If this works as intended, there’s a lot to like. From the end-user point of view, it’s almost nothing but upside: being able to check online for spot availability, having an increased likelihood of finding free spots on every block, and saving money by parking in less-popular areas. All of this is made possible by using technology to add a market function seamlessly into something that people are already doing; just by going about their business and parking, they’re generating information that makes the system better for everyone–themselves included.

While it remains to be seen if an approach like this will be profitable for the city, some tweaks could be made to their market algorithm so that the average price of a parking spot remains what it is now, keeping revenue where it is. Even if the program doesn’t generate money hand over fist, though, it still benefits the city and community as a whole, with reduced street congestion and pollution as mentioned by the video.

I especially like solutions like this one, as they enjoy the benefits of mass collaboration without actually requiring any additional effort on the part of the mass collaborators, and ample data is generated that can be further studied to try push the parking system to be that much more efficient. Everyone wins.

Bureaucrats of Toronto, take note!

6. The world needs better governments.

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

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

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9.  We need new measures of progress

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

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

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

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call it a Digital Davos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But check out the description and the twist:

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

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

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

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

1) Leave a comment on the Forum blog

2) Become a Fan of the Forum on Facebook

3) Join the Forum group on LinkedIn

4) Befriend the Forum on MySpace

5) Join the Forum network on Ning

6) Reply to @Davos on Twitter

7) Record and upload a video on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Throughout August, members of Congress are back home, where the hands they shake and the voices they hear will not belong to lobbyists, but to people like you,” Obama wrote.

“Home is where we’re strongest. We didn’t win last year’s election together at a committee hearing in D.C. We won it on the doorsteps and the phone lines, at the softball games and the town meetings, and in every part of this great country where people gather to talk about what matters most. And if you’re willing to step up once again, that’s exactly where we’re going to win this historic campaign for the guaranteed, affordable health insurance that every American deserves.”

Healthcare reform, writes Obama, is the issue “our movement was built for.”There is no possible compromise on health care and the myth of Obama as a “post-partisan” president is exactly that — a myth.   The health care industry generates billions of dollars in profits and many people are seething that these profits might be curtailed.  This issue can never be negotiated in Washington back rooms as there are huge interests vested in the status quo — such as the big insurance companies, health maintenance organizations and pharmaceutical giants.  Like many social changes, for this one there will be winners and losers and an historic battle will determine the outcome.

As Obama noted in his message to supporters, “In politics, there’s a rule that says when you ask people to get involved, always tell them it’ll be easy. Well, let’s be honest here: Passing comprehensive health insurance reform will not be easy. Every President since Harry Truman has talked about it, and the most powerful and experienced lobbyists in Washington stand in the way.”  But this time Obama has what those presidents lacked:  the Internet and a powerful social movement that potentially can shift the relationship of forces in America away from the traditional entrenched interests towards the needs of the population.

One of the principles of the New Media Group in the Obama presidential campaign was that “online activity exists to support offline activity.”  The goal of the online media specialists was to motivate and energize volunteers to be active in their communities.  This principle is being carried into the battle around healthcare:

Obama’s email says:  “That’s why Organizing for America is putting together thousands of events this month where you can reach out to neighbors, show your support, and make certain your members of Congress know that you’re counting on them to act.” He says:  “These canvasses, town halls, and gatherings only make a difference if you turn up to knock on doors, share your views, and show your support.”

He asks his supporters:  Can you commit to join at least one event in your community this month?

The battle will be fierce.  Already, opponents to health care reform are starting to sabotage the first of thousands of these town-hall meetings.  Protesters are being bussed in to disrupt information sessions and help spread myths that Obama’s plans are socialist or fascist or both.  The protesters are fueled by the rhetoric on Fox News and use the same sleazy tactics as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth used against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

“So yes, fixing this crisis will not be easy,” concludes Obama  “Our opponents will attack us every day for daring to try. It will require time, and hard work, and there will be days when we don’t know if we have anything more to give. But there comes a moment when we all have to choose between doing what’s easy, and doing what’s right.  This is one of those times.”

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

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

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

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

“What type of incentive would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?”

Source: http://linkedin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/graph21.jpg?w=502&h=321

The concept of using crowdsourcing to translate content is not new. Facebook, Mozilla and TED have used similar strategies. Ming wrote about Facebook’s translation initiative here.

When first looking at LinkedIn’s effort to utilize crowdsourcing, it appears as though they’ve made the right moves. They engaged their audience, asked for opinions with a survey and acknowledged the importance of incentives when looking to users to make contributions.

There is an interesting factor at play here, though. LinkedIn is known as a professional network. And given that LinkedIn serves this professional purpose, it’s worthy to note that direct financial compensation was left out of the possible responses for the survey question shown above.
As a result, LinkedIn has received a flurry of feedback over the last two weeks, much of it coming from translators themselves voicing their opinions about professionals being compensated fairly. A Twitter hashtag was established (#linkedinfail) and a LinkedIn discussion group was formed (Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses), now with 300+ members.
Here’s a look at some of the comments that have been posted in the past two weeks:

If LinkedIn goes ahead with an open call for translations, they’ll likely attract both professional and amateur translators. The issue then is that a professional and an amateur participate for different reasons. The professional looks for financial compensation, while the amateur seeks out, for example, recognition within the community (ie. “You’re the #1 translator of [ language name] based on submitting [x number of translations]“).
That becomes interesting because one of those deals – the amateur – is a much better one for LinkedIn (provided they put in place a system to ensure some standard of quality in translation).
So, if you’re a translator – which side are you on? Is this an opportunity to contribute to a community and gain valuable experience? Or, as some have questioned, is this the exploitation of professionals?
You might also be interested in “Is Spec Work Evil?”

If you are not familiar with BigThink.com, here is how the site describes itself: “Through an ever-expanding platform of knowledge content, including in-depth interviews with the world’s leading experts, Big Think is a vital hub for important information to help you function, and succeed, in a rapidly changing world. In keeping with our belief that crucial information should be freely shared, discussed and debated, we have developed a full menu of tools to engage, disseminate, and subscribe to uniquely powerful content. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Digg.com, Delicious, Google Reader, Vimeo, YouTube, a personal blog, Tumblr, or any application with an RSS feed, Big Think allows you to share bright ideas with the wider Big Think audience as well as your personal cadre of lively thinkers-quickly and easily.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

On this platform, everyone contributes to a library of content that can be used by anyone to do anything, the payoff for sharing your content is that everyone else has access to yours. I think Larry Lessig would agree.

Unfortunately, the interface for accomplishing such a level of collaboration doesn’t yet exist, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t already started happening. Introducing thru-you.com — a site run by YouTuber ‘Kutiman’ that remixes unrelated existing user-submitted YouTube musical content into new pieces; making songs played by ‘bands’ whose members have never met one another. The result is pretty cool to behold:

Under the editorial control of Kutiman, a massive pool of unrelated source material has been crafted together into an original piece. Conceptually, this is reminiscent of the sampling done in hip-hop, but from a much larger, more diverse pool.

Generating these movies required downloading each of the YouTube videos, converting them to an editor-friendly format, stitching them together and then uploading them again — something that is likely beyond most casual YouTubers’ technical abilities. It won’t always be this way, and soon I believe new technologies will emerge that allow all YouTube users to better leverage the content that their entire community has generated. Once this happens, the remix-culture will really be in full swing.

Part and parcel with viewing YouTube as a platform with open content that can be used and displayed however a content remixer likes is a new way to view YouTube videos: YooouuuTuuube.com. YooouuuTuuube.com takes a normal YouTube video and spits out the frames on a grid before your eyes. The result is pretty different from the normal experience of watching a YouTube video, but it shows the new kind of media that can be created when existing media is open (or at least taken) for use by others. To see it in action, check out this YooouuuTuuube’d version of ‘Junior Kickstart’ by The Go! Team — Enjoy!

In an unusual twist to these traditional stories, Yahoo Sports posted one last week about how NFL teams apply similar practices to scout out new prospects. Their trick? Befriend the players using fake profiles with pictures of attractive women who are … like, total fans!!! The catch is that these women are a baited lure, and once they accept, the unsuspecting NFL prospect has opened the gates, trojan horse style, to a detailed review of an individual’s comments, profile pages, and pictures.

Typically, when organizations review social networking profiles, they use them as a filter, where any ‘inappropriate’ information or media will get players or employees screened out of the application pool, or even a job.  In 2008, a CareerBuilder study indicates that 1/5 employers use social networking sites to screen applicants, and of those using the tool, 1/3 of managers indicated that they had found information about a candidate that caused them to remove them from consideration. According to Computerworld, of particular note was:

• Information about alcohol or drug use (41% of managers said this was a top concern)
• Inappropriate photos or information posted on a candidate’s page (40%)
• Poor communication skills (29%)
• Bad-mouthing of former employers or fellow employees (28%)
• Inaccurate qualifications (27%)
• Unprofessional screen names (22%)
• Notes showing links to criminal behavior (21%)
• Confidential information about past employers (19%)

Back to this story… NFL teams say they benefit from the review of these social networking sites because they allow teams to conduct research on players much faster than before, and with access to a much greater wealth of information. According to Yahoo Sports, Rick Spielman, VP of Player Personnel for the Minnesota Vikings, the Vikings are not unlike most other NFL teams in having someone specifically tasked with reviewing the profiles of player prospects. Their job is to gather as much information as possible that can be used to filter out undesirable candidates, assist in the interview process, and help conduct background checks on players. These are understandable goals, but my concern remains with the process to get to that goal.

How ethical is this practice of using “ghost profiles” – fake profiles that are created to entrap players, and then disappear after the draft – to discover information about potential draft candidates? The issue I have with this practice is that it totally misrepresents the intentions of one party, in what is effectively a lie, in order to place the other party at a disadvantage. Sure the football prospect ought to know better than to have any discriminating information posted on such a loosely private medium, but that does not negate the wrong-doing of the team scout, in using shady practices to unearth that data. And yet, that information was there, in a space that continues to be viewed as gray territory when establishing either a public or private label? Who is right? Who is wrong? Is there even a right or a wrong?

And so I turn to you, what do you think?  What are the issues here and what’s your take? Acceptable? Not?

The readers of the New York Times had a similar reaction to Jake DeSantis, a VP of AIG that provided his resignation letter as an op-ed piece. Now, the letter is well-written and some of his arguments are compelling — basic message is “a deal’s a deal and staff not responsible for the meltdown are being unfairly unpunished.”

The Times editors closed the comments section after accepting 917 entries. I think Mr. DeSantis was suprised that almost all of the commenters pretty much said “don`t let the door hit you on the way out.“ The few that were supportive, tending to agree on the macro level that the government shouldn`t get involved.

The public resignation letter, intended presumably to put a human face on those AIG staffers that were hurt by the meltdown instead fueled a mass collaboration of Mr. Pink sentiment.

As I watched the film Us Now last week, I was reminded of the British football club Ebbsfleet United and the MyFootballClub story, (see a clip here) where fans ultimately had enough of being armchair critics and put their money where their heart (and often discontent) was, and actually purchased a Club.

Bringing the story to a more personal level, I have been to quite a few of my favourite athletic club, the Toronto Raptors’, games this year and I have left the Air Canada Centre more often than I would like wishing there were some recourse that I, as a fan, had to have my displeasure heard.  I am completely aware that loss is an important part of sport, but to leave a match feeling as if the players did not leave it all on the court, or that the coach drew up a bad play, is not a great feeling as a supporter.

Now I know what you’re saying – does everyone give 100% all the time? Obviously not, but in the world of elite professional athletics, my threshold for forgiveness is admittedly lowered.

If there were a more immediate, constructive, and tangible way to give timely feedback, rather than voting with my feet, I would be all for it.

Now there are great online tools, such as Protrade The Sports Stock Market, that harness the power of prediction markets by allowing for the “purchase and sale” of  athletes, in order to earn some pretty great rewards and dominate fantasy pools, but the ultimate effect of these actions on the actual team remains unclear (presumably minimal).

One potential participatory experiment could be to gauge fans’ expectations vs. actual outcomes to mine the wisdom of the fans for added insight (kudos to Alex). For example, if the Raptors were playing the Kings, I would expect a solid victory, with CB4 putting up some big numbers, along with Jose Calderon dominating the assists column.  Now if the Raps were playing the Celtics, I would hope for a victory, but rather expect a big game from Chris Bosh, Jose Calderon, Andrea Bargnani and co., but would be well-prepared to chalk one up in the L category.

If, using sliding scale, I could input my predictions, along with the 000,000s of other NBA fans, then technically, the wisdom of the crowd should be pretty good at predicting ultimate outcomes (and managing expectations), and could hopefully improve the quality of game play (and fan engagement) if predictions were able to influence (pre)game-time decisions.  I respect many coaches’ expertise, but I am also a firm believer that none of us is as smart as all of us.

I suppose some of my frustrations this year have been driven by a few of the decidedly bizarre moves undertaken by a number of teams in the NBA, in light of salary cap considerations and decreased expected future earnings owing to economic pressure on ticket sales. Some of these decisions have resulted in what analysts have called a blatant disrespect of fans.  Always entertaining Bill Simmons goes so far as saying ”I’d say the Grizzlies hurled a flaming bag of dog feces at their fans, but they don’t have any fans” in reference to a three-way trade involving Houston, Orlando and Memphis, in February. In another complementary statement, Simmons also laments that “we [team leadership] finally crossed the imaginary line between “building a good team while being fiscally responsible” and “being fiscally responsible and not giving a crap about anything else.”

If fans begin to feel bored, or worse disrespected by questionable ownership/leadership  moves, then a fear of empty seats will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In an economy where entertainment dollars are growing harder and harder to capture, particularly the big ticket item sales – season tickets and luxury boxes – perhaps mechanisms that create deeper fan engagement must be among the tools used to help keep teams afloat - give the fans a greater say.

Now most of this post has been focused on the NBA, the league I would argue is best set up to weather the storm, due to its high-level of fan interaction and loyalty, but I dread to think of the situation that is imminent for many MLB and NHL teams (a league that is having trouble securing player buy-in and excitement for the fan favourite All-Star game).

Challenges aside, let’s be idealistic for a moment – wouldn’t it be great if a pro team were willing to give fans the extent of control that the Ebbsfleet United fans have, without surrendering formal ownership rights?

Any disenchanted sports fans out there looking to join in a myfootballclub-like adventure? We’ll call it mybasketballclub just to be original.

Well, a colleague of mine just told me about a new Pacific Coast collaborative (called the Pacific Green Energy Initiative) that was set up to build, test and rapidly deploy clean and renewable energy systems. The collaborative consists of renewable energy industry leaders who hope to convince a coalition of state and provincial governments on the Pacific Coast (including California, Oregon, Washington State, Alaska and British Columbia) to develop a common market for green energy that would stretch from San Diego, California up to Anchorage, Alaska.

Reading through some of its literature helped reinforce for me the sheer magnitude of the challenge:

The present complex web of businesses, institutions and regulations evolved to manage an energy economy based on oil and large scale electricity generation from coal and hydro power. These organizations are not designed or organized to effectively manage the emerging, new energy economy.

That’s challenge number one for Obama, and for all political leaders confronting the challenge of making their 20th century infrastructures fit for a new era of renewable energy. It’s not simply a matter of swapping out old technology for new while keeping the existing industry and regulatory structure intact:

This new energy economy is shaping to be a patchwork of regional supply portfolios with distributed energy systems (e.g. solar powered homes, geo-exchange systems, and district scale energy supply systems) playing a very large role. It involves a shift to electric transportation and creating huge new demands for green / clean electricity at competitive prices. It involves “smart” grid technologies and more efficient prime movers and appliances across the board.

The challenges get deeper as one considers the political and leadership challenges inherent in the need to break down organizational silos and align the agendas and activities of so many disparate players:

Although many organizations (public, private and non-profit) are engaged in a wide variety of activities relating to Climate Change and Sustainability that impinge on energy technology commercialization, they are also advancing their own independent agendas. These silo agendas have little to do with the acceleration of deployment of energy technologies and everything to do with existing corporate cultures and established ways of doing things. Too often this results in activities that are isolated and ineffective, in conflict or compromised, or diluted by duplication of effort.

The fragmentation of knowledge, capability and effort is an issue I encounter frequently. You could say that it characterizes many domains (international aid, disaster relief and poverty alleviation come to mind), but it is particularly true of climate change where the solutions entail so many deep changes across so many sectors and in so many aspects of our lives.

The Western States and BC have demonstrated leadership in setting ambitious Co2 reduction targets (much more ambitious than Canada or the US as a whole). But the renewable energy industry claims (evidently with some self-interest) that the scale of investment to accomplish the State/Province targets is orders of magnitude greater than current trends within the region would achieve.

The rhetoric coming out of both this initiative and inter-governmental collaboration is interesting. I will be more interested to see what they do in practice and how they set out to enable the cross-sectoral collaborations they envision. It is one thing to hold an annual conference as the inter-governmental coalition intends to do, starting this March. It is quite another to build-up and sustain the multi-dimensional collaborations required to underpin a common market for green energy. I wish them luck.

In the original Galaxy Zoo nearly 150,000 citizen scientists helped astronomers at Oxford and Yale classify roughly 1 million galaxies imaged by the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the researchers anticipated that it might take at least two years to complete the project. But within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were submitted during the first year.

In Galaxy Zoo 2 contributors have been equipped with more powerful classification tools and assigned more complex tasks than before, giving the researchers an even richer data set to work with. Project leads are hoping Zoo 2 will produce as much science – and as many surprises – as the original Galaxy Zoo did. My hunch is that it will likely generate much more.

For examples of the what the citizen scientists are up to see the results of their beta tests here. You can also follow the project on twitter.

Dan Borge: Director, LECG, a global expert services and consulting firm. Former senior managing director and head of corporate strategy at Bankers Trust where he was the principal designer of RAROC, the first enterprise risk management system. Author of the Book of Risk.

John Hull, Maple Financial Group Chair in Derivatives and Risk Management, Professor of Finance and Co-Director, Master of Finance Program, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto

Robert (Bob) Tapscott, interim CEO, RISConsulting

Moderator: Chuck Bralver, Senior Associate Dean – International Business and Finance, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (former Partner and Vice Chair, Oliver, Wyman & Company)

I was chair.  We had an excellent discussion and I’m pleased to report that a video of the session is now available online.  To view the video, click here.

The discussion took place from 5:00 to 6:30pm, Jan. 22, 2009, at the Fleck Atrium (ground floor), Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto.

“Having a wiki world, and having an ability to instantaneously set up mass collaboration, you can solve problems on a time scale that’s going to matter. So if we start having a bird flu pandemic, or if global warming continues to accelerate, we may not have the luxury of what I think of today as the slow speed of coming to answers for the challenges confronting the human race. And so the idea of being able to apply all the brains on the planet to a time urgent situation is something that we are going to look back on and be really glad that we figured out how to do because otherwise it’s going to be too late.”

I thought he summed up what this next book is going to be about pretty well.

He outlined five objectives for the Forum.  I’ve summarized them below but I encourage everyone to read the full speech, which is a quick read.

First, we will support governments, and particularly the G20, in their efforts to address the systemic risks in the financial systems to stabilize and relaunch the economy. We have worked together with the respective governments to make sure that all relevant issues are integrated into our discussions and that we can create here – midway between the G20 Summits in Washington last November and in London next April – a true global multistakeholder partnership supporting bold but necessary actions and policy changes.

The second objective for our Meeting is to make sure that we look at our world in a holistic, systemic way. The financial and economic crisis is not the only issue that needs a global multistakeholder response.

The third objective of this Annual Meeting is to start a year-long process to help design the systems and institutions that the world needs to really cooperate and to confront global challenges in a much more proactive way.

The fourth objective of this Annual Meeting is to better shape the ethical value base for business, highlighting a clear differentiation between industrial and service companies that provide true value to society and those that make money through paper transactions and speculation. Profit is a major driver of business, but it is clear that it cannot be profit at all costs and that self-indulgence cannot replace reasonable competitive remuneration.

The fifth and final objective of this Annual Meeting is to reconstruct the global economy. Yes, we are in the midst of an enormous challenge but we are also at the threshold of many promising breakthrough technologies, as the strong presence of our Technology Pioneers demonstrates. Today, a great opportunity exists to generate a new wave of economic growth based on technologies, products and services directly meeting societal needs in eco-efficiency, in healthcare, in transportation, in people empowerment and many more.

There are many good entries, but artist, composer and producer Brian Eno’s short piece really struck a chord, mostly because it made me question some of the fundamental assumptions underlying our assertion that mass collaboration is not just a new business model that harnesses openness and participation; it’s a fundamentally new model of human organization and a new way to orchestrate our collective ingenuity to address the growing number of global challenges that may well overwhelm our traditional institutions.

Eno’s premise is that the game-changing development is more of a feeling than an idea—a creeping and insidious feeling that the world is getting worse rather than better, that the Earth’s natural capital is being pillaged rather than replenished, that war is more fruitful than peace, that your neighbor is more likely your rival than your friend. In this new world, fear, secrecy and mistrust reign. They replace optimism, openness and social cohesion as our dominant social operating principles. We will have reached the end of progress and then perhaps even the end of civilization.

The implication is that an end to optimism and a return to baser instincts would annihilate the conditions that make wikinomics possible–conditions such as high levels of social trust, a culture of openness and idea sharing, a deeply-ingrained sense of entrepreneurialism, not to mention a healthy dose of leisure time.

Here’s an excerpt from Eno:

Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960′s. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point ‘up’. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part.

But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-cataclysm novel The Road. What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere. There isn’t time for them. Long term projects are abandoned—their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned—not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits.  Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right.

I think Eno provides us with some food for thought–though I’m more of an optimist than he. We probably underestimate the importance of how much our collective faith in progress and ever-increasing prosperity has shaped the way the world has evolved, particularly over the last century. Now things have hardly turned out as well as they might have, but what might have happened if that broadly accepted notion that there will be continuous improvement in the human condition was rejected in favor of much more distopian worldview? And what about the future? There is no doubt in my mind that we will need new institutions for governance if the human species is to survive the 21st century. I still think wikinomics could be part of the solution-set. But what prospect will we have to build these institutions in an environment of scarcity, conflict and mistrust.

Thanks to much social research, we know quite a bit about how people’s expectations of the future profoundly shape their behavior in the present. It’s probably time to start thinking more about how people’s behavior will change if and when our collective expectations of the future take a sharp turn for the worse. Will the spirit of wikinomics survive in harsher times? I don’t know yet. But before the world ends I’m going to enjoy giving this more thought.

Anyone who knows me is familiar with my buzzword fixation. In fact, I think I owe the bulk of my MBA to the effective overuse of fancy lingo. While a sound vocabulary is not to be underestimated, there’s nothing sillier than sentences over-peppered with empty words. Have you ever listened very carefully to one of those overly wordy people, initially impressed and intrigued, only to realize that despite their impressive constellation of words, strung together so eloquently, they hadn’t in fact said anything useful? That’s right, you all know that person.

…and yes, that’s right, I used ‘constellation.’

All kidding aside, I am genuinely intrigued by the effect word choice has on people and their perceptions. It’s amazing how much spin plays into image, both on a personal and organizational level, and how critical a role language plays in how we perceive things. This year has seen many events shape our current political, economic and social international environment. From a financial meltdown to an historic U.S. Presidential election, and everything in between, buzzwords were certainly abound. It was amazing to see how issues, people and events were, and continue to be, tagged and how certain words emerged as leading descriptors of mainstream topics. 2008 was oh so ‘mavericky,’ my friends.

A buzzword, however, isn’t always born obnoxious.

In fact, most of the time someone tags a concept with a great word, and simply takes it too far, or gets too excited about their new dictionary discovery. Yes, “word of the day” on your Google homepage along with those new terms you learn in school are exciting, I get it, but there’s only so much we can synergize, optimize and leverage in one breath.

So this post begins what I hope will be a buzzword exposé of sorts. “Bruno’s Buzzword Bonanza” aims to peel the onion back on these words and their use. Yeah, that’s right, we’re going to peel the onion back, people. Together we’ll explore current events and themes, and isolate their most over-used terms. I invite you, in the spirit of mass-collaboration, to submit your appropriate buzzwords for the theme explored, and suggest topics for upcoming editions. Perhaps you have a big assignment due on a certain issue and need to bulk it up with fancy, impressive and empty jargon… let me know what you’re writing about and perhaps the community can suggest some relevant words that will knock your Prof’s socks off. How’s that for synergy and collaboration?

To kick us off, this editions’ theme is: Layoffs.

I came across an interesting BusinessWeek piece in the December 22, 2008 issue of the weekly magazine. The article, “You’re fired: Rosy words for pink slips,” by Jena McGregor, explores the innovative semantic spin organizations are putting on their layoff lingo. While there’s no denying that the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost as a result of the year’s economic crisis are delivering a devastating blow to employees, organizations and industries worldwide, I was amazed to read about the cheeky spin employers are trying to put on this awful situation. I wonder: does a convoluted sentence or fancy word make a job loss any less painful?

Feel free to read the whole piece, but in the meantime I’ve made a top ten list of layoff buzzwords from the article. Among the terms employers are opting to use in lieu of the usual suspects known as “downsizing” and “rightsizing” are, in ascending order of ridiculousness ranking:

10. Rationalizing

9. Surplusing

8. Restructuring

7. Actions to simplify the organization

6. Offboarding

5. Reduction in force

4. Rethinking the social plan

3. De-verticalization

2. Strategic review of strategies

1. Synergy-related headcount adjustment goal.

Right.

Does that mean a faked sick day spent at the mall can be classified as an “image-related shoe count adjustment site visit?” Hmmm… how very outside-the-box…

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

However, I’m increasingly thinking that this perspective is causing people to miss out on a lot of important lessons. In order to explain why, one has to look no further than the very first story told in the first chapter of wikinomics – GoldCorp. It’s about how Rob McEwen decided to publicly release their proprietary geological data on the web, and hold a contest to see who could best help them find gold on their property. It was a remarkable success, and “catapulted an under performing $100 million company into a $9 Billion juggernaut.”

This was (and is) a great wikinomics success story, but it was not really a case of “how groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” It was not really a case of a whole bunch of people working together. Instead, it was a simple (and powerful) example of how a company could leverage the web, an open IP strategy, and a high dollar value contest in order to attract the best, uniquely qualified minds in the world. Other major examples in the book – such as P&G’s use of Innocentive in the Ideagoras section – have similar themes to them as well.

This is an important distinction in my mind – and one that people often miss. If you work through all the examples of “wikinomics in action” in the book and on this blog, some of them are about harnessing the wisdom of crowds, and others are about attracting uniquely qualified minds. As one would expect, the strategies required for success on one side are very different from the strategies required for success on the other. This is a particularly interesting area to explore as the issue of incentives for collaboration become more important.

For example, one of the areas I’m most interested in is prosumerism – when customers become actively engaged in the creation of goods and services. A lot of companies are naturally attracted to the idea, generally for some combination of lower R&D  costs, better innovation, and higher levels of customer engagement. However, as more and more companies become interested in the area, they are competing with each other for the attention of prosumers, which is where the incentives issue comes up – how do I get prosumers to work with me instead of somebody else?

Companies that come at this issue from the perspective of the wisdom of crowds generally quickly run into a problem – how do I allocate and share rewards across the (hopefully huge) mass of contributors? It’s hardly a trivial problem, because once dollars and cents come into play issues of “fairness” often trump what economists would consider “rational behavior.”

So for example, let’s say you and I are working together on a project, and are both making $0. You come to me with a proposal where we each keep doing what we’re doing, but now I will earn $10 for my contributions, and you will earn $100,000. Based on rational economic behavior, I would accept this proposal, as something is better than nothing. But many studies have proven that humans don’t behave this way – I’m for more likely to reject your offer, even though it makes me better off, because I deem it “unfair”.

So if you are trying to figure out how to distribute rewards across a huge crowd of contributors in a wikinomics-enabled business model, you could easily see how this issue could wreck the whole thing. If you share rewards somewhat equally, not only might the per-person amount be too trivial to matter, but those that contribute the most might get pissed off. If you try to distribute the rewards based on contribution to a group collaboration, it’s not only quite hard to figure out, but if the “masses” perceive it to be unfair they might just revolt and blow the whole collaborative model.

On the other hand, an incentive model that focuses strictly on the “uniquely qualified minds” seems a lot easier to pull off. GoldCorp and Innocentive are great examples of this using a contest model – and as noted, there really isn’t much “mass collaboration” going on in either. The big challenge right now is finding that middle ground. Recently I’ve written about Brownbook.net and Parlus, which are but two examples of companies building what look to be “mass collaboration” business models. Each are trying to use financial incentives to draw people in, and each are (rightfully in my mind) structuring these incentives to attract and reward the top contributors / uniquely qualified minds, rather than a huge mass of collaborators. But how to make it work remains a tricky question.

But I don’t want to get TOO far into those weeds here. Key point: those that associate wikinomics with only the wisdom of crowds aren’t going to see the whole picture.

Denis’ Response: in fairness, I was going to base my decision on the outcome of this videotaped battle between the two candidates, but I think we can all agree it was a tie.

The big issue on everyone’s mind is how Wikinomics, the Web 2.0 and the Net Generation combined can enable Colombia to leapfrog in economic and social development.

Arriving on Tuesday night, I had dinner with the board of the Fundación Saldarriaga Concha. These were all very thoughtful business leaders who spend enormous amounts of time attempting to do well by doing good in Colombia. The main focus of the foundation is the elderly and also disabled in Colombia — two groups that woefully lack services and rights.

7 am the next morning was one of the most inspiring conversations I’ve had in a long time — a small breakfast with 15 of the top movers and shakers of the new web in Colombia as it’s applied to social development and justice. These young folks were as sophisticated as any I’ve met anywhere. Some were implementing social networks (using open source software) in civil society and government in Colombia. Others were consulting foundations and businesses who want to support social investment. Others were using the web to organize movements for social change. They had a list of ten thoughtful questions prepared for me — we got through two of them.

An example was a lad named Felipe Arango from BSD Consulting, BSD standing for Business, Sustainability and Development. They have been working on models of stakeholder assurance (AA1000s) for sustainability reports for some years now and acted as consultants for some of the main banks in the Latin American Region on integrating sustainability into their strategies and transparent communications. They are also currently developing sustainability ratings for investments in Latin America, including financial market indexes. After the meeting he expressed interest in exploring collaboration possibilities with nGenera on how to blend the wikinomics model with stakeholder based assurance, stakeholder engagement and transparency through GRI reporting.

BSD is also developing a project with the Fairtrade movement, one of the most powerful ideas yet for sustainable development, based on using the wikinomics model to promote self-organization and collaboration amongst 3rd world rural producers and conscious consumers.

After that I was interviewed one on one by several leading journalists in Colombia and then headed to the ball room to give my keynote speech.

The room was packed — overflowing actually and I received a sustained, emotional response to my talk. As I was being introduced I chatted with Colombia’s First Lady – Lina Moreno — who had come to hear my talk. She told me that her husband President Álvaro Uribe Vélez had hoped to attend and wanted to follow up to discuss our work on Government 2.0. President Uribe has been holding town hall meetings in locations across Colombia every Saturday for months. I’m thinking he’s a prefect candidate for a digital brainstorm. Why couldn’t Colombia be the first developing country to hold a three day discussion about an important topic on the Internet?

After my talk I participated in a fascinating panel on the topic of Social Investment in Colombia: New strategies for new challenges. On the panel were Soraya Montoya- Saldarriaga Concha Foundation, Javier Jaramillo – Inversiones Mundial, Luís Gallo- Sharing with Colombia, Samuel Azout- Carulla Foundation, and Mauricio Rodríguez- Dean CESA.

Ironically, on the way to the airport we were delayed by a student demonstration that had blocked traffic. Young people are organizing in Colombia to bring about real change. You may remember the famous protests by youth against guerilla kidnappings that were organized earlier this year on facebook. Thousands of students and other youth came into the streets in one of the biggest demonstrations in the country’s history. If I’d missed my flight (a close call), somehow it would have been ok.

Viva Facebook. Viva the Net Generation

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