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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stemming from other posts and discussions about this very issue, I put forth the following list of simple guiding principles that I think can provide a starting point for organizations entering this sphere of communication.

Although, there is no one single, policy structure that can fit all situations and organizations, the one thing I do take a strong stance on, is the need to keep the rule simple to understand and relatable, which is the reason I chose to use the rule of the road as my reference point.

Most Importantly, Don’t drink and Drive…well that’s just good advice

My point in putting up this list is to mainly drive discussion around the subject of, what constitutes ‘good’ social policy? Hopefully this provides a springboard from which to launch this much needed debate.

This week I’ve had the pleasure of attending a very well executed Government 2.0 Summit held in Washington D.C. I was pleasantly surprised to find many ‘kindred spirits’ at the conference and additional examples that signal the rise New Public-Private Ecosystem.

Tim O’Reilly, whose firm conducted the conference, opened with a keynote that argued that the twin developments of open data and the power of shared platforms had the capacity to revolutionize government. He noted that platforms such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Apple’s iPhone App Store were successful because they harnessed user contributions to create enormous collective value – value way beyond what they could do alone. He then went on to argue that this same logic could be applied to the role of government services. He argued that the government needed to begin to think of itself as a platform. He pointed to how the investments made by the U.S. Department of Defense in globally positioned satellites (GPS) spurred others to develop applications, products and services, and spawned an entire industry.

Over 40 noteworthy examples of the government as a platform were seen at the conference. Here are some of the highlights:

• NASA’s Spacebook – “Lessons Learned from NASA’s Enterprise Social Network,” (Emma Antunes) that supports internal and external cross-fertilization of ideas and innovation at the juncture of different scientific disciplines.
• TSA’s IdeaFactory – “Transportation Security Administration’s IdeaFactory: Social Media and Securing America,” (Tina Cariola) that harnesses front line TSA employee’s ideas for innovation and continuous improvement at the TSA.
• Citizen budget input in Santa Cruz – “City of Santa Cruz Offers Blueprint for Solving CA Budget Crisis with Social Media,” (Peter Koht) was used to deal with radical budget cuts in municipal services and reallocate resources.
• State of Utah – “Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal,” (Jeff Nigbur) – a shared portal that coordinates safety information, enables collaboration with private media organizations, and saves money for the State of Utah.
• Data and Platforms – “GeoEnabling Gov 2.0″ (Jack Dangermond) – GIS wizard, pioneer and founder of ESRI, illustrated how open data sources with powerful GIS tools and government platforms can enable “on-the-fly” mashups to support situational awareness and crisis situations in realtime, like the recent Station Wildfire in Los Angeles.

One of my favorite sessions was a panel on “Creating an Effective Platform,” with John Markoff (New York Times), Vinton Cerf (Google), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Tim Sparapani (Facebook). Markoff started off the session by distinguishing between “platforms of liberation,” and “platforms of control,” suggesting that platforms of liberation lead to creativity and innovation whereas platforms of control tend to limit creativity, stifle innovation and by implication in the worst case, be used to enslave or oppress. All the panel members reiterated that effective platforms (aka liberating platforms) have the ability to enlist broad voluntary participation. Cerf noted that a combination of design requirements from the Department of Defense for connectivity among all of their assets mixed with the values of the academic community fostered an open, cooperative architecture for the Internet. Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, noted that the concept of a utility, like the electricity grid or the Internet was his inspiration for Twitter – a reliable platform that can be used by others to build new capabilities. Sparapani noted that while Facebook has over 250 million members, it is also important to note that Facebook’s architecture also enlists and supports over a million independent developers that add value to the Facebook platform every day.

At the highest levels of the Obama administration the United States, with the appointments of Vivek Kundra as the first CIO of the United States and Aneesh Chopra as the U.S. CTO, is developing policy frameworks (e.g. The Open Government Directive) and new tools (e.g. data.gov and The Federal IT Dashboard) that will support collaborative platforms and open data. Both Mr. Kundra (see here) and Mr. Chopra (see here) provided additional information on these efforts at the conference.

So the story continues and I believe the mindshare is growing. Policy makers, practitioners and thought leaders are rising to the idea that a globally interconnected world affords new opportunities to reshape government. Open data unleashes the creative potential of citizens and private enterprise to create new services, software applications, and insights that the government cannot do by itself. The shear numbers tell the story. Millions of citizens and hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes uniting to independently create value and enhance the common good. The proprietary ownership or licensing of that data to a few (Gov 1.0) seriously limits the power of the New Public Private Ecosystem. Now not all government data should be open and privacy must be safeguarded to be sure. Nonetheless, the vast proportion of government data falls under the non-private category.

The same logic applies to collaborative platforms. In contrast to open data, however, collaborative platforms require investment and development. As we further explore the New Public-Private Ecosystem, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and the market will need to work out where it is best for the public sector to invest and where the private sector should invest. The dividing line is not clear. Only 10 years ago, one would not expect Twitter to emerge from the private sector; utilities were the province of governments. But the good news is that democracies, republics, and open societies have the natural open forums to debate and collaborate to find the answer. Closed societies force themselves into a comparative disadvantage on the world scene – they only harness a small proportion of their collective creative spirit. We are not likely to see the New Public-Private Ecosystems and its benefits emerge in those nations.

This is a new age of collaboration and the train has left the station. Distinctions between less government or more government are the realm of old categories and thinking. Government may well get smaller – a happy thought for citizens. Howeverit will get smaller, not through fewer services, but rather through the power of collaborative platforms, open data, and the New Public-Private Ecosystem, and in the final analysis, private citizens will have more services and a play a greater role in the development and delivery of those services. Everyone can win: the dedicated public servant, the engaged citizen, the investor, and the company.

Failed systems. Constructs designed by humans that have faltered at some point in the process. Some might say education is the next to witness this.

Tom Brown, CEO of IDEO, questions the current economic model in North America:

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about the failure of the economy and whether we want it to recover to its pre-bust state. As I listened to the arguments for various stimulus packages, the main justification for distributing hundreds of billions of dollars seemed mostly to involve getting us to spend more by consuming more. As a short term fix this may be okay, but wasn’t it just such an unsustainable approach to growth and consumption that got us into trouble in the first place? Can we really expect to spend our way out of this downturn and somehow magically create a post-crisis economy that is sustainable?

You mean throwing money at a problem won’t solve it if the model has an inherent flaw? How do we redesign society on a macro level? How does one magically create a post crisis economy?

There is the concept of a participatory government, whereby citizens play a direct role in designing/monitoring/enforcing the rules that govern economic activity. Gong Szeto, designer and creator of YOUROWNDEMOCRACY, believes that we should redesign government as a computational platform:

Today’s technology allows for innovative online collaboration, networking, transactional, and information visualization. Integrated together in a coherent set of solutions for the citizens of democracy, it is now possible to conceive of a single-platform which is an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework that will allow citizens the ability to stay informed about complex issues and to register their votes in favor or in opposition to processes in government. Transparency will lead to a stronger, more active and informed citizenry and more accountable government.

A Finalist in the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY is a web-based application geared to empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another and their elected leaders on important issues on local, state, and national levels. Its goals:

•    empower collective action through citizen action
•    integrate with public citizens for immediate feedback.

You can read more about Gong’s proposal here. The concept applies today’s social networking, multimedia, and financial markets technologies to create a collaborative infrastructure that records and displays a population’s real-time sentiments. This data is measured and visualized for everyone as part of a continuous feedback loop.

I can appreciate that the idea makes issues digestible and actionable. Provided citizens are engaged, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY fosters a culture of transparency, openness and innovation. Transparency can even be a regulatory solution whereby connected citizens can act as monitors within the system. In the same breath though, transparency also means privacy issues.  Network and security issues could threaten public safety.  Data mining (especially on such a remarkable scale) and identity theft are not two phrases anyone enjoys hearing in the same sentence. With an accessible central repository of citizen data, the right data in the wrong hands could potentially be very harmful.

Scalability comes into play. Can the complete scope and needs of the people be adequately addressed using such a system? Do we have the physical resources required to support such an infrastructure. Twitter, an exemplary use of social media being used to track political events such as the post-election riots in Iran, has become a victim of its own success. It has experienced massive scaling problems due to the amount of page views per second.

There is also the daunting task of defining the parameters of the system. Should the system mimic the current infrastructure or does the change in methodology alter the system itself? Szeto’s approach is that of an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework. This idea alters the current multiple party system of politics to that of a direct democracy. A changing model of governance also means a change in distribution of labour within government. Who is responsible for framing the questions asked – the government or the people? Careful understanding and use of verbiage in law is paramount. Ballot initiatives, a costly method of doing politics, have been considered to be the reason for paralysis of the political process in California and have been deemed the ‘crack cocaine’ of democracy by the Economist. Ironically enough, the original intention of ballot initiatives was to empower citizens at a grassroots level.

Accessibility is yet another concern. PM Stephen Harper recently announced the government’s intention to improve broadband internet access to rural Canada. Although this is a step in the right direction, it illustrates the point that not all citizens of Canada have equal access to broadband technologies. Those unfamiliar with the technology may not be as inclined to use it as well.

Will this design have longevity? With technology constantly evolving, would the current system, and therefore the political system (depending on mutual exclusivity of the two) be able to stand the test of time due to technological obsolescence? Would interest fade? The law of diminishing utility could mean that citizens could simply get bored of using the system and participation could simply diminish over time.

Are people truly ready, willing, and able to govern themselves?

The issue of cybersecurity is nothing new; you can read Obama and Biden’s homeland security agenda, and specifically their objectives for “protecting our information networks” right here.  On a more interesting note, the issue of a Katrina-like disaster in cyberspace has been a topic of major interest over the past few months.  In February, former Whitehouse cybersecurity official Paul Kurts addressed the lack of a ‘FEMA for the internet’.  More recently, the online discourse surrounding cybersecurity has ramped up substantially, particularly following the anxiety over last week’s Conficker Worm.  This only stengthened the push for an American cyberecurity czar, which according to US Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), is an absolute necessity.  In a statement released last week, Snowe (co-author of the new bill) argued that “if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber Katrina.”

The bill’s most striking proposal (Section 18, paragraph 2), and the central issue of the article I cited above, is that the new legislation would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic, effectively shutting down the internet.  Not surprisingly, this created something of an uproar among political bloggers over the weekend, many of whom took issue with this expansion of federal powers.

Much of the opposition to the bill falls among ideological lines; one blog reader commented that “he who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither,” rehashing a libertarian argument that long predates the internet. 

Debates involving a liberty-security tradeoff are nothing new, nor is a generalized a lack of trust in federal government, both long-standing issues among Americans.  On the flip side, the analogies to the disasters of 9/11 and Katrina are also largely disconnected from the issue at hand; these arguments have a tendency to bubble up every time a debate arises over the liberty-security tradeoff.

In my opinion, the ideological arguments that simply cite pre-internet cases and debates, both for and against the bill, do little to confront the issue at hand.  The issues surrounding cybersecurity and cyberterrorism are very different than anything we’ve confronted in the past (contrary to most of the parallel arguments currently being made).  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have a full grasp over the threats at hand.  Whereas I feel well-read enough to comment over issues like journalism censorship or detainment of suspected terrorists, the issue of cybersecurity is one where I simply don’t know enough about the threats to make an informed opinion on the liberty-security tradeoff (even though I have been reading about it).  Even the blogs and articles I’ve read have done little to convince me that these authors have much more understanding of the issue than I do.

Growing up with a very open and libertarian internet, I’m no fan of the notion that a federal government could shut it down.  But then again, with the recent scares over Conficker (see Steve’s Skynet blogs), we may be entering a new age where more internet policing becomes a necessity, with governments needing more tools to limit damage in an emergency situation.  The scale and scope of said tools is currently up for debate, and rightfully so.  But that said, let’s try to focus the debate on the risks and needs that we’re now facing, and avoid referring solely to ideologies and analogies that pre-date the internet.

From its first few weeks in office, the new administration has emphasized the need for innovation in the public sector and called for dramatically more productive, equitable and transparent services. Fortunately, new social technologies and emerging models of mass collaboration provide a rich new set of possibilities for designing and delivering the functions of governments with greater creativity, efficiency and effectiveness than ever before. Drawing on lighthouse examples in the U.S. and abroad, Wikinomics co-author Anthony D. Williams will illustrate how the knowledge, ingenuity and skills of a diverse talent pool can help reshape how governments provide homeland security, health care, education and countless other public services.

Hardly typical behavior for a pharmaceutical company. After all, pinpointing their precise genetic origins of diabetes could unlock a treasure trove of new medicines and result in a major windfall for Novartis’s shareholders. But its perfectly rational from a wikinomics point of view. In fact, researchers claim there are far more leads hidden in the genome than any one lab could possibly follow-up on alone. So by placing its data in the public domain Novartis intends to leverage the talents of a global research community to dramatically scale and speed up its early-stage R&D activities.

Now it seems GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is the latest pharmaceutical company to undertake a major course-correction, this time with pledges to provide cheaper medicines in the developing world and to start a patent pool for research on neglected disease. As reported in the Guardian, GSK will:

1. Cut its prices for all drugs in the 50 least developed countries to no more than 25% of the levels in the UK and US – and less if possible – and make drugs more affordable in middle- income countries such as Brazil and India.
2. Put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a “patent pool”, so they can be explored by other researchers.
3. Reinvest 20% of any profits it makes in the least developed countries in hospitals, clinics and staff.
4. Invite scientists from other companies, NGOs or governments to join the hunt for tropical disease treatments at its dedicated institute at Tres Cantos, Spain.

It’s an intgriguing announcement from my point of view, not least because they have adopted startegies I wrote about in Wikinomics (see “the New Alexandrians”) and in my own work on intellectual property.

While the discounted prices for medicines will likely steal headlines, GSK’s pledge to back a patent pool is arguably more significant. While never very popular in the IP-intensive pharma industry, patent pools have been around for some time in industries such as aircraft manufacturing, radio and telecommunications. More recently, intellectual property theorists such as Carl Shapiro, Robert Merges and Josh Lerner have each suggested that the pooling intellectual property rights could help address an array of issues in industries characeterized by cumulative innovation, particularly software and biotechnology. Even the USPTO recommended patent pools as a potential solution to problems of access and excessive patenting and litigation in the biotechnology industry.

If other companies were to follow suit, a patent pool would provide a significant boost to researchers who have been working on treatments for neglected diseases such as TB, malaria, and river blindness. It could also help give new momentum to open source biology movement.

While I congratulate GSK, I do wonder what took them so long and I find myself agreeing with Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières, both of whom argued that the patent pool should be extended HIV.

Some of the issues that challenge today’s regulators include the sclerotic pace of rulemaking, increasing international interdependency, the lack of transparency in industry and government, the corrosive influence of “junk science” and money and an insufficient capacity for oversight.

After dismantling or circumscribing centralized regulatory agencies in the 1980s and 1990s, I think many governments will find they are ill equipped to deal with these challenges. In most sectors, deregulation was a cue for regulated industries to start designing and enforcing their own regulations. Decentralized rulemaking was intended to help make regulation more responsive to the needs of industries that were evolving quickly and becoming increasingly global in scope. Governments were to be the “regulators of last resort”—stepping in only after self-regulation was deemed to have failed. But in practice most instances of pure self-regulation have deficiencies and governments (for the most part) have proven unable or unwilling to take swift action when market failures became evident.

The upshot: without transparency, oversight and accountability, self-regulation is clearly inadequate. At the same time, the speed, interdependency and complexity of today’s world makes a return to centralized rulemaking and enforcement increasingly implausible. All this makes me think that the kinds of organizational innovations that make the Linux community, twitter and wikipedia remarkable could help regulators address some their challenges.

The big opportunity initially may be to foster greater citizen or stakeholder participation in monitoring and enforcing regulations that already exist. Naturalists and recreational users could be enlisted to help document abuses on public lands, just as individuals and organizations around the world are able to bring human rights abuses to global attention using new channels like YouTube or Winess’s Hub.

But citizens and other stakeholders could also help design and promulgate new rules, particularly where there are gaps in existing legislation. The consumer advocacy movements that currently police the social and environmental performance of industry are a good example. More governments could eventually sanction initiatives like these, while insisting on mandatory corporate sustainability reporting and other forms of transparency would bolster the efforts of citizen monitors.

The technological foundation – including RFID, satellite imagery, cheap personal video recorders and other Internet-connected devices – already exists to distribute the power and authority for designing and enforcing regulations to a broader network of participants. And I think that in the right niches and within certain communities of interest there is ample desire on the part of citizens to play a role in enforcing the rules they care about. I’m not sure that same enthusiasm exists within government and industry, which is why my preliminary research suggests that most new forms of participatory regulation are emerging completely outside traditional regulatory bodies.

I’ll be following up this post with a series of nascent examples. If participatory regulation is of interest to you or if you know of other examples, I would love to hear about it.

The full report is worth reading if these issues interest you at all. It’s in beta stage for the next 10 days, so your comments could help shape the future of digital governance in the UK.

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.

Essentially, anything that gives an advantage to national companies at the expense of non-national companies is trade-distorting, and thus a protectionist measure.  But during a global recession, it’s very difficult to avoid these actions.  For a simple example, take the auto bailout.  In North America, we assume that the auto industry is “too big to fail”.  But in giving a bailout to GM, Ford and Chrysler, we’re distorting trade – at the expense of German, British and Japanese auto companies.  Naturally, this issue has already been raised.

Now, a note on free trade.  Generally, most economists agree that free trade is good, and protectionism is bad.  Since the Second World War, regional trade agreements and the World Trade Organization have been, overall, reasonably successful in promoting global trade and lowering barriers to trade.  But let’s remember – we still don’t have absolute free trade.  Canada still has tariffs – you can read our official list if you’re that interested.  So although we have relatively “free-er” or “more open” trade than previous periods in history, it’s still not completely free or open, in any absolute sense.

Now as I mentioned, most economists will agree that we need to move towards free trade, not away from it.  Protectionism, and sometimes even bailouts, are often regarded as the “slippery slope” towards deeper recession (or even depression).

What makes this even worse, however, is the retaliatory nature of protectionism.  Just look at the “Buy American” clause in the US stimulus package, which prompted Canadian politicians to start talking about possible retaliatory measures.  Michael Ignatieff warned the US that Canada is a “force to be reckoned with”, while European leaders made open threats that this could spark a trade war.

But is this kind of rhetoric helpful?  Do our politicians really have to talk tough and make threats? 

Words like “war”, “threat” and “retaliate” all have very negative connotations.  The word ‘war’, in particular, is one generally associated with violence and malice.  Is this the kind of discourse we should have between North America and Western Europe, regions that are supposed to be close allies?  Using the term “war” angles this as state-versus-state conflict.  Is this how we want to frame this issue, at a time when global economic cooperation is more important than ever?

Politicians are savvy- they know the power of words (journalists too).  When they need to gather public support for a cause, they’ll often frame it as an us-versus-them issue – note the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” (on a sidenote, I’ve always thought that a barrier to progress on global warming was the term itself – “global warming” doesn’t sound very threatening – who doesn’t like warmth?  Why hasn’t anyone thought of a more threatening term for this?)

When the newspapers front headlines of “Trade War”, it’s likely to create public support for retaliation.  When public support goes up, it’s more likely that politicians will act on it.

So let’s go back to the auto bailout.  Was it protectionist? Yes.  Is protectionism detrimental to global trade?  Of course.  But did challenging times necessitate a bailout?  You could easily make this argument (as many economists have).  In a recession, states will do things like this, and yes, they will be trade-distorting.  But to frame bailouts and stimulus packages as acts of war is only going to make matters worse.

So let’s stop making threats of retaliation, and stop calling this “war” – this isn’t war.  Let’s not blindly assume that free trade is our ideological goal, and that any barriers to it are evil.  Instead, I’d rather see our politicians act with pragmatism, and come to new agreements on how the world can come through this crisis together.

People are already upset over the worsening economic condition.  So let’s choose our words more carefully, before the discourse of “war” causes national populations to villanize one another.

�

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.

Why not? They rely on an archaic and inefficient mode of teaching.

Prison education (personal development courses, GED, and post-secondary courses) rely on correspondence via travel (by educators to correctional facilities) and old-school postage. Computers are rare and the use of the Internet, or even Intranets, is prohibited.  

This story suggests that decreased funding for prison education in the United States makes it increasingly  difficult to successfully implement prison education via traditional correspondance. It explains that efficient, interactive prison classes – in which the students and professor interact through live video feeds – have the potential to vastly increase the odds that an inmate will start and complete courses or even an entire degree.

Open University (OU), a largely online-correspondence UK institution, has 1,400 student-inmates in 148 prisons. Officials from the school are calling for greater adoption of technology by prisons to facilitate the inmates’ learning. Anne Pike, Teaching Fellow in OU’s Offender Learning Program believes that, “If (inmates) are going to be rehabilitated into the modern world, offenders must access modern technologies. It is necessary for employment as well as coping with the fast pace of life. ” (Read the rest here).

If we wanted to use modern, common technology to provide enhanced education to prisoners we could (after cutting through all of the red tape). It could be done efficiently and at a high level of quality. The question is, do we want to?

For the inmate on Death Row guilty of the type of crime we try not to think about, the use of a computer or Internet is a priveledge lost, and deservedly so. But think of the marginalized 18 year-old serving a 3 year term for a robbery - a robbery that he committed, perhaps, to get cash to pay for food or health care bills. Assuming that this 18 year-old enrolls in some educational program in prison, should he receive an inefficient and expensive “snail mail education,” or should he have the opportunity to develop himself through an efficient and relevant education that harnesses the power of common computer technology?

I look foward to hearing your take on this issue.

�

Here’s a clip from the Globe’s PolicyWiki site:

So much of what happens in Canada when it comes to developing public policy occurs behind closed doors, inside committee rooms and legislative offices. Even the discussion about many of the issues that affect us as a country, such as the federal budget, foreign policy, our relationship with the U.S. and so on, tends to take place primarily in academic or official circles. Opportunities for public comment are rare, and often overly restrictive.

We’d like to try and open that process up a little, and this is our attempt to do that. One of the benefits to the Internet is that it lowers the barriers that can prevent people from discussing these kinds of important topics, and allow them to provide their thoughts about the direction the government should take. Some would argue that it lowers the barriers a little too far, but that’s a subject for another day, and another wiki . . .

If this experiment succeeds — as we sincerely hope it will — we’d like to expand it to become an ongoing project to tap what we like to call the “Two Million Minds” of our readers and other concerned citizens, a kind of open, crowd-powered forum that we could use to collect the thoughts and opinions of the Canadian public on the important issues that confront our country and us as a society.

There are various ways to contribute. For example, you can simply vote on the ideas that have been already been presented by various Canadian politicos or you can add your own proposals. We desperately need this kind of forum in Canada, so do take some time to contribute. 

1. Mass collaboration could change virtually every aspect of government: From the way we deliver services like education and health care to the way we develop policy and engage citizens in democratic decision-making to the way we recruit new talent into government agencies and orchestrate capability in the public service.

2. Toronto has an enormous talent pool with more than 4 million residents in the GTA. That’s a lot of brainpower to apply to the challenges that face this city. Could we make the city the most vibrant, progressive and dynamic urban space on the planet? Yes, but we’ve got much work to do to harness this latent potential. That’s why this summit was a good start.

3. Web 2.0 has enormous promise at all levels of government, but the local applications have the greatest potential to make a real difference in how citizens interact with government. The services offered by local government and the kind of decisions taken in the council chambers impact people’s lives very directly. They shape the quality of the urban experience in Toronto and the evolution of its many neighborhoods. The irony is that engagement at the local level of government is typically low, in large part because the existing consultation mechanisms are slow and cumbersome and exclude the vast majority who may not have time to show up to a council session or a town hall meeting. Web 2.0 can make decision-making around issues such as transportation and urban planning more transparent, and that transparency can bolster our ability to scrutinize our local officials (see They Work For Us). With greater transparency comes greater input, with intuitive online tools for information gathering, brainstorming, and collaborative filtering making the process of contributing less onerous and more productive. The City’s facebook consultation on the Jarvis St. streetscape improvement project (demo’s this morning) is a good start.

4. There is an emerging consensus that one of the best ways to enable government 2.0 innovation is for government to embrace the kind of platform openness that has driven the success of entities like Wikipedia, flickr and Amazon. In other words, government should open up their data and online service applications to enable any individual or third party with the skills and inclination to develop new service innovations. The rationale is simple. Government can’t anticipate how citizens’ needs may change or all of the creative ways in which services could be delivered in the future. So by providing an open platform for innovation they can leverage the talents and insights of a much broader community of co-innovators. Indeed, it’s probably fair to assume that citizens, non-profits and businesses—being generally unconstrained by rigid internal brueaucracies and strict accountabilities—will innovate around the data far faster and more freely than government can. Apps for Democracy in DC and “Show Us a Better Way” are showing us the way forward.

5. The City of Toronto’s website needs a major overhaul. Rather than a static portal for disseminating information to residents and visitors, we need a dynamic platform for citizen engagement and service innovation, using the kind of approach described above. One thing is clear from this meeting: the web 2.0 commmunity in Toronto would gladly get this done quickly — just give them access to the underlying data and services. In other cases, the city could simply piggy back on what the community has already provided, much the way local councils in the UK leverage fixmystreet.com, an application developed by a non-profit called mysociety. As of today, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time using mysociety’s tools, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister. No need for government to reinvent the wheel.

6. More than a better website, we need a new form of participatory urbanism that gives citizens a major role in addressing some of our most pressing challenges–e.g., how do we reduce the city’s carbon footprint, improve local transport, and ensure the city remains an attractive destination for investment and job creation. We need a city-wide talent marketplace and solution exchange where problems citizens can converge around these issues. This participatory urbanism project has become one of my latest favorites.

7. None of this needs to be prohibitively expensive. Technology is the easy part – it’s relatively cheap, quick to install and easy to use. The tough challenges are about changing people, processes and culture in the way things are done in the city’s administration. It will take a combination of grassroots wiki communities growing organically (with enthusiastic participants that demonstrate the benefits) and strong leadership from the mayor and other officials to create an environment where innovation can flourish.

8. Finally there’s a wealth of pathbreaking projects to draw inspiration from. This blog is a good source. Be sure to check out The Collaboration Project, run by my friends at the National Academy of Public Administration.

Feel free to suggest other sources or add your observations about the meeting!

Take the Berkeley-based “Common Sense” project, where an innovative group of researchers claims that a few simple modifications can transform an ordinary mobile phone into a powerful personal measurement instrument capable of sensing our natural environment and empowering collective action through everyday grassroots citizen science across blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and nations.

Here’s their hypothesis:

“Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the computer platform of choice in developed and developing nations. These mobile phones already shape our culture – collapsing space and time by enabling us to reach out to contact others at a distance, to perform just-in-time coordination of events, and to purchase, play, and game “on-the-go”. While there is a growing research space around sensor based activity inferencing and a wealth of existing location applications in the market, we claim that our mobile phones still fall short in their ability to enable us to measure and understand the real world around us.”

What kind of things might we like to measure, you ask? As the researchers point out, the list is potentially endless:

How hot is it? Which direction am I facing? Which direction is the wind blowing and how fast? How healthy is the air I’m breathing? What is the pollen count right now? How long can I stay outside without getting sunburned? Is the noise level safe here? Were pesticides used on these fruits? Is this water safe to drink? Are my children’s toys free of lead and other toxins? Is my new indoor carpeting emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs)?

As it stands, our phones tell us very little about these environmental conditions. But with the addition of a few sensors and some software, we could turn our mobile phones into personal measurement devices and platforms for citizen science. Here’s a potential scenario:

“Imagine you are deciding between walking to one of two subway stations and could gather live data from the passengers waiting on the platform at each stop about the temperature and humidity of each station at that very moment? What if you were one of the 300 million people who suffer from asthma and could breath easily as you navigated your city with real-time pollen counts collected by your fellow citizens? What if you could not just be told the level of noise pollution in your city but measure and publish your own actual decibel measurements taken in front of your home? What if you were one of the more than 3 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, that burned solid fuels, including biomass fuels (wood, dung, agricultural residues) and coal, for their energy, heating, and cooking needs indoors and yet had no way to monitor the health effects of the resulting pollutants on yourself and your family even though nearly 2 million people die annually from indoor air pollution?”

In a recent trial, the Berkeley researchers collaborated with the City of San Francisco to put their air quality sensing systems on the municipal fleet of street sweepers. The street sweepers collect data as they drive around and it all gets aggregated on city maps.

For more on remote sensing and citizen science, see these other projects too:

AIR and Pigeonblog (Preemptive Media)
CarTel (MIT CSAIL)
Urban Sensing (UCLA CENS)
MetroSense (Dartmouth)
Mobile Urban Sensing (Cambridge)
SenseWeb (Microsoft Research)
Sensor Planet (Nokia)

For a sneak peek at what a web 2.0 strategy for the City of Toronto could look like check out iLive.at, the winner of the District of Columbia’s “Apps for Democracy” contest.

Most of the proceedings will be webcast. So, if you’re not in the city — or can’t get off work — you can still see how citizens and local officials can use web 2.0 technologies to transform their city. Hope to see you there!

Most of my talk was about the role of mass collaboration could play in driving the success of small and medium size enterprises. While the focus in Washington has been on organizing bailouts for large enterprises to provide short-term damage control, I argued that it’s more sensible over the long-term to provide stiumlus for SMEs given the critical role they play in innovation and job creation.

What really seemed to intrigue the audience, however, was the few minutes I spent discussing the potential for using prediction markets to make smarter forecasts and decisions. I used intrade’s prediction market for the presidential election as an example. But what the audience wanted to know, more than anything else, was whether a prediction market could help them forecast the end of this economic nightmare. 

Well, there is no such prediction market (at least not on intrade.com) but there are plenty of indicators to suggest that the intrade community sees little hope in the months ahead. At todays rates:

• Probability that the US economy will be in recession in 2009 — 90%. 
• Probability that the DOW will close on or above 11,000 by December 31, 2008 — 0%. 
• Probability that the unemployment will be greater than 5% in December, 2008 — 100%
• Probability that the US economy will go into depression in 2009 — 15% 

All of these predictions seem rather obvious now (though one would have done quite well had they bet back in August 08 that the economy would be in recession in 2009) and I don’t see anyone willing to go out on a limb to predict when all of this might end. Given the current state of flux, such reticence is understandable. Maybe someone in our reader community would care to make a prediction? Perhaps you’d like to provide some solace to my friends in Kansas City .

While we’re at it, is there a role for mass collaboration in getting us out of this economic mess. What do you think about the merits of bailing out failing automotive giants versus a longer-term emphasis on stimulating the small and medium size business sector? Or given that large and small enterprises are so intertwined through supply chains, etc., should we be trying to protect both?

Well he doesn’t seem to be utilizing any of the web 2.0 tools that he had in the campaign.

His Twitter account has gone quite stale over the last 6 days, just like what happened with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Do you think he’ll update it? Did he ever actually update it? It looks just like an RSS feed of events that he was broadcasting live from.

Also… the blog on Change.gov looks like a mechanism for glorified press releases.

So, no signs thus far that he’s going to use any of the grass roots community building Web 2.0 tools that he used in the campaign to actually reach out and touch the American people during his presidency.

Justin makes a good point. Now that the campaign is over it would all too easy to figure that the job of engaging the public is over until election time rolls around again in 2012. But it’s also a bit early to rush to judgment so let’s give Obama a few more weeks to get settled.

In this new post I’d like to emphasize the importance of reaching outside the traditional boundaries of government institutions to leverage the skills, knowledge and resources that civic and private sector organizations can contribute to the design and delivery of public services.

Here’s the rationale: In our increasingly networked world, issues and problems easily and quickly spill outside the organizational and even geographic boundaries of governmental institutions. While collaboration technologies have evolved at an incredible rate, the application of these technologies to assist governments in dealing with problems is completely dependent on institutional and organizational learning that is proceeding at a snail’s pace.

So we’ve argued that there’s a growing imperative to seize the new function-rich infrastructure of the Web 2.0 to open-up the government’s approach to public policy-making and service delivery. Rather than have agencies manage everything in-house, public services could be provided by any combination of public agencies, the private sector, a community group, or citizens, using the Web as a mechanism for collaboration, innovation and engagement. And, rather than treat citizens as inert consumers, recipients of government services and benefits could become prosumers – shaping the policy and the structures of program, benefits and services for their individual needs. This in turn will lead to better outcomes that better map onto the needs and behaviors of the people that use them.

As my colleague Maryantonett Flumian put it, “The big question is, what roles and responsibilities will government, citizens, not-for-profits and business assume in a society where knowledge is everywhere, where hierarchies are anachronisms, and where “the state” is no longer king of the jungle, but part of an ecosystem energized by mass collaboration?”

Take education, health care and social security, for example. In most public sector “marketplaces” governments maintain a monopoly on service provision and most services are delivered one-size-fits-all. Even in the shift to e-government, many agencies have largely replicated physical world distribution systems on the Web, thus ignoring one of the most powerful implications of the Internet—the ability to create new forms of value by focusing on and transforming core competencies while creating partnerships for non-core activities. By assembling networks of citizens, private firms, non-profit organizations and other agencies on a Web-based platform, governments can offer greater innovation, choice and variety to citizens. In some areas, it could be advantageous to go one step further by offering citizens a basket of services and providers to “purchase” with their tax dollars and many other possible business models that emphasize choice in service venues, providers and options.

We haven’t see too many great examples of this in government, but the British National Health Service (NHS) recently respond to public demand for choice in health care by implementing what it describes as a “dramatic expansion in patient choice.” The introduction of free choice means, among other things, that patients referred to see a specialist are themselves able to choose where they are treated from any hospital that meets NHS standards (whether publicly or privately operated). Patient choice, in turn, introduces an element of competition that should encourage poor facilities to improve as patients seek out practitioners in the best hospitals.

Obama has called for more creative delivery strategies for public services and emphasized the importance of choice in education and health care. Give us your thoughts: Where else could choice make a difference and how could the Obama administration use the Web to enable a more collaborative and user-driven approach to service delivery?

Given Obama’s dominant use of Web 2.0 tools to power his campaign, it’s hard to imagine anything less but a significant shift towards openness and participation should we wake up tomorrow with him as President Elect. As for McCain, he’s admittedly less adept with the tools currently available, and is against Net Neutrality, but his taxation and trade policies might actually do more for innovation then we care to admit.

Either way, as a I wrote a few weeks ago in the Globe and Mail, whomever is elected will have a tremendous challenge and opportunity on their hands. As “Having grown up digital, they (young voters) will want to be involved in the act of governing — by contributing ideas before decisions are made. What’s more, they’ll insist on integrity from politicians; if politicians say one thing and do another, young Americans will use their digital tools to find out, and spread the news.” They want Government 2.0.

So how do the candidates match up?

Barack Obama would:

• Ensure an open Internet.
• Create a transparent and connected democracy.
• Encourage a modern communications infrastructure.
• Prepare all of our children for a 21st century economy.
• Improve America’s competitiveness.
• Employ science and technology to solve our nation’s most pressing problems.

John McCain would:

• Encourage investment in innovation
• Develop a skilled work force
• Champion open and fair trade
• Reform intellectual property protection
• Keep the Internet and entrepreneurs free of unnecessary regulation
• Ensure a fully connected citizenry

Based on both candidate’s proposed policies, it’s far from a cut and dry debate. But if at the heart of this issue, and at the heart of Government 2.0, is a commitment to transparency, participation and engagement then the fact that Obama’s campaign encourages the submission of ideas and insights regarding his campaign policies is a far clearer signal of future intentions and the future of government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you haven’t heard of or experienced an ARG, check out Wikipedia’s comprehensive entry. The essential nugget is that an ARG is an interactive, Internet-based narrative where large numbers of game players collaborate to solve plot-based challenges and puzzles. Unlike a tightly-scripted game or media production, the outcome of an ARG is determined almost entirely by the players and their interactions.

Most, though not all, ARGs to date have been tied to product promotions (e.g. I love bees was a promotion for Halo 2) and televisions productions like Lost (see the Lost Experience). World Without Oil is one of the exceptions.

The premise of World Without Oil was simple and provocative: What if an oil crisis started on April 30, 2007 – what would happen? How would the lives of ordinary people change? Players were invited to imagine how their lives and communities would be different and how they would cope if the world’s oil suddenly dried up. The “plot” unfolded dynamically. First, the players read the “official news” and what other players were saying. Then, using a combination of blog posts, videos, images and even voice mails, they told their own stories of the challenges they were facing.  As the crisis continued, players updated their stories with further thoughts, reactions and solutions.

The game ended after 32 days, having engaged thousands of players around world and woven the fabric of 1,500 stories into what Ken describes as “living breathing mega narrative that presented some eerily plausible scenarios, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.”

Herein lies the key point. World Without Oil presented players with an engaging, interactive structure in which ordinary individuals could collectively imagine how the world would respond to what we all know is an inevitability: sometime in the near future (and perhaps sooner than we might expect) we will all live in a world in which we can no longer rely on fossil fuels to power our daily existence.

There is a tendency in public policy circles to assume that issues like climate change are sufficiently complex that the average citizen has little to contribute to the debate about appropriate solutions, so the job of coming up with solutions is therefore best left to the experts. To some extent it may be true that the “non-expert” might have little to say about the intricacies of a cap-and-trade system. But the average citizen is an authority on their daily lives. Ken points out that “When we were asking people to talk about what’s going on in their neighborhood, we were deliberately focusing on something which they are experts at.”

“With just a little bit of narrative structure,” says Ken, “people could post their story and say what they wanted to say without the fear of being kind of contradicted or shouted down. Because we’re talking about an alternate reality and in a way we’re kind of talking about the future.”

Ken notes that the narrative structure encourages “peer learning.” “The game becomes this incredibly enriching experience, with people learning from other people, joining a community, learning new skills, getting access to novel data and information and then using the game experience to make real changes in the way they conduct their lives.”

There is no doubt that fighting climate change will require a massive worldwide effort that could dramatically alter much about the world as we know it today. We need more than just smart public policy. And we need more than a comprehensive retooling of industry and our infrastructure. We all need to give up our oil addictions and that, in turn, will require us to make some pretty profound changes in our daily lives. Alternate reality games like World Without Oil could play a vital role in engaging the public in making those vital changes.

He likens this to a post i9/11 future, one where our online rights and privacy will face unprecendented scrutiny by government. You can watch part of his talk at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in California where he made the comments below.

This message mirrors part of the thesis proposed by author and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” In it, Zittrain argues that we’re on the path to Internet lockdown thanks to a combination of proprietary devices and malicious intent. You can read my colleague Naumi’s review here.

There’s some great discussions and ranting taking place about this pretty much everywhere so I’ll pass on the summary of what’s being said and instead pose two questions: what constitutes an i-9/11 attack, and what would such an act allow that isn’t already being done today?

Thoughts?

Looking at The Wire from a purely technical standpoint you notice that over the course of the series the ‘drug dealers’ are always weighing the cost of efficient communication against the criminal liability of having their conversations and interactions recorded. In many cases defaulting to face-to-face meetings in order to assure that the remain free from prosecution.

Unfortunately, I am seeing the same mentality used in organizations when it comes to technology and web 2.0 tools. Enabling employees to communicate, collaborate, efficiently share information and provide value across the business should be seen as a god send by organizations. However, many companies have been operating under the mindset that ‘ignorance is bliss’ especially when it comes to ‘legal liability’.

Take for example a company that produces widgets, and during the development process employees are used to help test the widgets. They use Web 2.0 tools that enable employees to report errors and potential improvements, interacting directly with engineers to help improve design and speed up development cycles. The problem is that from a legal standpoint the information captured from the process could mean that the organization would now be liable for all of the errors and improvements captured, even the ones it deemed ‘acceptable’. Ironically something that would increase value for both the organization and the consumer becomes harder to manage because of legal liability.

This leads to some organizations taking a street inspired approach to communication. Now we have things like ‘information life cycles’ that are aimed more at removing potentially damaging information that saving space on the server (think of it as digital shredding). Basically, the less efficiently you track you communications and expose your flaws the safer you are. Employees shouldn’t feel the need to send Blackberry PIN messages and shy away from documenting information especially when they are acting in what the think is the best interest of the organization.

I think it will be interesting to see how corporations and the legal system adapt in the coming years.

Does joining a Facebook group associated with a cause / corporation mean that you’re engaged?

Or does posting an online consultation process like this one mean that you’re really engaging people?

Evidently, it’s a relatively ambiguous term. A colleague of ours over at D-Code makes a good point when he differentiates between engagement and investment – the latter indicating a defined input of time/money/effort into an activity, rather than just pushing “join” as many Web 2.0 tools tend to incent. Thus, what’s important is the conversion of the passively engaged into the invested.

But on the organizational side, and in particular, in the public sector, what’s the flip side of that conversion process and user-investment?

I for one see it as a process issue. As a user invests his or her time into a cause/issue, their ROI is dependent on the organization’s application of that investment. So if an organization opens up their processes to attract citizen/constituent opinion and ideas, the ROI will be positive only if the resulting policy/product reflects those inputs and the process with which they were arrived at in a transparent manner.

Organizational-led engagement in the Web 2.0 space is subsequently much more than just using new tools to communicate with target populations. Rather, it’s about transforming the processes by which stakeholders interact with your organization so that those interactions, and the evolution and path of their inputs, can be seen as important components of the end result.