There are four lessons which one can draw from looking at these early initiatives: First, using Facebook applications (and other public platforms) to harness the ideas of the crowd is more user-friendly than having to log in on a proprietary site. Second, communities and tools that increase the “glory” of participants by attaining badges or reputations points lead to a higher intrinsic motivation of participants. Third, limited voting might ensure that voting is scarce resource and that people think more carefully about using it. Fourth, the size does not matter. Like in the case of Freiburg’s participatory budget model, a small town like Manor can also serve as a role model for open government initiatives.

Tools the U.S. Government uses

What applications make the Open Government policy possible? Apps.gov, a homepage hosted by the General Services Administration (GSA), is the online source for the departments to look for appropriate cloud computing applications. Program developers have to negotiate with the GSA to get an entry in this online database. Here is a short overview of some tools used in the Open Government Initiative:

• IdeaScale: The U.S. Government used this platform to generate ideas for the Open Government Plans. IdeaScale facilitates discussions, people can vote and comment on ideas.
• UserVoice: The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses UserVoice to share ideas and discuss those ideas for the department’s strategic plan 2010-2015. In this case, the discussion is separated into different themes. In contrary to IdeaScale, the number of votes is limited.
• VenCorps: The VenCorps platform enables collaborative competitions. The Department of Education uses VenCorps
  for innovation.ed.gov. The advantage of VenCorps is that it already has a big community that uses the platform. Within VenCorps, users can attain a higher reputation by frequent contribution to the community.
  

Microsoft steps in

A new tool for governments and politicians is the release of Microsoft’s “TownHall. It is not listed on apps.gov (yet). Like most collaborative platforms, “TownHall” makes it possible to build online communities for policies and campaigns. Citizens can vote and discuss the issues via a Facebook application. This makes participation more user friendly because citizens do not have to log in to another platform.

Role Model City of Manor?

City of Manor is a town with the population of 6.500 people. One might not suspect, that this small town could serve as a role model for open government, but it does—in fact the U.S. Government has been looking to Manor for guidance on leading practices. The City of Manor uses QR-Codes (Quick Response) on buildings. These Codes can be read by mobile phone and leads the citizens to information about the place. So the citizen can get the information they need wherever they are, whenever they want. This feature also adds an additional context to physical places. One can get info about service hours or the history of a point of interest.

The City of Manor also started the Project “Manor Labs“. Manor Labs is the “official research and development division of the City of Manor”. This project recognizes that citizens are also innovators. Citizens can share their ideas and comment on other ideas. The process of idea generation is designed like a computer game. Citizens can earn virtual money for good ideas. There is also a “hall of fame” for the best participants of the platform. Why is this a promising approach? Thomas Malone identifies in his article “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence” (PDF) three incentives why people participate in crowdsourcing platforms: Love, Money, Glory. The Model of Manor Labs seems to trigger at least Glory (“Hall of Fame”) and Love (“It´s like a game”). To put it differently: Manor Labs simply makes participating fun. Seems like a good start for this ambitious project.

Editor’s Note: Thomas is a summer intern working at nGenera. He is researching crowdsourcing models in government and is also working on several projects with Sean Wise of VenCorps. As part of his studies, Thomas is focused on wisdom of the crowds approaches, design, organizational behavior and entrepreneurship.  He is on exchange at Ryerson University and is currently enrolled full-time for business and economics at the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz in Austria.

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.

Readily available transparent communications are changing how people form and use social networks in their personal lives.  When anyone with a phone can instantly publish every moment of their lives in real-time, flirtations, relationships, and other personal interactions increasingly play out right before our eyes.  The “new paparazzi” are amateurs armed with smartphones capable of real-time, transparent reporting on anything they see, anytime, anywhere.  Ten years ago, mobile phones were relatively uncommon, yet tweens now demand unlimited texting, mobile maps, and three megapixel cameras.  Highly mobile, entirely digital, completely transparent, real-time gonzo reporting isn’t on the average person’s mental radar just yet.  But how long will that last?

Emerging new media technology has resulted in an enormous rise in visibility of real (and imagined) niche subject matter experts who draw greater attention to their knowledge than ever before, and hence accumulate audience share in a competitive information marketplace.  They are interviewing their friends at private parties, filming television networks filming “reality” shows, and opining on every topic under the sun.  And they’re often closer to the disaster scene, premiere event, or other topic of interest than the mainstream media.  When the media is outside the exclusive event and Ashton Kutcher is interviewing his friends using Twitter and UStream inside it, who’s the subject-matter expert?  Who’s the reporter?Objective, removed experts are increasingly victims of the phenomenon that David Weinberger describes as “transparency becoming the new objectivity.”  The notion of objectivity – the journalistic authority with credentials you can trust without looking into matters any further – has been undone in a new virtual world of hyperlinks and microsharing.  Now, audiences want to see where authorities’ ideas came from, see the references they link to, and look at their online social networks.  Then they’ll decide as a network of readers who is authoritative, objective, biased, smart, and influential – or not.  Credentials will continue to be important when building authority and influence in journalism, but they will probably cease to be sufficient.

In a world where transparency is the new objectivity, audiences increasingly want to get information from accessible, authentic, gonzo subject matter experts.  In a recent post I coined the term “bantamweight publishing” to describe the Web posting of globally-accessible information in extremely short bursts. Collectively, this is called “citizen journalism.,” but I think tweeting about Derek Jeter eating at Nobu is behaviorally no different than texting my friend about it.  Citizen journalists are nothing more than universal sources.

What has changed is that they are free, real-time, locally global sources that everyone in the world has access to.  The information  these universal sources share with their bantamweight publishing is archived, and therefore accessible, searchable, discoverable, and easily repurposeable.  Audiences are increasingly failing to distinguish the differences between universal sources and the “authoritative” journalism trade.  In the era of transparency and authenticity, people in the audience are effectively collecting raw data, conducting mental experiments, and drawing conclusions of their own about what is and is not news.  However, when planes crash, flu spreads, and protests rage, one thing hardly anyone knows the answer to is: Which raw sources can I trust?  Mainstream media can help to answer that question.

Amateur universal sources will only get more talented and prominent with newer technology, experimentation, and practice.  So how can mainstream media survive in an environment where universal sources are giving away the milk for free?  An enormous emerging market that large media companies can enter is intelligently collating, analyzing, and presenting  real-time and right-time information from millions of universal sources for their readers.  When transparency is the new objectivity, media brands can gain credibility with, and provide value to, audiences by doing what lone amateurs cannot: providing a combination of massive analysis,  high-quality packaging, and authoritative marketing.

It used to be that people would trust the news from Walter Cronkite.  In the near future, people may trust the news that CBS distills from a million distributed Walter Cronkite wannabes.

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.

But I thought I’d bring them up again because they sent me an email (because I’m kind of a big deal I’m on their email distribution list as a past buyer) about a very cool contest – LG Mobile Phones has opened a “Design the Future” competition, with more than $80,000 in rewards for people that can come up with the most “revolutionary” LG mobile phone designs. You can find all the details about it here – and join the competition if you’d like, as long as you are American. I’m hoping they have a similar, less ambitious, and more self-depreciating for us Canadians in the near future .

There’s also another neat element to this – the competition is sponsored by AutoDesk, “a world leader in 2D and 3D design software.” All participants will get a 15-day free trial to SketchBook Pro, a powerful design application. Very cool co-branding initiative, and another example of how “professional” tools are increasingly getting in the hands of prosumers.

It’s going to be a great contest to watch – and coupled with other recent developments like Doritos Guru, it’s nice to see companies starting to get creative with their rewards. In the Doritos case, it was a share of all future product sales for the winner of the brand name / commercial contest – which could be quite a lucrative reward indeed. This competition (at least partially) deals with another complaint often levied at crowdsourcing platforms – the ‘winner takes all’ model. The prize structure is that the winner gets $20 K, 2nd $10 K, 3rd $5K, and then 40 awards of $1 K each. 43 winners is a pretty good start to encourage participation.

But wouldn’t it be cool to see those two models mashed together? Perhaps the winner getting $20 K + X% of future phone sales? Or maybe even everyone in (say) the top-10 getting a share? I think that would work very well – and I’d bet that we see a company do something like that fairly soon…

Best Buy management understand that the nature of work is changing. It has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time-pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile and less dependent on geography. A growing number of firms are decentralizing decision-making functions, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies which empower employees to communicate easily and openly with people inside and outside the firm. In doing so, they are creating new corporate meritocracy that is sweeping away the hierarchical silos in its path and connecting internal teams to a wealth of external networks.

For Brad Anderson, Best Buy’s CEO, supervision and even management in the old sense is outdated. He notes: “The Net Geners we hire have enormous knowledge, unprecedented information, and facility with tools that in some areas is superior their seniors.” So the job of management is more to create the context whereby they can be successful, rather than to supervise them.

Every company should be thinking along these lines.

“We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because it’s a better description of what you’re doing; you’re a regular citizen but you’re doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, well, you’re just a member of the crowd and you’re not; you’re our collaborator. You’re pro-actively involved in the process of science by participating.”

On comparisons between Galaxy Zoo and seti@home, fightaids@home stardust@home, etc., etc., etc.:

“Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work. They’re not just passively running something on their computer and hoping that they’ll be the first person to find aliens. They have a stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now interested in what we do with it, and what we find.”

On the application of wikinomics to astrophysics:

“It’s a new way of doing science. Mass collaboration makes things possible that were impossible before, mostly because of the size of our data sets. You can analyze a data set with hundreds or perhaps thousands of objects by yourself or with a small team. But if the question you want to answer involves millions of images or objects then there is really only one answer to this question: public participation.”

This interview, btw, was in my top five for 2008.

Contests like these are worthwhile for a variety of reasons. One, if we left it up to public officials to make government more transparent I think we can all predict the outcome. Two, contests are a reasonably good way to incent broader involvement from the public. And three, third parties are not contrained by the bureaucratic encumberances and political considerations that stiffle innovation in the public administration. Thus they can build innovative new applications using public data sets faster and more freely than government.

That being said, we need to move beyond the “google map mash-up” paradigm and build applications that enable genuine interaction and engagement with government. And for that to happen, we need government agencies to genuinely engage in this process. I’m sure the folks at Sunlight Labs would agree!

Applications are due March 31st and winners will be announced on April 7th. The winner receives $15,000.

The reason that I am writing about it here is blatant self-promotion two-fold – we are attempting to build chTONGUEeek by sticking to the principles of wikinomics, and do so at an absolute minimum of out-of-pocket expense. From what we’ve seen so far (with this project and the research), these two things often go hand in hand.

As of right now, the total expense incurred has been a little over $200, and outside of a few plans we have for rewarding contributors, we don’t expect this to go a penny higher for the foreseeable future. About 1/4 of this expense was unavoidable – domain name registration. The rest was for the logo design, and to get us off on the right wikinomics foot we decided to go with crowdSPRING for what eventually became this:

Regular readers may remember I wrote about my interview with the founders of crowdSPRING back in June. The idea behind the company is simple – anybody can post a description of creative project, the reward that they are offering, and the end date. Interested artists within the community then submit designs (the company guarantees a minimum of 25), and the buyer can continually provide feedback as they flow in to guide the community towards what they want, before finally selecting a winner. crowdSPRING takes care of the payments, legal issues, etc.

We decided to post our project for the minimum amount – $150 – with a one week time frame, providing a brief description and an absolutely terrible graphic representing what we were thinking. Over the course of the week we received a total of 69 submissions, with quality ranging from pretty bad to quite intriguing. In order to get the most out of the platform, we provided feedback (at minimum a rating) on every submission in timely fashion, and it was the work of Peg770 that was clearly rising to the top. We sent her a couple of personal message for some final tweaks, and in the end declared her the winner, receiving a portfolio of different logos she had created for us (you can see some of them in the box marked with the award tab). We thought it was a great experience, and absolutely brought home the power and value of crowdsourcing.

From there, we’ve built the initial site through Word Press (free), borrowed some hosting for the time being (free), and had the more skilled of us (not me) get the site designed and “live,” while we both focus on creating some hopefully entertaining content in our spare time (of which there is very little). Next steps include the launch of our initial store through CafePress (either free or $6 / month), figuring out our incentive plan for attracting a community of contributors (probably not free), and most importantly building our social media marketing strategy (free, but what will be the most time consuming). It is the latter I am most interested in, and will be reporting back time and again if something interesting comes up. In the meantime, seats are still available on Twitter and Facebook – but they are going fast .