1. OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi as tools for change
   

   Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron presented their project, Map Kibera, with which they mapped the neighborhood of Kibera, a slum in the City of Nairobi, Kenya. By engaging the community, the grey space on every map was turned into a dense, detailed and public available OpenStreetMap map. Alongside empowering the citizens of Kibera, this map makes it easier for NGOs to do their work: in the second phase of the project, the team used Ushahidi to create the site voiceofkibera.org, where citizens can submit geolocated issues and problems to be addressed. For instance, this was useful for reporting problems in the referendum process. Many citizens access voiceofkibera.org via phone, as the rate of web-enabled phones in Kibera is fairly high. The project was realized with less than $100k and probably had more impact than several top-down development aid initiatives would have.

2. Where is my trash? TrashTracker
   

   How to create consciousness for the environment and sustainability? Prof. Carlo Ratti, director of MITs Sensable City Lab, thought of following answer: let’s track our trash by using “small, smart, location aware tags” to find out where it ends up. The “Trash Tracker” will increase the knowledge of the “removal chain” and can lead to improvements in waste management.

   

3. The nice facebook: Diaspora

   In the battle David against Goliath, Diaspora would be David. Diaspora is aiming to create a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.” After presenting the project, I asked Maxwell Salzberg from Diaspora about the high switching costs for an user to move from one social network to the next. I used the analogy of a city: when you move into a new city, you lose most of your friends; switching social networks will be the same. Salzberg agreed that social network mobility should be a core feature. My perspective is that governments need to think about regulations for social networks in that sense to create more competition between social network providers, and allow for user mobility between sites.

4. Investigate environmental crime: Infodoalamar.info
   

   Infondoalmar.info enables grassroots monitoring of environmental crimes in the Mediterranean Sea. The site locates ships with hazardous waste that have been illegally sunk. It makes the invisible visible and creates pressure on public authorities. This project is based on empowering the citizens and declares that we need everyone to take actively care about the environment. David Eaves put forward the concept of the long tail in public service. The long tail knowledge of the citizens will lead to a long-term success of this platform: Government might know lot, but without reports from citizens it is impossible to track all the environmental crime. In fact, analysis of the traffic showed that Italian officials from ministries and agencies are already one of the biggest users of the site.

With the proliferation of corporate scandal in the past decade or so, today’s enterprise finds itself facing consumers who demand that it be more transparent, accountable and be considerate of the environment in which it operates. These demands have traditionally been made of governments and corporations have the added responsibility to continue to generate a profit and provide positive return for its shareholders. All in all, it is a trying time and companies are struggling to find the balance between what is profitable and what is socially acceptable.

However, the silver lining is that the new demand broadens the scope of competitive factors as any corporation that can convey its commitment to social good in a measurable form holds a serious advantage over its competitors. And the B Corporation initiative seeks to provide just such an option. An idea formulated and crafted by B Labs, the B Corporation initiative allows companied to be certified as a ‘B Corp’ – a social benefit corporation. Why might this help enterprises in building trust with consumers you ask? Well, for starters, an entity that seeks to be certified in this manner needs to adopt the charter of a B Corp, which includes an extended shareholders model, and adopt a holistic measure of organizational success. The extended model and novel scorecard that takes the environmental, leadership community impacts of the business are all an effort at distinguishing a ‘good company’ from ‘good marketing’.

Although still quite a nascent movement, 220 companies have become B Corps and together represent about $1.1 Billion in revenues. The members are from varied industries – banks, clothing companies, CPG’s, charities, media and advertising, even venture capitalists are present.

But if the movement is to thrive, it needs some refinements and legitimacy. As of now, B Labs – the organization behind it – is lobbying to get B Corporation classified as a legal option when incorporating your organization. With help from 2 national law firms(Linklaters and Jones Day), they have settled on rules and amendments that work within the laws of all 50 states and even give interested managers a guide to highlight the changes they need to make according to their state and type of incorporation.

However, in my opinion, B Corp should remain a certification. This is mainly for the reasons below:

• For existing organizations, re-incorporating as a B Corp would be a hassle and consumer time and money at a stage when most are reluctant to do so.
• Also for existing corporations, the reshuffling would cause disruptions in the daily operations while the new decision model would reduce productivity in the short-term as managers learn to consider the new decision criteria.
• In being a voluntary action, B Corp certification would be a point of distinction for companies (like ISO certification) and something concrete consumers could ask for when pushing companies to be more accountable.
• Volunteering would mean an annual audit on the state of operations, which means, the company would have to ensure that it adheres the new model on an on-going basis to maintain the certification.
• Being a new initiative, allowing companies to see the incremental benefit from certification before diving in head first is likely to be an easier ‘sell’ to managers and shareholders.

That’s all for me, what are your thoughts? Should B Corps be recognized as legal incorporation option or remain a certificate? Is it even relevant given the rise in prosumerism and industry watchdog agencies?

In 2004, Walt DuLaney and I conducted a longitudinal examination of business growth and cumulative revenue performance.  Among the success factors, we found that companies with powerful business platforms outperformed peers in cumulative revenue growth over a 15 year period.  Our conclusion: business platforms can be a means for organizational renewal, continuous innovation, and sustainable success.

Since then, the sophistication of business platforms and their related ecosystems has expanded and other companies have found success. In the case of Apple, competitors were forced to launch competitive platforms in response (Google’s Android, Symbian Foundation, and RIM) while Apple collected competitive profits.  A growing body of experience indicates that business platforms coupled with an ecosystem of partners can produce superior economic value.  As those partners cooperate and work together they collectively learn, innovate and expand their options for new product features, additional partnerships, and new platform components.  The platform plus the ecosystem becomes a sustainable economic engine for growth and development.

Here are twelve success factors for business platforms based on our work at nGenera Insight.  The first seven are business-related success factors.  The second five are technology-success factors.  The list reflects current understanding and is far from comprehensive.  Nonetheless, it provides a starting point for companies interested in sustainable growth.

BUSINESS SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Leadership, Vision and Purpose – No surprise.  All successful platforms begin with leadership, vision and a clear persistent purpose.  Wal-Mart’s logistic system implemented in 1993, now over 16 years old established the foundation to manage an increasingly complex distribution model, provide a basis to involve partners in category management and drive sustainable efficiencies in the retail industry.  GE’s aircraft engine maintenance platform supported the collection of real-time in-flight engine telemetry data that in turn provided information to customers and ultimately supported concurrent design of their next generation engines.
2. A Vibrant Ecosystem – An ecosystem is an economic community.  An ecosystem thrives when all parties experience mutual economic benefit.  Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has produced 100,000 apps.  In an ecosystem, motivated, persistent participation and contribution is driven by enlightened self-interest which benefits the whole.  The business platform provides the architecture, policies, rules, transactional frameworks, and the information necessary for the ecosystem to operate.
3. Competitive Velocity – How does a company outcompete its rivals and grow?  Move faster.  Salesforce.com revolutionized the CRM business, not only providing a better deal, but also delivering more new functionality per unit time than their competitors like Siebel, Oracle and SAP.  IBM got platform and ecosystem fever with Linux.  By investing in the Linux platform, its world-wide development community, and its related ecosystem, IBM was able to grow a new operating system faster than it could do by itself and enlist more developers than it could possibly afford.
4. Extensible Business Architecture — Business platforms must be conceived, from the outset, as an unfinished masterpiece.  Extensibility means learning.  The difference between an applications project and a business platform is that a business platform is never finished.  When a platform is finished it is at the end of its life.  Learning creates new directions and options.  New options create new opportunities for growth, alternative futures and other avenues for competitive action.  Amazon’s original on-line retail platform evolved into other businesses such as Marketplace, Web Services, and most recently cloud computing with their Elastic Compute Cloud offering.
5. Transparency — Transparency fosters beneficial contagion and excitement among the ecosystem members and interested parties.  An examination of any successful business platform reveals alternative futures.  Alternative future means options.  Options can be valued and hence the investment community can estimate the expected value of such potential futures and model a resulting perpetuity calculation.  Transparency attracts new partners and helps existing ecosystem partners to co-create the future of business platform.  As momentum builds, transparency also strikes fear in the competitors.
6. Policies and Rules — Policies and rules are essential otherwise chaos reigns and the platform and related ecosystem dies.  The business platform becomes the repository and the enforcer of policies and rules.  The business platform also communicates changes in rules. Consider the rules propagated and enforced in the iPhone ecosystem, or the Android ecosystem through the hardware architecture, operating system architecture, the business architecture and the rules and policies for these respective ecosystems.
7. Analytics — Business platforms generate prodigious amount of data continuously.  One of the most powerful advantages of a business platform stems from the collection and analysis of strategic, situational, transactional and detailed usage data.  As the data is collected powerful visualization and analytic tools can provide a combination of real-time and longitudinal analyses.  The closed-loop nature of the data collection process inherent in the business platform enable the platform leaders and ecosystem partners to run experiments, continuously improve products and rapidly evaluate potential business strategies and directions.  It is very difficult to duplicate this type of analytic capability in a non-platform business model.

TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Open technology architecture – Open architectures provide the basis for future options and business platform extensibility.  Open means that other technological standards can interface with the business platform, even technologies that have yet to be invented.  Remember, business value is ultimately determined by the market’s assessment of future viability and the promise of future value.  If the business platform is based only on a few proprietary or close technology architectures, future business options will be limited.
2. Component based – “assembly required.” Most business platforms consist of a collection of open, custom and proprietary application engines.  From a technological perspective, it is cheaper and more effective for a platform to be assembled from the evolving marketplace of technological components.  A component based approach in an open source, open architecture and cloud computing environment also means that companies can enter the business platform space for less cost and minimal proprietary software development.
3. Scalable – Google has scaled from it beginnings.  At the outset the Googleplex consisted of hundreds of servers.  Today the Googleplex is estimated to consist of over a million servers.  Google’s business platform and technology platform was designed from the outset to scale.
4. Sensing capability – Sensors in products (e.g. aircraft engines, cell phones, elevators) and sensing capabilities in key aspect of the business platform’s infrastructure provides a level of detailed data not possible in standard business models.  Almost all successful business platforms, whether product based, or service-based have a sophisticated network of sensors that collects real-time data.
5. Location agnostic – Business platforms operate to deliver their product or services to the customer at the right place, at the right time in the best possible way.  Successful business platforms eliminate the constraint of place.  Dion Hinchcliffe notes in a recent post that the popularity of mobile apps is transforming the Internet and replacing the web because they provide the right type of interaction for the user at the right time. Whether it is a mobile app or another delivery vehicle, smart business platforms live by being location agnostic.

Taken together these twelve factors provide a basis to begin a quest for sustainable growth.  What is your view?  Are business platforms a new basis for business growth and success?  Will all companies need to be a part of a platform or a platform leader?

Do you have plans for a business platform in your future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An HR executive at a major manufacturer confided to me: “Last weekend, I hacked my iPhone so I could use it on our network because it is not an authorized device at our company.” When I asked how he learned to hack his iPhone, he said he found an Internet chat group of like-minded iPhone owners and readily found the right settings for his particular network.

A Managing Director in Singapore for a US-based company told me that his PC is virtually useless in Asia “Recently I was in Hong Kong stranded in traffic,” he said, “and I watched another executive, probably a competitor, thumbing his way through phone calls, emails, and other business on a tiny keyboard and tiny screen. Meanwhile I sat in the back seat of my limo twiddling my thumbs looking at my un-tethered laptop, bemoaning the fact that our company does not support an Asian mobile solution.”

Are these isolated examples? No. Are they real? Yes. Are these your typical Gen Y or Net Generation employees? No, all are senior executives each with over 20 years of experience. Why would any company want to stifle the productivity of its high paid executives?

The anecdotes come from the fieldwork of a major study of employee computing released by nGenera Corporation earlier this week. A group of colleagues and I spent more than a year conducting the research, which was sponsored by a blue-ribbon syndicate of global corporations that are members of our nGenera Insight programs. We interviewed individuals at top vendors, global companies, and major government agencies to understand the best way to unleash employee creativity, support new forms of collaboration, and drive new levels of productivity.

Let me review just a few of the findings from the study. (You can download a summary of the report here.)

• Some companies get it, some don’t. Most employees come to work to be productive. Many want to be creative. And, increasingly, more and more want to collaborate. Collaboration in the workplace requires open data, open apps, and open minds. Does this mean a workplace free-for-all? No. In fact, companies that “get it” categorize their data, specify where open apps can be used, and put in place infrastructure that naturally implements policies and controls to guide “creative and open minds.” Those that don’t get it find themselves outmaneuvered when it comes to looking for new talent and forced to reinvent the wheel every time they need to partner. Competitors who get the need for collaboration will continually extend and improve their product and service features faster and at a lower cost.
• Collaboration requires a collaborative services infrastructure – nGenera calls it a Collaboration Server. Who has better information about your employees, your HR systems or Facebook and Linked-In? With over 300 million profiles on Facebook, it’s very likely that Facebook profile information might be useful to download into your internal systems. Would such information benefit your employees? Would profile information benefit your sales reps when they deal with customers or prospects? Yes and yes. Organizations need a “master hub” for collaboration. This “master hub” seamlessly interconnects proprietary systems, structured data and unstructured data, internal search with external search, open applications, and external platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, WebEx, Salesforce.com, etc.), so employees have what they need. As nGenera puts it, the Collaboration Server integrates leading consumer platforms, user management and security, policy and compliance management, and metadata repositories.
• Share data, information, and knowledge to create value, but categorize first. Companies need to segment data and knowledge into a minimum of three categories: 1) data that is open; 2) data that can be shared; and 3) data that is closed (locked up). Why? Employees need to know what data is in which category. Open data can be freely shared with a great deal of discretion and often this leads to new ideas and innovation. Shared data, the realm of joint ventures, product design, etc., must be controlled and selectively (usually under contracts and NDAs) shared. Data such as formulas, designs, customer data, etc., need to be looked up and sometimes taken completely off the grid for competitive and legal reasons. In our research, thought, we found that few companies have taken the time to make even these simple distinctions. It is no wonder data security and privacy are compromised.
• IT cannot do everything, nor should they. Yes, technology is a major source of innovation. And yes, it’s impossible to have any business discussion these days without having a technology discussion. But that does not mean that IT must do everything. Companies that completely lock down their IT tools, technologies, and infrastructure, by definition, must depend on IT professionals to do everything. Today, with computer literacy rates at all-time highs, employees can do much on their own, if given the right tools and the right policy frameworks. In fact once the creativity is unleashed, few companies can anticipate all the innovation that ensues. Locked-down companies deprive themselves of significant productivity and innovation in their workforce. Smart CIOs are revamping their infrastructure and policies to support self-service IT models and unleash enterprise-wide creativity on a massive and measurable scale.
• Some employees will manage their own computing just for the privilege to be more creative and self-reliant. One of our earliest findings in this research program was that every organization has a segment of employees that want to be self-sufficient. They will even buy their own technology and provide their own support if the organization will give them greater freedom over their technological choices. A number of companies now provide this option to employees, such as by providing a stipend for purchases. Employees buy what they can with the stipend (usually from an approved but diverse list), and then are welcome to make additional purchases on their own nickel to augment their “computing environment.” At BP, one of the largest global energy companies, such a program reduced support costs and increased employee morale. Of course, BP also put in place the policies that defined the rules of the road, instituted a computer “driver’s license,” had the participating employees sign appropriate use contracts, and engineered a thin client infrastructure to securely link self-reliant employees to sensitive internal systems. The moral of the story: Do whatever you can to harness this class of employees.

We uncovered several other key findings about how companies are supporting and nurturing employee freedom, creativity, and self-reliance in pursuit of a collaborative workplace. Some companies (see Dion Hinchcliffe on open business data and open business methods) are on their way to the new model of employee productivity and so are some leading government agencies (see data.gov and apps.gov). Every organization has a choice and the consequences of the wrong choice may be dramatic and immediate: Will they pursue new policies, technologies, and practices that unleash the creativity, innovation, and energy of their workforces, or will they continue to rely on command and control and in the process stymie the next generation of enterprise innovation and productivity gains?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rode the escalator up to the third level, only to be greeted by a group of yogis practicing sun salutations in front of Lululemon. And finally, when making my purchase at SportsChek, I was reminded of the 5 cent charge for a plastic bag from the recent city bylaw. It seems that the whole retail industry has been consumed with the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility, encompassing a wide spectrum of causes from fair trade, philanthropy, to labour standards and green solutions.  As an avid shopper and somewhat of an environmentalist, I whole heartedly support this shift in business focus but I also wonder whether these companies are genuinely compassionate or simply leveraging CSR as a marketing gimmick to boost sales? I also ponder at the fact of whether CSR should be paid for by the end consumer? It certainly seems like the case when you check out some of the price tags associated with these branded goods…

Thankfully, there is a place for some objective information: visit Wikichoice.com. WikiChoice seeks to become “the most powerful platform in the world for consumers to align their purchases with their deepest values.” Its database consists of company profiles that highlight key sections on fairness, justice, and sustainability. Here’s a sample page of Lululemon Athletica.

The site is still in its early form and a lot of the information is currently mined from Wikipedia, a practice dubbed as “Wikifarming” by the founders. However, over time and with more contributors, it will host a comprehensive database of global companies enabling a dual verification mechanism between corporate and the consumer.  You may remember Guess? Jeans’ sweatshop litigations in the 90′s, Starbucks’ biodegradable cup and fair trade certified coffee, or even more recently, the suicide of a Foxconn (Apple’s contractor in Asia) worker over an iPhone prototype. Now more than ever, there is transparency in CSR claims and companies are held accountable for their actions, not just measured on their marketing façade.

Thanks to collaboration, we can now buy “good” and hopefully move towards a concerted triple bottom line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At noon yesterday, the Sunlight Foundation announced the winners from the Apps for America contest.  The top prize (which came with a $15 000 reward) went to the makers of Filibusted.us, a web-based application that sheds light on which Senators have been filibustering legislation in the US Senate.  There were 16 prize winners in total, and I definately recommend checking out the winners for yourself (my favorite is Legistalker.org).

Next came the recently-launched INCA – the Innovative and Creative Application Contest, based out of Belgium.  This contest is open for anyone to submit an application, be it a website, widget, google mashup or mobile application, to be used by Flemish citizens to help solve “collective and social problems.”  Prizes will be awarded to the ten best submissions, with the top developer receiving a prize of 20 000 Euros (about $25 ooo USD).  Deadline for submission is April 27th. 

With INCA, Apps for America and last November’s Apps for Democracy, we’re starting to see a very exciting trend in the Gov 2.0 space:  software developers and programmers engaging in social causes and public sector development.  Can these contests help spur the creation of new services along the lines of fixmystreet or transparency tools like opencongress?  After speaking with Sunlight’s John Wonderlich and Apps for Democracy architect Peter Corbett over the past two weeks, I’m convinced that they can.

The key to improving on these contest models is to create, in the words of Peter Corbett, a “Cradle-to-Grave” strategy to promote citizen-driven innovation in the public sector.  Corbett’s Cradle-to-Grave approach seeks an 8-step process for future application contests:

1.  Problem Sourcing:  Idea-sourcing, in this case, will work best when a specific problem/social issue is being targeted (such as crime, traffic congestions, etc.)

2.  Open Data:  A key to the success of Apps for Democracy was that Vivek Kundra made DC’s government data openly available with over 240 data feeds. 

3.  Government Sponsorship:  To support the idea-sourcing contest.  This was done in DC’s Apps initiative.

4.  Establish Contest Framework: Well-constructed in all three above examples.

5.  Launch and Run the Contest:  Also well-done in the three above-cited cases.

6.  Award:  All three contests had multiple award winners (not just financial – the recognition is probably a more powerful incentive to participation).

7.  Absorption by Government:  For the best applications to live on after the contest and provide real value to the public sector, they need to be adopted, maintained, and ideally, improved upon.  This represents a murky point, and an area where the initial contests haven’t found a working model.  It’s unclear how this is best handled.  Should the government provide ongoing grants for development of applications?  Should government internalize the best applications?

8.  Commercialization:  Lastly, Corbett believes that the applications need to somehow become commercialized, although it’s unclear whether or not government should be involved.  Could iLive.at or DCHistoricTours have a business model, wherein they could be licensed to other cities to use?  Another possibility might be a sponsorship arrangement with a private company.

Overall, citizen-driven idea sourcing and app creation represents a means of maximizing web 2.0 potential in public sector development.  The room for improvement is massive – outside of DC, for example, very few governments have truly open data (Corbett’s 2nd step).  But even if we’re still years away from widespread adoption of this model, at least we have the model (or rather, a model), with forward-thinking governments seeing the merits and beginning to move in this direction. 

If you’re really into this space, there’s a major development coming over the horizon – but that’s a whole other blog post in itself.

So what did they do? They took matters into their own hands and auctioned the funds to the highest bidders -  other municipalities who had projects ready to go paid them cash for the rights to the MTA funds (in one case just $.61 on the dollar). The city selling the MTA funds would then be able to take the cash and use it for anything it liked.

Three interesting things about the situation stand out:

• First, the swaps/marketplace itself is quite innovative/creative. An interesting case in optimizing results in a grass roots way. Grade: A-
• Second, the low prices paid for the funds suggest that, in some cases, stimulus dollars are being weilded very inefficiently  (A $.61 price suggests a 39% inefficiency) Grade: C
• Third, the MTA appears to have put the brakes on these swaps. Maybe because of the publicity they generated? Who knows. But cities must now build (invent?) a case for their use, or risk losing them altogether. This seems to create the wrong message and set of incentives. Grade: D 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part of the issue is that few people are aware of the appropriate process for filing a freedom of information request and probably assume that effort and time required would outweigh the ultimate benefits. That’s why I really like WhatDoTheyKnow, a MySociety project that strips away all of the hassles and uncertainties of filing an FOI request. Visitors to the site simply pick a department, type a request, and mysociety handles the rest!

Residents of Edinburgh in the UK, for example, have used WhatDoTheyKnow to successfully request information about things like:

• How much did it cost to repair the road surface in New Street on the 26th and 27th November 2008?
• How many council houses have been sold under Right to buy in the city centre since May 2006?
• How many CCTV cameras operated by the various councils are there in Scotland?
• How many street traders licences are currently in operation within the City Centre?

Answers to these queries remain on the site so that future visitors needn’t burden the Edinburgh council with redundant requests for information. If you see a topic of interest you can always set up an RSS alert so that you get notified when something of interest comes in.

For anyone not familiar with the idea, it is, simply put, “pay-what-you-want” dining. (Radiohead recently applied the concept [not for food, of course], allowing fans to decide what to pay for their new album). At the end of the meal the customer decides how much it was worth, and pays accordingly.

Menus at Zesty’s Deli in Guelph, Ontario list a question mark beside items instead of a dollar figure. Tony Salamone, owner of Zesty’s says, “I have great faith in the people of Guelph.” The participatory pricing approach could clearly go a long way in keeping businesses honest, but the benefits aren’t one-way. For sure, customers win when they are empowered by the policy. At the same time, honest, and good quality businesses will win too - having customers reflect appreciation in the prices they choose to pay.

The owners of Barrie, Ontario restaurant Oscar’s echo Salamone’s message, “We are so confident in our kitchen and the food that we put out. And we are confident in our front of the house staff, our service is some of the best in the city.” Their message emphasizes the fact that business owners who apply participatory pricing aren’t operating charities – they believe that they will be more successful when they turn the price-setting power over to the consumer.

The first pay-what-you-want restaurant was the international, UK-based chain, Little Bay. According to reports, Little Bay is actually enjoying increased revenue since giving customers the power to decide what meals are worth.

More power to the consumer and an imperative to operate honestly for businesses, with increased revenue for those offering the best food and experience - participatory pricing is win-win.

I’d be interested to learn of experiences others have had with participatory pricing and in which industries you think it’ll have the greatest impact.

LittleSis mixes Facebook-ish user interface with Wikipedia-like user editing to create profiles of the “powers that be” in both the private and public sectors.  Users who register as analysts can log in and add information to profiles of major figures like Barack Obama, Robert Rubin or Bill Gates.  The site focuses on 3 main factors about an individual:  Relationships (which includes Business/Government positions, other memberships, education and donation/grant recipients), Interlocks (people in common organizations), Giving (who they’ve donated to, as well as other individuals that have given to the same recipients) and the basic personal information.

Like Facebook, LittleSis also includes groups.  When I look up Citi Group, I can see their leadership and staff, but I also get a look at people and organizations that Citi has done businesses with. My favorite group feature is the “targets of lobbying”, where I learn that from ’99-’08, they lobbied the Senate and House 19 times.  They also lobbied the Department of Education 7 times between ’04 and ’07 (why would that be?)  If I go to the Department of Education group, I can follow up and see who they’ve done business with, who’s lobbied them, and which organizations have leadership and staff in common with the Department.  I can also check out which organizations have received donations from people who work in the Department.

The key to LittleSis is that it’s not Barack Obama, Citi Group or the Department of Education controlling their own profile and network.  Analysts like myself (I signed up for an account) are the ones doing the writing and editing, much like Wikipedia.  LittleSis also has a metric for determining which Analysts score the most points for making edits – a good system to (hopefully) maintain the integrity of the site.

At this point, there are a few shortcomings to LittleSis.  As I mentioned, the site is still in a Beta version, so it’s not a completed project yet.  Also, you can certainly question the accuracy of the information, and more importantly, the completeness of it.  I can read that a major CEO donated to groups x, y and z, but he may also have donated to a, b and c, with that information not yet uploaded.  As with Wikipedia, I think that a major prerequisite to a complete and successful version of LittleSis will be achieving a critical mass of users to police information and ensure the completeness of it.

Regardless of this shortcoming, I see a lot of potential in LittleSis.  Having this kind of facebook-like platform to follow donations and relationships among America’s elite is a fantastic development for public and private transparency.  Previously, we had to rely on journalists to follow the string and inform us about these relationships.  This website, if successful, allows individual citizens to see this themselves in a platform that’s very similar to the facebook sites they’re so adept at navigating.

The Sunlight Foundation is on the right track – let’s hope that LittleSis gets a strong enough user base to reach its potential.

SOBCon stands for Successful and Outstanding Bloggers, so it seems fitting that any promotions for the event take advantage of Web 2.0 opportunities. By targetting the core audience of this event, bloggers, and providing a tangible reward for their participation, I am confident that this type of promotion will be a highly cost effective way of advertising for their event. This is especially true when you consider that the prize is a discounted ticket rather than a monetary reward, and therefore the actual cost of the promotion is likely to be negligible in the face of some good publicity. You might also consider what type of blogger might be interested in this reward and my thought is that respondents who self-select are more likely to be well-connected virtually, and hence the audience for their ‘discount-per-blog’ promotion will likely also be larger and = bigger impact.

Here’s the description provided by the founder of SOBCon:

“Blog your thoughts, share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit).  We’ll also link to you on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $200 off the $795 FULL conference rate - that’s over a 25% savings!

…

We also know that getting to conferences isn’t always easy, especially this year.

So we are announcing today the opportunity for you to significantly reduce your registration cost for the event.

It’s called the “Blog It, Earn It” discount. We’d like to hear from you about what “The ROI of Relationships” means to you. Tell us why relationships matter. How they affect what you do every day and how you do it. Maybe how you see them changing the face of tomorrow’s businesses. We want to know how relationships and personal connections shape your world.

Blog your thoughts, share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit).  We’ll also link to you on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $200 off the $795 FULL conference rate - that’s over a 25% savings!

Please act quickly because there are only a limited number of these discounted registrations available. All blog entries must be posted no later than March 7, and the discounts must be redeemed by March 14.”

–

What I like about this promotion, beyond it’s impact, is that it’s transparent in the exchange taking place – in fact it’s almost hard to ignore the quid-pro-quo nature of the activity given its name. I suspect that to many people, this information might make the difference between an unethical viral marketing campaign, and one with the public on its side. Thoughts?

My question for you: if you could have an alternate prize that’s more meaningful to you than the one offered, and which is within the range of reason, what would it be? Money? Items? Reputational rewards?

Stimuluswatch.org, evidently a work in progress, provides an interesting (albeit imperfect) example of how this might work. Launched by team led by Jerry Brito at George Mason University, the site encourages citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in their city to find, discuss and rate those projects. The list of shovel-ready projects was developed by a coalition of US Mayors as a response to the stimulus package. The mayor’s have had their say, now stimulus-watch allows citizens to register their opinions on which projects they believe are critical and which are not.

Despite being sympathetic with the site’s aims, I can’t get past the problem that there is absolutely no way to determine whether the input on forums like stimuluswatch.org is in any way representative of the majority views in a given jurisdiction. This is a general problem with citizen engagement online and one reason why online consultations will remain marginal until at least two big issues are solved:

1. The ability to authenticate the citizens who participate (i.e., are they who they say they are and are they in fact resident of a given jurisdiction) and,
2. The ability to determine whether the opinions expressed by the online population are representative of the general population (particularly the population of people who are unlikely to participate in online engagement exercises).

Unfortunately, without these elements I struggle to see how projects like stimuluswatch.org can claim any democratic legitimacy. That doesn’t mean that they are not a useful source of input. But it does mean that local elected officials would be hard-pressed to justify using this input to determine how they allocate public funds.

Obama has promised that the spending authorized by the stimulus bill will be subject to unprecedented transparency and accountability. Although there is little substance yet, recovery.gov — the centerpiece of the transparency strategy — promises to be a rich source of detailed charts, maps and graphics that display where the money is being spent (including which districts and which federal contractors), how it is being spent (the specific projects being funded and their performance targets), and to what effect (including the ability to track individual project developments and assess any measurable improvements in economic performance using broad economic indicators). For a partial example of what this might look like see OMBWatch’s fedspending.org and the government’s own USAspending.gov.

The first two aspects of the proposed transparency strategy (detailing where and how money is being spent) are already routine practice. Whether they can provide that info in a timely and useful manner is another matter. As Ellen Miller at the Sunlight Foundation rightly points out:

Recovery.gov must make the raw data available and it must be housed in system so that data can flow in and out easily. There should be open programming interfaces that allow developers to share and analyze data.

We also need details such as:

What data is getting collected and how often? Who has to report? How often will the data be updated and how often will it made available to the public? What’s the database going to look like what’s the relationship to USASpending.gov? What kinds of content will Recovery.gov produce around the data? (Will there be regular emails when new information is available, blogging with analysis, etc.)?

In my view, the third element (the ability to track projects in real-time and to evaluate their impacts) holds both the greatest promise and also the greatest challenge. Releasing official project-level data and providing metrics and tools for analysis (e.g, jobs created per dollar spent) would be a good first step. Open-sourcing this process as much as possible would be even better.

One opportunity is to gather more local intelligence about which projects are positively impacting citizens and the economy and which ones are wasting money. Naturally, these assessments would be more subjective, but not necessarily less reliable than the official data, which we know can be manipulated to hide any signs of poor performance.

I would expect see considerable resistance to this idea all the way down the spending chain, from the federal agencies that distribute the funds to the state and local agencies that spend it to the contractors that ultimately perform the work. Which is likely why we won’t see this kind of capability hosted on recovery.gov, but rather on a third party site like stimuluswatch.org (see my next post).

My five-week-old son has had over 1,400 individual visitors to his website. Within two hours of his birth, he was Twittered because a friend got a text message announcing his birth. In a matter of days his name was indexed in Google. A friend’s five-month-old already has a Facebook page. Anecdotally, I find that a favourite pastime of many new dads in my peer group is electronic communication involving their newborns. Maybe it’s a way to connect both to the newborn and to the outside world during what is a cocooning and potentially isolating time. Maybe it helps dads become involved. Whatever the reason, most new babies these days are “born digital,” to borrow a phrase. What it will mean when they grow up, I’m not sure, but it changes something fundamental about who your little one is in the world. He has a public persona often before he can hold up his own head.

The author notes that when friends and families live far apart, the immediacy of online communication is a powerful way to share in the birth. But will these “born digital” children grow up to regret their parents enthusiasm to chronicle the early stages of their lives online? Or, will this level of personal transparency be seen as completely natural by the time they are old enough to voice an opinion? Perhaps it already is.

Today, at least three forces are opening up the regulatory process to a much broader global audience.

1. Satellite imagery coupled with a plethora of intelligent micro-sensors allows us to cull staggering quantities from our natural and built environments (see the California Institute for Technology and Carnegie Mellon experiments where low-power intelligent wireless sensors measure everything from temperature to movement to chemical composition and report that information back in real-time). And thanks to tools like Google Earth, much of this information is now freely available on the Internet, which gives considerable ammunition to conservationists (see here and here, for example).

2. There is growing recognition that at least some resource stocks should be considered global public goods, due to the ecological services they provide to the broader global biosphere (the Amazon being one example). Citizens around the globe have taken an increasing interest in the protection of those public goods and in doing so they call into question traditional notions of national sovereignty when it comes to planetary stewardship.

3. As a result, there are well organized and increasingly agile networks of conservations and environmental groups that reach across national borders and wield considerable influence in key policy debates. They have also become increasingly adept at exposing instances of abuse and pressuring either the culprits directly or the regulatory authorities, or both.

My favourite example in this space, Global Forest Watch improves transparency and accountability in forest management decisions by increasing the public’s access to information on forestry developments around the world. They have a cool Data Warehouse where users can download a vast array of geographical data and manipulate it for their own analyses using their interactive map server

Other examples include the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council, both of which were set up as joint efforts of industry and conservation groups to impose new eco-labelling regimes that help consumers recognize and reward sustainable practices in forestry and fishing.

For other posts in this series see:
Time for participatory regulation
Participatory regulation for workplace health and safety
Participatory regulation and anti-corruption efforts

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), first released in 1995, is the best known of Transparency International’s corruption-fighting tools. It has been widely credited with putting TI and the issue of corruption on the international policy agenda. The CPI ranks 180 countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys. TI also has the global corruption barometer, the bribe payer’s index (assesses the supply side of corruption and ranks corruption by source country and industry sector) and the revenue transparency project (working to disclose company payments to resource-rich countries ). Given their clout and reputation I would like to see TI adopt a more participatory approach. At the moment, donating funds to their organization seems to be the main channel for public participation. Although credit to them, they do appear to make their data available for resuse.

The Kimberley Process (KP) is a joint government- industry-civil society initiative to stem the flow of conflict diamonds – rough diamonds used by rebel movements to finance wars against legitimate governments to devastating effect in countries such as Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone. The Kimberley Process established a supply chain monitoring and diamond certification process that is supposed to ensure that conflict diamonds do not reach retail shelves. Although the initiative appears to have made considerable progress, Global Witness, which (along with Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) and other NGOs) had an unusually high level of involvement in developing and building support for the scheme, claims that there is still a flourishing illicit trade in diamonds globally. Global Witness reports that poor controls in some diamond producing countries (e.g., Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone) allow significant volumes of blood diamonds enter the legitimate trade through Ghana and Mali, where they are being certified as conflict free.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is similar in intent to TI’s bribe payer’s index — it also aims to strengthen governance by improving transparency and accountability in the extractives sector. The EITI initiative works directly with participants in the extractive industry (e.g., mining, oil & gas companies and governments) to set a global standard for companies to publish what they pay and for governments to disclose what they receive. The goal is to ensure that the revenues from oil, gas, and mining companies in the form of taxes, royalties, signature bonuses and other payments become an important engine for economic growth and social development rather than simply enriching the ruling elite.

Wikileaks is arguably the most open and participatory anti-corruption efforts in the mix. Its core objective is to provide a platform for people who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations and it does this by hosting a wiki for mass document leaking and analysis. To date, it has received over 1.2 million documents from dissident communities and anonymous sources, focused largely on exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

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.

Like many observers of the international scene, I find it frustrating to watch international organizations like the United Nations fail to shake-off the sclerosis and bureaucratic inertia that have marred attempts to get anywhere near meeting the millennium development goals by 2015. As my colleague rightly pointed out, there was so much optimism surrounding the Rio Earth Summit in 1992–a time when the United Nations had a much more positive public profile and, seemingly at least, the clout to make things happen. No more.

Described by my colleague as “closed and insular,” the UN is quickly losing its convening power and ultimately its relevance in addressing the global challenges that matter. Its power and authority have been usurped; by the US’s unilateralism on one hand, and by a multitude of more nimble and innovative stakeholder networks that have emerged to fill the leadership void—networks that compete with the UN and other international organizations for attention, loyalty and funds. If there was ever a time when the UN needed to embrace open source principles, this is it.

To be fair to the many good people who work hard for the UN, they are hardly operating in a benign environment. Eight years of neo-conservative attacks and unfavorable news media coverage have denigrated its image and perhaps even eroded its confidence. It’s also fair to say that making consensus decisions with 192 members on the board of directors is hardly a walk in the park, particularly when some of those board members are not very sympathetic to your cause.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, it won’t matter if the UN cedes leadership to new global “organizations” and networks so long as someone can get the job done. But my sense is that the job will not get done without the involvement of an international body that represents the world’s national governments. So in the spirit of renewing the United Nations, I’m offering up the following five six ideas for starters:

1. Hold a series of large-scale digital conversations (along the lines of Habitat Jam) on the each of the millennium development goals (MDG) to help develop new ideas, restore confidence, and engage the public. Set up an Ideastorm for each MDG to continue the dialog.
2. Start building a virtual citizen assembly with representatives from each country. I don’t see this as a “world parliament” as others have suggested, but as more of watch dog whose principle responsibility would be to hold agencies within the United Nations system accountable. See Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, for example (thanks Tony for the link).
3. Develop a transparency toolkit and encourage social entrepreneurs to build new web-based applications to help track progress (or lack of progress) towards the MDGs, much the way the United Kingdom and the District of Columbia have done with their mash-up contests.
4. Stop producing stale policy documents and white papers and start leveraging rich, interactive media to carry-out the UN’s education and advocacy work.
5. Establish an international clearinghouse of sorts that would help foster greater coordination and knowledge sharing between the multitude of international organizations, aid agencies, NGOs, charities and social entrepreneurs that are engaged in international development efforts.
6. Experiment with InnoCentive and other talent marketplaces to help bolster the problem-solving capacity of UN agencies. Solution Exchange in India was developed by a local UN agency and could serve as a model for a broader collaboration platform.

United Nations 2.0 may sound far-fetched, but as my colleague aptly put it “he who cautions every step covers little ground.” Please add your own ideas in the comments section.

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.

On January 22, 2009, Encyclopaedia Britannica president Jorge Cauz announced that they will be releasing new features on Britannica.com that empower users to contribute and edit content. However, all submissions will undergo a strict vetting process, and may not make the cut. As Cauz reported to the New York Times, “We’re not trying to be a wiki – that’s the last thing we want to be.”

Now why would a 240 year old steadfast institution suddenly make such a drastic change in its approach? The answer: the bottom line. Let’s compare web traffic:

Britannica’s Web 2.0 approach isn’t exactly brand new. Back in July of 2008, Britannica launched a new version of its web site that was more interactive and full of new media resources. Members of the community were given an online home allowing them to promote their work and services, publish and share the work that they create outside of the encyclopaedia, and interact with others in the community. The site even features a ‘reward system’ to motivate users to contribute.

I see the reiteration of these ‘new features’ as a marketing ploy to retort Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales’ proposal to review revisions by new and anonymous users before posting them to Wikipedia. This editing change comes after vandals edited the pages of Senators Robert Byrd and Edward (Ted) Kennedy, erroneously stating that both had died. As if Senator Kennedy’s seizure during Obama’s post-inaugural luncheon wasn’t unfortunate enough!

Wales’ proposed new system, called Flagged Revisions, would mark a significant change in the ethos of Wikipedia, which in eight years of existence has become one of the top 10 sites on the Web and the de facto information source for the Internet-using public. Used by German Wikipedia since last May, flagged revisions provides only ‘reliable users’ with the liberty to have their material appear immediately to the general public. Other contributors can edit articles, but their changes will be held until registered, reliable users have signed off on them.

Due to a massive backlash from editors stating that the proposal is unfeasible and unmanageable, Wales is offering a compromise, asking those opposed to the changes make an alternative proposal within the next seven days, to be voted upon 14 days after that.

The convergence of the two processes is, in my opinion, long overdue. Regardless of whether or not the Nature article back in 2005 has been debunked or not is somewhat irrelevant. The point remains – everyone makes mistakes, be they accidental or intentional.

As first quoted by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism, and later expanded upon by the Farmers’ Almanac in 1978, “To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. The fact that both knowledge bases have come to their senses and have realized that a screening process is necessary is vital to the accuracy of both publications.

The convergence of these processes will hopefully also result in the convergence of error rates. However, if this does occur, and Wikipedia and Britannica will hold the same veracity, why exactly then would I pay to read one over the other? Besides, isn’t researching an encyclopaedia simply a secondary point of research to start from? If I really care about a topic, I’ll continue researching from different sources, both primary and secondary. Britannica’s attempt at finally jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon may provide them with a few more page views for now, but I highly doubt that it will be it’s saving grace.