboration, when it shares artifacts and responses to the Flat Classroom Conference event.

(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! 

My colleague Alan nicely captured the citizen reporting that happened around the Miracle on the Hudson. The aftermath makes a nice Wikinomics story as well.

Captain C.B. Sullenberger

He’s a star on Facebook; there are dozens of fan groups set up about him including this one with more than 300,000 members at time of posting and one nominating him for an award. 

His LinkedIn profile is a little light, but he has two posted recommendations. I’m thinking he’ll get some more shortly.

Three minutes earlier than that, @manolantern sent out what appears to be the first tweet on the plane crash:

I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive in manhattan

I love how our earliest news is most certainly going to contain typos from now on. Same case with Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind) who in December twittered about being in a plane crash. Understandably he put it quite strongly:

Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!

I enjoyed his followup tweet just as much though:

You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can’t even get a vodka-tonic. Boo

Twitter truly connects us to the experiences of others – and terrific first hand news is just part of the fun. While I hope there are no plane crashes in my future, you can follow my own twitter updates at @crasheral (gee, hope I’m not tempting fate with that twittername).

Click on the YouTube video above to hear President-elect Barack Obama invite the nation to participate in the Inauguration festivities surrounding his swearing-in as President on January 20. True to form, Obama’s opening words include “But this inauguration is not about me. It’s about all of us.”

It’s this kind of inclusive thinking that clinched him the nomination and then the election.

Can’t make it to Washington to participate in the official ceremonies? Then host a Neighborhood Ball Party of your own. Invite your friends. Want to roll up your sleeves and participate in the spirit of renewal that he promises will be the hallmark of his administration? Begin by going to www.USAservice.org and volunteer in your community the day before the inauguration to help mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Watch the online video by Michelle Obama encouraging everyone to participate. Enter the YouTube video contest and find out about local events through Facebook.

The Obama administration promises to employ the digital tools of Web 2.0 as much as possible in the campaign to introduce to the country a newer and much more participatory democracy.