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.

Visualize Business Models

I bought the book “Business Model Generation” by Alexander Osterwalder. First, this book provides and easy understandable and visual approach for capturing the value and the implications of business models. This book is a useful “ready to use” tool to change the way in which you approach your work. Roger Martin, an advocate for design thinking in business says: “Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better – they need to become designers.”

Second, the book itself has a new business model. It is co-created by 470 practitioners.

Value Model of Open Data

The basic model of the book, “the business model canvass” can also be extended to government initiatives. The basic notion is that a government initiative must create value to be successful. Value is seen not only from a revenue/cost perspective, value also includes the tangible and intangible benefits for a society. Jeff and I had a whiteboard session at the nGenera office in Toronto to capture the value of Open Data. We both agreed that using the model is a valuable and exciting way to think about business models. Here is our result:

There is still some room for improvement on our canvas. For example, one needs to think about the aftermath of an application contest or innovation challenge. It is cool to have an awesome application/products, but who provides regular updates? The government might think of making a contract with the developer of the app or with other developers that submitted non-winning ideas. Another question is: How much money could the government save by using open data? (Laura Wesley, who works for the Canadian Government wrote an interesting blog article about that). Without getting lost in too much detail now, I think the Open Data Value Model clearly shows, that Open Data is a win-win project for every government. To read more about Open Data, check out some of the previous Wikinomics posts on the topic, including:

Collaborative platforms and open data as keys to the new public-private ecosystem

Open Government: It’s all about timing.

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

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

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

Bureaucrats of Toronto, take note!

The list of best-practice examples is long. It’s a good thing that some public transport providers react to that need. But my point is: we live in the year 2010, free accessible WiFi on public transportation and on public squares should be an expected standard. It is the job of local governments in cooperation with the transport authorities to ensure that.

In my home city of Linz in Austria—population of approximately 180,000—the local government is convinced that it is their responsibility to invest in public infrastructure that advances the free access to WiFi. The city provides the citizens with free WiFi on 120 hotspots in the public sphere. Recently, city councilor Christian Forsterleitner put forward a motion that the public transport authority of Linz should provide free accessible WiFi on the streetcars and in the most frequently used bus shelters. The public transport authority reacted positively.

This progressive move stands in stark contrast to what Toronto—my current city of residence—is doing: Toronto is getting new Street Cars from Bombardier in 2012. Linz has similar light rail and low floor streetcars since 2001. I think the TTC in Toronto should consider providing free WiFi for the new streetcars. A world metropolis must be able to offer the same service as a small city in Austria.

First, where do we stand on recession? There’s still room to debate whether we are in or out of it. Officially the USA is out but with concern about a double dip, with Krugman giving odds of 2:1 against back in January and the mood worsening a little since in some quarters. Friday of this week will be something of a watershed as the EU releases the outcome of its bank stress testing against a backdrop of rising industrial production.

It seems though there is still plenty to fear in the system, hence the stress tests, and this might still be the big issue  ahead of worrying over regeneration – do we still know the full extent of the problem?

The UK Office for National Statistics last week announced that UK public debt is five times its published level at 5, not 1, trillion GBP. Spanish debt levels far exceed those of Greece. Last week it emerged that 400 Spanish local authorities were unable to pay their utility bills with an empty payroll looming in August.

Whether the stress tests look good or bad the markets are already sounding cautionary notes about the tests themselves. All this is a way of saying if you manage a small town or a big city, your work is going to get tougher. You have opportunity in the age of Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 but the chances are your revenues are in decline.

Places currently lack a comprehensive management theory perhaps because they are rooted in traditional urban or rural spatial planning paradigms.

Over recent years places have been buoyed by the development of direct inward investment  as a supplementary way of managing employment creation and by cluster theory (another way of saying specialize your local labor force) or by the idea that the creative class can provide an engine for renewal. Grafted on to these fruitful but dislocated principles is place-branding, and the big gamble – sporting events and creative festivals. Get a big sporting event and like London you can justify spending $10 billion on regeneration programs.

The problem for many cities and towns is that even as they try to adopt these strategies, they are deprived of funding – national policies invariably hit the local in a variety of ways – lost rates on empty properties, people moving out, retailers shuttering.

Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 both create the infrastructure for people to get involved in their places once more, which is an unquestionable good. But I want to raise the question – is place management adequately developed as a managerial discipline?

I saw three initiatives recently that made me think another theme in place identity is springing up – the virtualization of place.

Boston has set up a global Boston alumnus network, Boston World Partnership, casting the net of stakeholders across the world. Places are beginning the search for a new type of identity, embracing the world outside their walls as part of the concept of place. Ireland recently announced a “certificate of Irishness” for the 70 million people of Irish descent who do not qualify for citizenship. Detroit too is exploring the language and benefits of becoming a global city focused on the origins of its residents, using the Web to connect to distant economies where there are established relationships through immigration.

This unhinging of place from its physical roots is not just Web 2.0 or Government 2.0. I think it will lead to a more profound acknowledgment of how interconnected we are and it will lead to an interesting debate around how towns and cities compete with each other, a debate the enterprise has to be interested in because that competition is often the lever for relocation subsidies; and an exploration of how virtual clusters, such as those we see in software ecosystems like the Apps Store, connect to local economic development.

As they explore these areas I sense cities and towns will need more theory, more cases and more guidance for the decisions they make and need to justify. It’s the time for place right now.

Market and Social world

A paper by Gill Seyfang summarizes the intent of the UK government that time banks serve: “the need for informal mutual support, volunteering and community self-help, to grow strong communities and build capacity for regeneration among deprived neighborhoods.” But I was still wondering, why time banking works.

A concept from Daniel Ariely’s book “Predictably Irrational” offers some insight. Ariely argues that we live in two worlds simultaneously: The “Market World” where everything is rooted in the exchange of money, goods, competition and cost/benefit analysis; and the next is the “Social World,” where we do favors for other people, volunteer for charity and community organizations. Ariely has a useful example to illustrate what happens when you mix the market world with the social world: A day care center was discontent that parents picked up their children late. They introduced a fine to solve the problem, but instead of reducing the rate of tardy pickups, the rate rose up. Why? By introducing a fine the day care center switched from the “Social World” to the “Market World,” and the parents felt it was ok to pick up their children late because they pay for it.

My experience with Non-Profit Organization has echoed this result: when you start paying volunteers for basic activities, their motivation drops sharply. So, if time credits serve as a currency, do time credits introduce the “Market World” into the volunteering sector? It seems like the contrary is the case, and time banking could serve as an engine for mutual exchange and co-creation of services within the “Social World.”

Goals and Results of time banking

First, time banking recognizes that everyone is equally capable of making valuable contributions to the community. This empowers members of the society who are excluded and feel empowered by sharing their skills, resulting in higher self-confidence and well-being. A study of the University of Wales concludes that time banking lead to increased volunteering and engagement of citizens.

Second, it has a positive effect of “knitting together” community organizations and people. It creates social networks for people and organizations and increases the spectrum of opportunities.

Third, the co-creation of tailored services and help between people and organizations solve problems.

Obstacles and constraints of the model

Seyfang summarizes in her study the obstacles of time banking. People have problems to “getting people to understand the difference between Time Banking and ‘traditional volunteering’ as the coordinator describes it. While members like to give time, they are reluctant to ask for help themselves.” There are not enough spending options, and you need an office and a full time staff to facilitate the time bank. Finally, government regulations, institutions and social policy is sometimes incompatible with the time banking model.

I want to focus on the last point: Time banking may be an instrument to spark interaction within a community that faces social disparity. However it cannot replace social policy like affordable housing. Government needs also to re-think the top down approaches of social policy, which treat citizens like “problem customers.”

To ease the exchanges between people, some cities, like Lower Mainland Vancouver, are using web platforms to facilitate the exchange. Anyhow, I am still skeptical about this idea, but it seems worth observing its development in the future.

First, the extent of this concern is dependent on the environment in which the government operates. In local governments in Europe, like in Austria and Germany, political parties play a major role. In North America, party politics play a less significant role on local level. However, the bigger the city, the more important the issue of partisan politics and the interests of lobby groups become. Well organized, lobby groups and opposition can make mountains out of molehills on a crowdsourcing platform. A government, which refuses to take care about an issue that has gained acceptance on a crowdsourcing platform, is likely to be grilled by the media. The headline: “Government does not listen to ordinary citizens”. Subhead: “Electronic participation served solely PR interests of government”. So my first answer would be: In an environment where a government or the ruling party fears that crowdsourcing could be exploited by the opposition for partisan politics there is one remedy: The activists of your own party should be active on the platform as well. Fight out the competition of ideas on the platform.

However, I think the core issue is the fundamental principle of representative democracy. We elect politicians e.g. every four years, which should represent the will of the citizens. Citizens can hold the politician accountable within the democratic system. Admittedly, this system is not perfect. I believe that democracy is more than casting a ballot once a time. Politicians should harness the wisdom of the crowd to improve government public policy and services. Although we can’t neglect that lobby groups or opposition could use these tools to push their agenda. Politicians also have to think about the interests of those people who do not participate in the crowdsourcing process. The reason for this might be digital divide, less awareness, less interest, or simply lack of time. In other words, politicians have to represent all citizens, not only those who participated on a crowdsourcing platform.

Key issue: participation rate

I had a look at the participation rate of the participatory budget models. In Freiburg, the participation rate was 0.84 % (still higher than having town hall meetings about the budget, the rate was in that case 0.09 %). The City of Solingen used crowdsourcing to get support and understanding for an austerity budget. They used the participatory budget model to collect suggestions from citizens on how to save public money. According to the homepage sohlingen-spart.de („Solingen economizes“), over 3,600 citizens – 2 % of the population -agreed on saving 31 Million Euros. In the Brazilian town Belo Horizonte the participation rate in participatory budget process was at almost 10 %. Admittedly these rates are certainly higher than in any other participatory process. But the lower the percentage of participation, the higher the chance that lobbying groups and interest groups can influence the opinion on the platform. Dustin Haisler, the CIO of Manor, told me that approximately 30 % of the population is using Manorlabs. Although Manorlabs does not include participatory budget, the high participation rate is astonishing.

Naumi and I have the hypothesis that the higher participation rate of citizens, the less the influence of lobby groups. We created following graph:

The assumption is that the influence of the population grows at a much faster rate because they are a much larger percentage of the population.  The “back-of-the-napkin” assumption is that 15 % of the population is somehow affiliated with a lobby group or opposition party and all of them participate. So, once you reach participation rate of about 30 %, the voice of the public evens out the lobbyists.  As overall participation increases, overall bias from lobbyists decreases even more.

If this hypothesis is true, what would that mean for governments? First, think about the environment you are in. Second, mobilize your own activists in case you operate in a harsh environment. Third, make every effort to create a high participation rate. To achieve this, you must develop an incentive model that attracts the engagement of citizens.

Obstacles for Open Data

One of the mayor concerns around open data is privacy. It is probably the single most important issue that is keeping this movement from going forward. The federal government is prone to make excuses about protecting SIN numbers and citizen’s private information, but it’s simple enough to solve this: only share data that doesn’t directly implicate citizens. Nobody is saying to share health records, or address details – but health industry statistics or population census reports might be useful. On a more serious note, there is also concern about a breech in national security and how an accidental leak might lead to dangerous, unintended consequences. But this isn’t new, people that want to hack into the government’s mainframe will find a way to do it, if they haven’t done so already. The real issue here is that the government doesn’t want to give up control over the information they have gathered.

Open Data as a strategic asset

The problem is that many government decision makers don’t understand the full breadth and significance of the information they possess. Their next step, to be able move forward with Open Data, is to analyze how and by whom it can be used. Of course, there’s no way of knowing all the ways this information will be used, but it’s important to target prospective users of this information, so as to maximize the benefits that can be accrued from open sharing with the public. As David Eaves expressed in an interview with us, “[he’s] always seen open data as a way to not only empower citizens, but to drive culture change in public service.” In this sense, data can be used as a strategic asset that won’t only benefit the government, but also citizens, start-ups, and traditional businesses that can use it to evolve their organizations.

An example of this is Homezilla, a “home buying and neighborhood research assistant.” Homezilla is an online platform that gathers and puts together everything you would need to know when buying a home in one place: schools nearby, whether it’s a safe neighborhood, how far away the things that interest you are from your potential home. It reduces the amount of time a person spends researching, asking, and browsing around homes and uses open data to achieve this. Homezilla also uses open data to improve their Google street view accuracy for potential homes.

How to build a community for your platform

Another issue is participation. How do you build a volunteer community around an open source platform? How do you motivate people to participate and collaborate? Richard Weait, Open Street Map representative, says the most effective strategy they used is to make the collaboration fun. This is the same for Manor Labs, by making the online platform fun, people are more encouraged to volunteer and share. As Thomas mentioned in one of his blogposts the key motivators for participation are Love (for what you’re doing), Money and Glory. Both Manor Labs and Open Street Maps have found a way to build a contributing community on their sites.

Other platforms, such as Torontopedia.com, have not been so successful. Torontopedia is a non-governmental wiki for Toronto; it is meant to harness information from its citizen to create a comprehensive guide to everything you can find in Toronto. To do this, it needs people to participate, create pages, add/edit/update information. It is meant to be easier to use than Wikipedia because you don’t need to program or know how to use html. You do, however, need to sign up with your “Real Name” as your user name, create a page, and be “accountable” for the things you post. This, along with the fact that the site is unattractive and unintuitive, deters, rather than encourages, people to participate. It also dissuades people from commenting what they really think for fear of being immortalized negatively on the internet. Because of this, most of the pages that are on the site right now have been written by the creator of the site, HïMY SYeD; who ran for mayor last election period, and is planning to run again. The site does have some registered users that contribute from time to time, but it has yet to “take off” as a wiki platform.

For open data, or any kind of open source platform, it’s important to keep in mind that progress takes time, and even though this is the internet, and things happens at the speed of a click, people need to take some time to adapt to changing behaviours and learn to do things in a new way. We should also keep in mind that privacy will always be an issue, and the only way to move forward is to innovate pretending it’s not a pressing concern, come up with new ideas, and then tweak here and fix there to accommodate privacy. We have to push boundaries in order to create progress.

Editor’s note: Nitla is summer intern working at nGenera. She is currently enrolled fulltime at the University of Toronto majoring in Industrial Engineering.

When should we start?

The question for a government is: When should we start with an Open Government Initiative? We have learnt from the “Adoption Lifecycle” that it takes some time for citizens to adapt and appreciate these new instruments. In the beginning, citizens might wonder if Open Government instruments are really useful. I believe that the best time to launch an Open Government initiative is at the start of each legislative period. I created the following timetable for Open Government projects:

Phase 0: You can’t start an Open Government initiative at the beginning of your legislative period if you haven’t put some thought into it beforehand. For example, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government on his first day in Office. This is because his new administration had an Open Government strategy planned out before he was even in power.

Phase 1: Secure the approval of the legislative and support from key actors within the bureaucracy. Start the project as a “Beta” Version, which basically tells people: the government is trying out something new, so we can’t expect it to be perfect.

Phase 2: Many experiments in this stage will fail—that’s okay. Stay flexible. Launch several small projects. Include feedback loops in the prototyping process. Use cheap, throwaway technology and avoid rigid lock-in tied to technology integration and costly licensing agreements. Small successes in this phase will help you get more support for your Open Government project. In the case of Open Data, you might think of starting a contest to ignite the creativity of tech-savvy citizens. A showcase example for an application contest is Apps for Democracy. Also explore what other governments are doing.

Phase 3: Evaluate your prototypes and learn from your mistakes. Iterate early and often and adapt projects accordingly.

Phase 4: Popularize innovative solutions that have emerged by putting money and resources behind them. From the “Adoption Lifecycle” perspective this is the step between early adopters and early majority.

Phase 5: Leverage your achievements for your election campaign. Usually politicians don’t get elected for what they have done in the past, they get elected for what they promise to achieve in the future. However, if you have achieved nothing in your legislative period, it is difficult to convince your constituents that you are able to shape the future.

Bonus Phase: When you get reelected you can strengthen and deepen your Open Government initiatives.

For me, this would be the perfect game plan to implement Open Government. This does not mean you cannot start Open Government initiatives when you are in the middle of your term. It’s probably better to start one, then to do nothing at all; however in order to sustain Open Government, initiatives will have to last more than one four-year term.

One-Stop-Shop in your Browser

Microsoft and the Government of Austria collaborated on the Project “Digital Austria Explorer.” Microsoft developed a menu bar for the iExplorer (see below for an example). This menu bar serves as an easy, accessible, and user-friendly one-stop-shop for all available e-government services. Over 1,000 forms and 350 government procedures can be accessed online; citizens can search for services, use E-Government applications like Finance Online, and find useful information about daily services like doctors, public transports, and job postings from the Austrian “Work” agency and tourism. The development of this project is paid for by Microsoft Austria. The CEO of Microsoft Austria Petra Jenner states that: “Red tape government services was yesterday – Austria shows with this project, how successful e-government should look like. This unique innovation brings the government services closer to citizens and enterprises.”

So what’s the catch?

I am cautious when Microsoft does something for free. From a privacy perspective, this system is safe; Microsoft does not get access to the data. One problem with Microsoft is that the market share of iExplorer in Austria is only around 35 %. Someone who doesn’t have iExplorer is excluded from the service (like Mac-Users, since Microsoft stopped the development of the iExplorer for Mac in 2005).

I assume Microsoft gets two benefits from this project:

1. If this service is successful, more people will switch to the iExplorer. E-Government services are an instrument to increase market share.
2. Offering good services for citizens via the iExplorer is good PR for Microsoft. (Since the news reports are mostly negative related to Microsoft’s battle with the European Union over Anti-Trust laws).

Is it a problem that this service is only available via an exclusive platform? The Government of Austria argues: “We have no problems when somebody approaches us with a good idea. Next time we will work together with someone else. If other browsers also want to offer this service, we would not say no.” Without any doubt, this is a good service and a great example of what Nick Vitalari talks about when he discusses the role of public-private ecosystems. However I believe that, in general, the goal of the government should be to use open platforms, even if it means investing taxpayer’s money. What’s your opinion?

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

Tools the U.S. Government uses

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

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

Microsoft steps in

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

Role Model City of Manor?

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

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

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

“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.”

This is exactly what you are seeing below. Bachman breaks down the 2011 Federal budget in a surprisingly simple graphic, showing total spend per category, percent change, and size relative to other spending priorities (click the image for the interactive chart).

Admittedly, I’m a little late to the party on this one. Bachman has being doing this since 2004 and has been featured in numerous publications as well as on national television. Still, if you’re like me and haven’t had a chance to check it out, definitely set aside some time to do so. There’s a new graphic every year, so even if you saw the chart a couple of years ago, it’s probably worth a revisit. This will be particularly relevant for U.S. readers who can calculate where their tax dollars are going at a fairly granular level. For example, in 2011, the average American tax payer will give $3,565 to the Department of Defense, $249 to the Department of Education, $218 to Homeland Security, $93 to NASA, $53 to the Environmental Protection Agency, $35 to Nuclear Weapons Activities, $27 to financing foreign militaries in Israel and Egypt, $22 to Postal Service, $14 to National Parks, $12 to HIV/AIDS, $6 to counter-insurgency in Pakistan, and $2.21 to Obama (Executive Office of the President). As Bachman notes:

“Thousands of pages of raw data have been boiled down to one poster that provides the most open and accessible record of our nations’ spending you will ever find. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster. ‘Death and Taxes’ is an essential poster for any responsible citizen or information junkie.”

The next order of sophistication for something like this would be an interactive budget chart a la Freiburg model, where citizens could use the visualization to propose their own balanced budgets as a way to provide feedback about their priorities. Imagine sliders that would allow you to ratchet-up or ratchet-down the relative size of spending categories.  These individual budgets could then be aggregated into a ‘citizen budget’ that would go beyond simple ‘suggestion box’ initiatives to provide a truly useful piece of information for policy makers.  I’m guessing a collaborative citizen budget would look a lot different than the one shown above.

nGenera is a major, national sponsor of CoSN. If you have followed the work of Don and frequent collaborator Anthony Williams, you recognize this as consistent with their coverage of education as a key topic of their writing and nGenera’s research. And while I agree with Don and Anthony, that the tools and (in many cases) the conditions are in place for dramatic improvement to take place in the public education system for many a country, my personal opinion for the U.S. is gloomier, in that I think we are in for a decade of frustration.

Maybe I’m a little tired from a week of 18-20 hour days and running my Starbucks card through too many Venti bold cups of coffee. But, the state of public education in our country seems to be awash in contradictions, opposites, and (as the cliché goes) “left hands not knowing what the right hands are doing.”

For instance, on the one hand, it seems that most people understand the transformative potential for IT in learning. We are witness to it literally before our eyes on a daily basis, as my colleague Denis Hancock made the case so well in his post Wednesday, on the subject of the impact of iPhone apps on his daughter’s learning. Yet, on the other hand, few school districts include the CTO at the cabinet level (in other words, as a member of the senior executive team directly reporting to the superintendent) in the district’s leadership.

Part of the issue, which CoSN is working to change, is that the CTOs themselves are not well prepared to be effective at that senior leadership position. Many lack the business vision and strategic leadership skills to operate as effective change agents and equal partners in the running of the district with the other leaders. Thus, an important objective for CoSN’s members and staff is to promote the adoption of an Essential Skills Framework for CTOs, advocating that there is the profession itself can do a better job to equip its members, preparing them to be more effective leaders.

To take a different issue, on the one hand, there was a nearly universal cry for the need for standard approaches to web 2.0 content production, assessment, and platform deployment. Yet, on the other hand, in a panel that closed the morning portion of an international symposium day at the CoSN conference, it was ironic (to me anyhow) that the five speakers – from ePals, Taking IT Global, IEARN-USA, NASA’s GLOBE program, and European Schoolnet – presented their web 2.0 platforms for about 10 minutes each, in succession, but yet by my hearing completely missed the opportunity to address how they were working together.

In every case, each one seemed to be busily building communities of millions of users, thousands of pieces of content, with hundreds of schools and or regions involved. However, except in the case of the European Schoolnet, which is a partnership of multiple European education ministries, there was practically no mention of how any of the presenters were striving towards cross-promotion, standardization, or (god forbid) merger of operations and mission from two into one, or three into two, etc.

On the one hand, you have the President and Secretary of Education setting ambitious and merit-worthy goals of achieving an increase to a college graduation rate of 60% by the year 2020, from our present level of approximately 40%. This means, from the federal perspective, a real focus needs to be on what we can do to impact the success of kids at the 4^th grade level and above, starting now. Yet, on the other hand, data from regional groups like the E3 Alliance in Texas and others shows that frequently the point of greatest leverage is young children and getting them “school ready” by the time they get to kindergarten.

Lastly, the final day of the CoSN conference was billed as an advocacy day, where we spent the morning hearing about the legislative funding priorities for Education, from CoSN and three other education-related partners: ISTE, SETDA, and SIIA. On the one hand, the associations had the data and talking points clearly showing how critical education is to the success of the nation and how important some of the funding streams are to national goals.

Yet, on the other hand, the panel of congressional staffers who spoke to the audience of 100 or so software and CTO/CIO leaders convened to advocate to their various state delegations of senators and congressmen and women were extremely bearish on the chances of the education priorities getting much attention in 2010, due to other pressing U.S. national priorities such as healthcare reform, job creation, and of course, inflexible military and social entitlement program commitments.

It’s like the comment that a senior federal technology official from an agency (not the Department of Education) made to me, on my last day in the city this week, about the especially challenging position for a change agent in the government. He used the example of the military and recounted that it was about 100 years ago that the U.S. Navy determined they would no longer build ships out of wood…that all future vessels must be built using metal.

Without that specific and irreversible requirement – which had an impact, no doubt, of enormous consequences to supply chains, inventories, jobs, and countless other transition costs – one can just imagine that 50, 60, 70 years later, we might still have been building and launching new ships made of wood. The problem, he said, is that in some domains – and I would venture that education is one of them – it’s very hard to recognize the wooden ships.

What do we do in the meantime, given that the status quo isn’t an acceptable option?  That’s where I think the government is at least trying to apply the principles of social entrepreneurship and innovation, with the reauthorization of “No Child Left Behind,” now more benignly named the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (or ESEA), and the “Race to the Top” program.  It’s also where I think we must see more public/private partnerships emerge.  Experimentation must be encouraged and real consequences have got to be at stake for communities, ultimately producing quantifiable, economic value like we describe in the Nexus Economics theme in nGenera’s 2010 research agenda.

So, if you’ve got a “wooden ship” that you want to sink and, more specifically, an education innovation that you want to promote, then tell us about it.  Or better yet, tell us AND tell the Department of Education, through its new Innovation website.  Let’s prevent a decade of frustration in public education.

6. The world needs better governments.

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

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

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9.  We need new measures of progress

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

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

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

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

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

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

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

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

When I originally started looking State of the Union addresses, I simply found transcripts online and did a manual count of words in text documents. This was laborious, but provided some interesting findings (note sites like Speech Wars can now automate this process). Last January I highlighted Wordle and used tag clouds to create a visualization of State of the Union addresses from notable past Presidents. This year, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching sentiment analysis, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that vendor Crimson Hexagon and CNN had teamed up to analyze public sentiment towards the 2010 State of the Union in real-time. Check out the video after the jump.

The impact of the new technology was not lost on the news media. The Huffington Post picked up the story and reported that, “The moment that ends up being most pivotal in changing the way the media covers big, live events may well have happened on CNN, where John King used the ‘Magic Wall’ to analyze almost 150,000 Twitter responses to President Obama’s speech.” In the article, CNN’s Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, David Bohrman is quoted as saying, “Twitter is all noise, but to be able to harness it and group it and actually intelligently cluster it and derive moods and opinions from it is very interesting.”

Whatever you might think of Twitter (Jon Stewart used the Magic Wall as an opportunity to make fun of both CNN and Twitter), this is exactly the type of technology companies are starting to think about for managing their brands, conduct market research, and pre-emptively deal with customer issues. The next level of granularity that sentiment analysis vendors are starting to offer is the ability to go beyond positive and negative sentiment to look at why sentiment is the way it is. Why are people pro-Obama? What types of issues are most often related to “Obama is too liberal?” This type of analysis is available, and I’ve seen demos from some vendors that offer fairly sophisticated drill-downs. However, some people remain sceptical about the general accuracy of this capability, as well as the limitations of most systems to crunch this type of data in real-time. Maybe we’ll see this for next year’s State of the Union—I’m hoping so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The venue was a conscripted hairdressing salon that was pressed into service by the Forum as a meeting space.  We were like sardines. But the energy in the tiny room was high.

To recap: The Xchange is a Web-based marketplace where companies can collaborate and share intellectual property which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Ten organizations have already signed on. The Xchange is the first step in a journey towards more sustainable innovation, and the more companies that get on board, the faster we’ll all make progress.  More info can be found here. http://greenxchange.force.com/

In Wikinomics my co-author Anthony Williams and I argued that we’re living in a world where new approaches to collaboration enable new business models that enable companies to create better value for consumers.  We said companies need a portfolio of intellectual property – some that they own and protect, some that they licence and some that they share.  The Green Exchange is all about achieving that.

Nike began the announcement with a cool video that made it clear that sustainability is not an obligation, it’s an opportunity.  Companies can choose to be ahead of the curve or behind the times.  The goal is to create an innovation community.  No one is “giving away” their intellectual property; the exchange includes a licensing protocol.

“Nike is today committing to placing more than 400 of our patents on GX for research, demonstrating our belief that the best way to stimulate sustainable innovation is through open innovation,” said Mark Parker, Nike president and CEO. “Our hope is this will unleash new innovation to help solve current obstacles to sustainability issues.”

Example: Possible cross-industry benefits of making available Nike’s Environmentally Preferred Rubber. Used in Nike footwear the rubber contains 96 percent fewer toxins than the original formulation. By licensing the technology on GX it could be used in other company’s footwear, or it could hypothetically be used by Mountain Equipment Co-op for bicycle inner tubes. In this way Mountain Equipment Co-op could bring a greener product to market more quickly and cheaply than it could on its own.

Parker explained that initially the company’s lawyers opposed the Xchange.  They felt intellectual property was always meant to be kept under wraps and guarded.  But they’ve all come around to see the value of the Xchange, not only to the environment, but also bring competitive advantage to the company.  When Nike’s patents are put into the commons, any improvements made to the patents will be available to Nike.

Parker said universities are a great source of intellectual property. What is needed – and what the Xchange provides – is a standard protocol whereby IP can bust out from the university and be helpful more broadly to business and society.

John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, said “There is so much duplication of effort and wasted resources when it comes to sustainability. We need to make it easier for individuals, companies, academia, and researchers to collaborate and share best practices.”

This idea of a patent commons came up at another session.  Currently the planet has many commons like the ocean, air and space.  Much of the Web is in the commons. It’s time we added an additional area:  know-how related to sustainability.

Christopher White, a University of Alberta graduate student, responded to the prorogation by forming a facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament (CAPP). People joined in droves. To date, the group is almost 220,000 users strong, and there was hardly a single time I logged into facebook for a period of 2-3 weeks when I didn’t see that at least 4-5 more of my friends had joined the group. I thought then, as I did before, that this was just armchair democracy, and no one really cared about the issue with more energy than it would take to click a link, and people on both sides of the issue agreed that that was a very likely assessment. When facebook invites started going out asking Canadians to rally in their prospective cities on January 23rd to protest, I was skeptical that turnout would exceed more than a few hundred in any one place.

Boy was I wrong.

On Saturday I went downtown to take a look at the protest, and snuck onto a nearby patio to get a view of the turnout.

(Click for full)

By my estimate, there were some 3200 people in Toronto’s Dundas square, not all of them were there to learn about the Gumwich. Whether or not the protests will make a difference in the long run remains to be seen, as we’re still pretty far from an election, and it’s entirely possible that only a few of the attendees voted for our current ruling party. But this clearly puts to rest the idea that civic engagement online begins and ends with clicking a button to join a link.

I’m glad I was wrong, and I’m glad that I was around to witness this social media-organized peaceful assembly for political action.

It’s all part of the Open Government Directive mandated by the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo dated December 8, 2009. The Directive is a direct result of the work begun by the White House, under the auspices of an Open Government Initiative, in the early days of the Obama Administration. (We’re pleased, by the way, that Beth Noveck, a collaborator with Don and the Wikinomics team in recent years, has had such an important role leading the Initiative from inside the White House…congratulations Beth!)

I encourage you to read the Directive. It’s the antithesis of the kinds of 1,000-page government documents that get joked about on the late night TV programs. Instead, it is eleven pages long and has clear, unequivocal language such as “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

So, what can you expect in two to three weeks? Well, the first deadline in the directive actually already passed last week. To wit: “Within 45 days, each agency shall identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.” We discussed Data.gov and some of the terrific work going on in open source development of apps to tap into those rich data sets in my multi-part review of the inaugural O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit last year.

But, what you can expect by early February is that each agency will have created an “Open Government Webpage” to serve as its gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive. This is the place where each agency will provide information about its plans and solicit and receive input about its future. For the solicitation of citizen input, expect an already well-tested web 2.0 tool, like Ideascale, to power the process.

We’ll provide more updates in the coming weeks.  And, keep an eye on our partner website, The Collaboration Project, at the National Academy, for insightful policy updates on open government progress as well.  But, in the meantime, get in there and make your voice heard!

For example, it was over a decade ago that Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously said “There is no privacy…get over it.” Fast forward to a headline article last year in the New York Times during the throes of the financial crisis when banks were grasping for any new way to retain or gain customers – “Banks Mine Data and Woo Troubled Borrowers” – which speaks to the vast array of personalized information available for sale.

That Times article came back to mind this week, as I was sitting in a talk this week at our Fall All Member’s meeting by one of nGenera’s researchers on the subject of “Pervasive Personal Identity.” The talk was highlighting the findings in a major new research report nGenera produced on the same subject, for members of its syndicated research program (executive summary now available to the public).

But, among the points that caught my attention was the enormous breadth and depth of information we are entrusting with various digital services. For example, in November, Google announced general availability of its dashboard for users. Assuming you have an account with one or more Google services (such as G-mail, Youtube, etc.), just sign-in to your Google account and go to the URL: www.google.com/dashboard. You’ll get a fascinating lens into a portion of what Google “knows” about you, all in one place.

Or take the online matching service, eHarmony, for example, where it is estimated that they take in 15,000 new voluntary registrants to their 250-plus question in-depth survey each day. With an estimated nearly 20 million users, this makes them quite likely the best source of deep professional, emotional, and attitudinal data available on the planet at the moment.

Combine these with other sources of data about our selves – some of which we contribute and some of which is assembled without our knowing by vendors and services behind the scenes – and it is easy to see that we are approaching a point where we might be uniquely identified by the accumulation of our digital data. Think of it as your digital DNA, just like the unique marker that your real DNA represents in the physical world.

So, I got to thinkin’ (as we say in Texas) about the following question: “What if there was a better way for people to aggregate and monetize the data about themselves?” In other words, rather than accept that others control the buying and selling of our data, what if the individual was able to get in on the action? The more I thought about it, the more little additional pieces of the puzzle began to reveal themselves, like these:

(1) Ever since Seth Godin published the bible on permission marketing, we largely accept that the best we can do is barter our private data for little online trinkets, more or less valuable at any moment in time. Sometimes it’s free use of a software product; other times, it’s a discount on a t-shirt; or occasionally, it’s just the ability to download that white paper that I really crave. Instead, why not get cold hard cash for my private data?

(2) Ever since David Pullman rocked the investment world (literally) with Bowie bonds, there’s clearly a proven market for an individual’s capacity to produce value over their lifetime (way beyond what the insurance industry’s actuarial tables would indicate). Why let rock stars have all of the fun?

(3) And ever since Facebook started morphing towards the social operating system and Google also revealed that Personalized Search was their friendly way to let you know that – yes indeed – everything that you had ever searched for (including through their shadowy meta-services, like Doubleclick) was filed away somewhere to be mined by you or them (or maybe, who knows…?), there is a vast new, highly personalized set of data that each of us creates and incrementally refines – for free! – every time we use these services.

Any marketer worth their salt knows that the name-of-the-game in mastering profitability of initial customer acquisition and retention is understanding lifetime value. And the more they know about you – your profile, your activities, and your relationships – the more they can personalize offers and the products or services that go with them.

What if there was a new kind of social network service, where you could receive a fee for your participation in the network? Sure, you’d have to agree to be audited, as well as truthfully and accurately complete a comprehensive profile (including things like your detailed health records, down to your genetic makeup, like that available from 23andme.

You would also likely need to make a commitment to use the paid network as your primary (exclusive) social platform. But, why not? If, in effect, all of that same “private” information about you is available already for a fee, wouldn’t it be fair for you to get a cut?

It’s the ultimate form of personal information arbitrage – and you’d be the direct beneficiary. So, in the future, rather than all of these clever new gps-powered apps for the iPhone being the ones to charge advertisers for the ability to have their restaurants or coffee shops presented to you because of the free twitter stream that you generate while you are on the move, why can’t you be the one to receive the royalty fee for letting the advertiser know that you are going to be in the area and, by the way, happen to be awfully fond of lattes in the afternoon?

Don frequently says that we ought to go way beyond issuing social security numbers or inking the footprints of every newborn; additionally, he says, let’s issue everyone a website at birth. Of course, the notion of any government taking a step like that immediately brings to mind the second coming of Orwell’s “1984″ and Big Brother.

But, how about a hybrid? I envision something that is an international, public/private partnership, akin to the Internet naming authority ICANN. It would require a great deal of international cooperation, superior transparency in its operations, and the greatest security, privacy, and legal minds involved in its governance, to provide the level of credibility required to be effective. Call it www.lifetimevalue.me. (But, make sure to send me a royalty: I already registered the domain.)

Today and tomorrow (Nov 12-13), Nike is hosting a “collaboratory” specifically on the subject of “double closed loop” production, which is an extension of the closed loop paradigm to consider and care for developing populations and regions.

If you want to follow what’s going via twitter, LIVE:

Then just click through to this link: http://twitter.com/CLCollabLIVE
Then hit “follow”
And you will start seeing the twitter stream as we go,

Or

You can just search for the tag #gxlive
And you will see all tweets that contain that tag.

Wish you were here!

I specifically talked about the nascent, but very exciting work underway with the GreenXchange, being championed by Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy, along with other founding members (of which nGenera is one, in the interest of full disclosure).

Well, the post spurred interest from several sources, one of which was my good friend Scott Campbell at SAP. Scott introduced me to the “Hopenhagen” movement, which is being led by partners Coca-Cola, Siemens, and SAP. The goal of Hopenhagen is to prompt an effective dialog among citizens of all the world’s nations to raise awareness for the importance of decisions at COP 15 that support a healthy climate and a healthy global economy.

COP 15 is the United Nations event occurring in mid-December in Copenhagen, Denmark where world leaders are expected to, in my layman’s terms, pick up where Kyoto left off and produce an agreement to which ALL of the world’s nations can agree to protect the earth’s climate. You can learn more about the mission of Hopenhagen at the movement’s website.

In Scott’s words, “Individual empowerment and commitment are critical to the success of this effort and Hopenhagen serves as a natural extension to give everyone an opportunity to raise their voice for change.” Apart from the Hopenhagen website, you can learn more about the specific point of view of SAP customers and other members of their eco-system in the Sustainability area on BPX, SAP’s corporate blog, which Scott claims reaches 1.8 million member communities.

POSTSCRIPT: Not to digress too much from the topic of corporate efforts to stem climate change, but there is an incredibly important sub-text to these two efforts (i.e., Hopenhagen and GreenXchange) that is relevant to every other private or public sector initiative where using collaborative software and other tools of the web 2.0/social media age are critical to success.

Historically, the standard practices employed to ensure that such an effort doesn’t wither include practices like securing strong executive sponsorship, executing strategically targeted word-of-mouth promotions, and assigning a focused online community manager or two.

However, time and again, anecdotal evidence has begun to show that such collaborative efforts have a “high mortality rate.” Why is this so, even when one has budgeted appropriately and run their collaborative community “by the book?”

The answer lies in a previously poorly understood phenomenon we call “Collaborative Intents,” that Tammy Erickson and other senior members of nGenera’s faculty and research team have studied. I’ll talk more about Collaborative Intents in my next Wikinomics post in November. In the meantime, if you want to get a jump start on the topic, you can download the Boardroom Imperative authored by Tammy and others now.

Each presenter gets the same amount of limited time (5-7 minutes) to cover key points that include: innovation, overall market opportunity, stage of development, intellectual property (IP) position, resource requirements, environmental impact, management team, and potential ROI. After their formal remarks, judges followed by audience members, have another 5 minutes or so to ask follow-up questions.

It’s always interesting to hear over 20 presentations by company principals in such a concentrated period of time. Besides being reminded how important it is to prepare and rehearse a presentation, by listening to a range of styles from very good to universally awful, you also pick up attitudes and perceptions about themes that entrepreneurs and investors consider important and how those change over time.

One of the themes I listened closely for was the approach to IP. Historically, intellectual property – especially patents – has been one of those areas considered to be critical by investors for several reasons, particularly for businesses based on “hard science” like biotech and clean energy.

First, an IP “position” is critical because investors want to know that the company has done its “homework” and has determined at some reasonable level, in advance, that it is not building its business on the legally protected work of others. Or, if it is, investors want to know that the company has a command of the IP that it must acquire or license in order to get its product(s) to market.

Second, traditionally, IP represents a competitive barrier to entry to other companies that may be trying to bring to market similar products. The thinking is that by having one or more patents on key discoveries or innovations, the competition may be slowed down or possibly completely thwarted from proceeding.

Leading to the third reason investors have traditionally viewed IP as critical, which is that IP potentially represents a “hard asset” in which the investor tangibly has an ownership interest. Worst case, should “all else fail” (which the percentages say is likely, otherwise they wouldn’t call it “venture” capital), there is the hope that the investor can monetize any patents that are secured through their investment.

Best case, the IP is so compelling and differentiating that it enables the company to bring to market a product that enjoys higher-margin profits, due to customer demand. Or, taking it a step further, competitors may want to acquire the right to use the protected IP via licensing, joint venturing, or other arrangements.

All of this is background to say that the attitudes and perceptions about IP are changing, both on the entrepreneur and investor side. While it was still an important criterion for evaluation, more than one presenter at the CEVS said, to paraphrase, “I’m really less focused on patents or other IP protection and more focused on time to market and execution, because I don’t believe that the time and money spent on the IP strategy gains you much advantage, versus the cost.”

The main reasons given for this position, were two-fold: (1) in this globally-connected market of ideas, it’s too “cheap” – both time- and money-wise – to find ways around patents (versus the costs of securing them) enabling you and/or your competitor to continue forward with your primary plans and (2) in the spirit of the global dangers of climate change, the necessity for clean technologies demands that products innovative products and services be brought to market as fast as possible.

I could spend a whole other blog post arguing the pro and con merits of this changing position by entrepreneurs about IP, but instead I want to focus on a development where businesspeople are embracing this position and doing something potentially transformative about it through an effort called the GreenXchange.

The GreenXchange is a project of Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy. Their vision is to create an “open innovation platform” that promotes the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve the problems of sustainability. The goal is to create a “commons” among as large a group of commercial, public sector, and non-profit stakeholders as possible, leveraging ideas and techniques such as using patent pools, research non-assertions, and technologies that support networked and community-based knowledge transfer and sharing.

These principles sound familiar to most of us, of course, because at this point they are recognized as the essential foundations of the open software/open source movement, where Creative Commons is recognized as a leader in providing intellectual property licensing, facilitating sharing and knowledge transfer. The GreenXchange is technically a project of Science Commons, which was launched with the goal of bringing the openness and sharing that have made Creative Commons licenses a success in the arts and cultural fields to the world of science.

The GreenXchange was first publicly discussed at the 2009 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Work is underway now, among the founding partners and technology partners that have been recruited, to begin putting in place the systems for operating the GreenXchange. The goal – from discussions with GreenXchange principals – is to use the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen as a key forum for building momentum and participation for the GreenXchange, with further announcements about GreenXchange platform availability by the Davos WEF in January 2010.

Think for a moment, about how the landscape of software is different today from what it was 20 years ago. By having the LAMP stack, as it is often called (i.e., Linux-Apache-MySQL, PHP), and all of the many other open source software products available via innovations like Creative Commons’ licenses, there is a much richer, more competitive marketplace, frequently featuring better alternatives to traditionally proprietary, closed offerings from commercial vendors.

Thinking about where we are today with software open innovation gives you a glimpse of what could be the transformative nature of the GreenXchange on the cleantech industry and other sustainability ventures in 5, 10, 20 years from now.

To highlight these differences further, my personal observation was that there was a dramatic over-emphasis on visual, programmatic, and evangelical descriptions of the Government 2.0 examples presented during the event. However, there was an under-emphasis on subjects such as process change, adaptable methodology, and cultural dynamics.

The one notable exception was Eric Ries of Kleiner Perkins Caufield whose “lean start-up” discussion was an insightful, but moreso from the perspective of the “developer of a product” and not “the implementer of a large-scale enterprise solution” – see Eric’s blog for more: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

This is not to say that presenters dismissed the subjects. But their comments amounted to lip service clichés, such as “you have to manage the change” and “it’s important to get your management’s support.” But there were practically no specifics given for how to perform those critical activities.

In fact, the only presenters that spoke confidently about such issues were the government reps themselves: CIOs and directors, for example, from large healthcare, communications and defense agencies. However, it sounded as though most were relying heavily on their knowledge and skills with existing, time-tested Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) frameworks, leadership approaches, and change management methods.

This is a problem. On the one hand, the Whitehouse and current administration is opening up the floodgates of structured and unstructured data, supported by everything from policy directives, such as the Open Government Initiative, to technology innovation, such as last week’s initial roll-out of the federal Apps.gov website, promoting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and cloud computing.

On the other hand, there is an enormous federal bureaucracy with its supporting technological, procedural, and people infrastructure supporting systems and that are mission critical and strategic – they can’t go down and they can’t fail. Many people’s lives and livelihoods depend on them.

It’s like having two gears that are spinning at very different speeds, but extremely rapidly, with the force of the government 2.0 movement forcing the gears together. My opinion is that the solution to enabling the gears to mesh and spin together is from innovations in process management and service implementation of enterprise 2.0 (or what I’ll refer to, for simplicity’s sake, as “collaborative”) systems.

It may not sound so thrilling, but I believe it is absolutely the key to success. At nGenera, we have spent a great deal of time and money studying organizational collaboration, large and small. And, from this research, we have learned what elements are crucial for the success of large-scale collaborative initiatives, like those that lie ahead of the federal government as it implements more government 2.0 initiatives.

Some of these elements are well-documented, for example, “Eight Ways to Collaborate,” published in the Harvard Business Review by Tammy Erickson and Lynda Gratton in 2007, from their landmark study on enterprise collaboration.

Since then, at the heart of newer research, is a construct referred to as “collaborative intents.” In other words, collaboration and collaborative systems are not an “end” in themselves…they are a means to an end. The question is what are the difference kinds of “ends” – or better said “outcomes” – that leaders seek to achieve through collaborative systems. This is an absolutely fundamental, crucial decision point that must be met early in the design and development process.

Far too often, unfortunately, the collaborative intent or intents are not decisively settled. This lack of clarity can be a major source of misalignment and can cause significant hardship resulting in cost and timeline over-runs for a major government 2.0 project. We’ve developed a boardroom imperative describing collaborative intents that you can download.

Others have begun to recognize that existing management processes and approaches to implementing new services are insufficient, as well. At the conference that Nick and I attended, there was a large presence from major service providers, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, to smaller niche players, such as Aquilent. In every case, there was no doubt that there was a great deal of momentum and a lot of learning going on about how the old ways of doing things needed to be re-thought.

I’ll be talking more about collaborative intents and associated methodologies in future posts. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from others about their experiences with implementing new social networking-based or collaborative systems for their public sector purposes, whether local/municipal, state/provincial, or federal.

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.