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Today, the book Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace arrived on my doorstep. I am fortunate enough to be a contributing author. My chapter is entitled Empowering Individuals Towards Collective Online Production, and focuses on the paradoxical notion of the importance of individual motivation in effective online collaboration. Works from several of my personal heroes appear in this compendium, including Yochai Benkler, Doug Engelbart, Pierre Levy, Thomas Malone, Howard Rheingold, and David Weinberger. I simultaneously feel incredibly fortunate and remarkably unworthy of sharing a book jacket with the likes of these folks, but here it is.

On Thursday, the MIT Center for Future Civic Media as part of the MIT Communications Forum and Civic Media Series hosted a talk between Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein, moderated by Henry Jenkins and entitled "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly." The premise, of which I was skeptical, was to get Cass and Yochai to duke it out over whether internet participation was headed anywhere good. I was dubious of MIT staging a scholarly drama, but Benkler, Sunstein, and Jenkins have written three of the (arguably) most important recent works on the participatory internet, and for that fact alone, attendance was mandatory.

Many great arguments were articulated, all of which can be heard here. To nutshell it, Sunstein stayed true to his books stating that pervasive individual self-selection on the internet is leading to insulation and a lack of diversity. He paraded out the tired old The Daily Me argument and the so-called echo chamber effect. He suggests that democracy itself is at risk, as it requires diverse input, the exchange of unshared knowledge, and serendipitous encounters to function effectively.

Benkler refused to outright disagree with Sunstein, but instead focused on the positive effect of empowering individuals to participate online. He argued that individuals who perceive they can influence society's agenda become more engaged in civic discourse and behave more responsibly in this context. I took this to mean that individuals who feel they can make a difference are more likely to be engaged (vs. detached), develop meaningful arguments (vs. complain), and try to make a productive difference (vs. passivity).

While I agree with Sunstein's desire for diversity and serendipity and with Benkler's excitement over individual feelings of empowerment, I was disappointed that neither questioned the tired and quaint notion of the web being nothing more than a series of echo chambers. I wonder if either looks outside their inboxes to see what's really going on. Here is where Jenkins should have jumped in and schooled them on growing participation across diverse online communities, the wildly serendipitous (if not downright chaotic) information exchange found on Twitter, and individual interest (and subsequent sharing) expanding outward across every category of long tail media and knowledge. I would go farther to argue that emerging social norms in online interactions encourage diverse information dissemenation and punish the types of insular behavior that Sunstein and Benkler seem to accept as universal.

Undoubtedly, there are specific examples where echo chambers do exist, and link analysis shows narrow patterns of interaction in, for example, select political blogs, but I would argue that the internet is just a wee bit more than link spam littering the bottom of inflammatory blog posts.

I live-twittered the event. Here are some selected Tweets
(These are not direct quotes but rather real-time paraphrasing what I took each speaker to mean. Greatness is theirs. Mistakes are mine):

• Benkler: What happens instead of a few elite that can set the agenda, we now have 3 million who believe they can affect their society
• Yochai suggests that traditional mass media is more polarizing (fox news, radio talk shows) than the web's perceived echo chamber effect
• Sunstein: How much serendipity we embrace depends on what we're regularly exposed to
• Show of hands: 3/4 of the Bartos Theater audience have edited Wikipedia
• We need a new model for understanding human behavior that builds in imperfection to allow for the possibility of true collaboration
• Benkler: If you feel you have the ability to influence the cultural agenda, your concerns migrate from complaints to considered positional arguments
• Sunstein, in response to what web tools should come to be: Stimulate curiosity. Once curiosity is triggered, it is very hard to resist
• Triggering participatory activity requires, in part, for individuals to feel their efforts are needed and wanted
• 1st order diversity = range within our group (different people); 2nd order diversity = range across groups (different groups)
• Sunstein: 4 probs in deliberation: amplify individual bias, polarization, early words initiate cascade, shared knowledge crowds out unshared

And now, for something highly dorky.

I have begun to play with DIY electronics. This is principally because it's tremendous fun. You should try it. Seriously. The possibilities are endless.

Here is a video of a range test for my prototype homing device built with an Arduino microcontroller module and an XBee radio transceiver. The portable, handheld device cost me about $60 to make, but theoretically could be a lot less if you designed a PCB and didn't rely on prototyping components.

Short-term, I hope to join fellow Boston Dorkbot members to build on this prototype and construct a location-based game. Stay tuned...

My longer-term goal is to develop a standardized radio/micontroller platform on which to load and share user-oriented software applications (like the homing software shown here) for proximity-based device communications.

The range for the "homing device" seems to well exceed the 300' that the XBee specs claim. Cool.

Please send me suggestions for improvements, other ideas, etc.

"The Break Up" video has been around for about a year, but it's so relevant to what we've been working on with Project VRM, I couldn't resist posting it. Produced by Microsoft (of all people) along with ad agency openhere.be, the short video is a brilliant slam on how the traditional approach to customer outreach is woefully out of touch. It basically runs like an ad for The Cluetrain Manifesto.

The video is by Geert Desager and originally posted at bringtheloveback.com.

Seeing as I get "the mention" about once a year, and usually by accident, I figured I’d strut out the fact that I got two (2) unsolicited plugs this week on not totally obscure media outlets.

The first was from none other than the Cluetrain man himself, Doc Searls. During a Newsgang podcast from Steve Gillmore with Steven Hill, and the Interim CEO of NPR, Dennis Haarsager, Doc mentioned our work together on Project VRM at the Berkman Center. The future of public broadcasting discussion that ensues is an interesting insider view and a worthwhile listen.

The next one was great fun and truly a historic moment in our little sphere of nerds-who-work-in-public-broadcasting. Thursday’s Up to Date call-in show on KCUR (Kansas City) was sagely dedicated to the future of Public Broadcasting and its interesting and evolving relationship with the web and social technology.

Rob Patterson, Andy Carvin, and Todd Mundt then spent the next hour trying their damnest to not talk constantly about Twitter (and pretty much failed). In a particularly self-referential moment, Andy mentioned that I was livetwittering a bunch of twittering broadcasters as they broadcast twitter's impact on broadcasting. I’m not sure that last sentence was grammatically correct or even remotely what Andy said, but whatever. Listen to it yourself.

In a long anticipated move, idea submit & rate engines are finally catching some meme-like popularity. They're certainly easy to build. In a follow-up post, I will tear them to bits for the flaws they introduce and the assumptions we make around their utility.

They do poke at some interesting aspects of Collective Problem Solving. Here are three:

* IdeaStorm

* My Starbucks Idea

* Ubuntu Brainstorm

How might media organizations better engage their audiences online?

Over the past year, I teamed up with several public broadcasters to try and answer this question. We collected lessons while rolling out online participation software at NPR’s Car Talk, KQED, Oregon Public Broadcasting, PRI’s The World and a dozen others. We are learning that the future of media engagement goes beyond invitations for listener comments. The leading examples involve much higher expectations from the "audience"; specifically, their partnership in delivering on more collaborative projects.

Take WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, who in late 2007 asked their listeners to share price inequities they found at local grocery stores. The results made national news, and not just for the novel use of crowdsourced journalism (turns out that the state regulates milk prices, and not everyone was playing by the rules). As the demand for richer and more compelling media experiences increase, you’ll likely see less "Come join the discussion" and more "Let’s solve a problem together".

Most important here is the word "together". What participants want is a team-oriented experience that is open, inclusive, and aims to produce valuable outcomes where they can benefit. While these co-directed endeavors can be challenging to conceive and manage, they can drive significantly more participation and yield real, lasting online value (they now have a nice map of beer prices across Manhattan). Successful initiatives give the opportunity for all to be involved, and for many to play the role of expert – whether as an authoritative voice, a creative problem-solver, a data gatherer, or even a tackler of basic tasks. The very best solutions have participants as co-creators, co-directors, and even co-owners of the produced results. In this more collaborative environment, the notion of "the audience" begins to dissolve.

These collaborative projects can involve varying levels of commitment from participants. The following list identifies a spectrum of media-driven initiatives, from those with the least individual involvement to the most.

Opinion & Preference – Extract localized knowledge and insight from your audience in the form of polls, aggregated estimates or prediction markets.

Basic Task Completion – Why not crowdsource a simple electronic task? Well, for starters, coming up with a compelling outcome and building a system to do it efficiently are two likely reasons not to. There are a few good examples of ones that seem to be working, although tying it effectively to media might be a different story.

Shared Experience – Collect narratives around unique themes. Inviting in stories effectively involves finding unexpected, yet invariably human common ground.

Unique Expertise – If you have a big enough audience, track down the needle in the haystack by seeking unique expertise. Proven ideas include troubleshooting car problems, soliciting peace corps volunteers, or getting hot tips on possible stories.

Research Data & Analysis – You don’t need rare skills to roll your sleeves and do some primary research or apply a critical eye. Audience members have proven their ability at spotting celebrities, measuring a city’s SUV density, and helping slog through the JFK files for conspiracy clues.

Creative Content – Accumulating creative submissions around a common theme is a time-tested method for getting media junkies engaged. Consider offering incentives and showcasing the best. Examples are endless: photos, top-10 lists, t-shirt ideas, show names, fan fiction, and full-on radio stations to name but a handful.

Ideas & Solutions – "Given enough eyeballs, all [problems] are shallow." Arguably the oldest crowdsourcing endeavor was the British government trying to solve the longitude problem. And since then, pumping your community for insights to address specific issues has inspired everything from the online suggestion box to trying to find a cure for Lou Gehrig’s disease.

True Collaboration – Bringing a community together, deploying varied skills over time in a dynamic and massively productive process is the holy grail for online participation. It's like applying the complexities of open source software development to the media industry. Three noble efforts in this regard include spurring organized community action, collaborative story coverage, and, of course, cataloging the World's knowledge.

Can the motivations that drive individual behavior towards online collaborative production be explained entirely by enlightened self-interest?

More generally, in this new culture around collaboration and online participation, what motivates people to share? This was (essentially) the question posed by a research associate of Yochai Benkler at Clay Shirky's talk at Harvard last week.

Enlightened self-interest can be defined as individual motivations that are neither purely selfish nor altruistic, but are ultimately based in the knowledge that helping the group might ultimately help oneself. This is exemplified in the shopkeeper who is only generous to customers so that they might ultimately profit in the long run through future business. Can this alone explain why people cooperate online?

Shirky's response to this question was, essentially, "no". He evoked the outcome of the ultimatum game as an argument that individuals do sometimes behave outside pure economic self-interest. The predictable outcome of the ultimatum game is that all humans will behave irrationally (i.e. not in a purely self-interested fashion) in order to punish society's cheaters (defectors). Within an online participation environment, this would translate as an individual's willingness to, say, expend unrewarded effort policing a discussion group for trolls and spammers.

However, it turns out that monkeys are also inclined to punish defectors. So can this highly-specific, seemingly-autonomic response be considered as evidence against pure self-interest? Others have also argued that choosing to not defect can be explained economically as the cumulative value of reputation.

The enlightened self-interest question being asked in such a public forum is particularly interesting because it signals two things:

1. Recognition of the importance of individual motivations in considering participatory systems, how to build them, and what they mean for the future. Determining how to effectively inspire people to create has (finally) become an important and popular area of study.
2. Progression of thought beyond simple, categorical explanations of individual motivation towards an increasingly rich understanding of social and cognitive factors as seen in emerging fields such as behavioral economics.

So the argument wages on... Why do individuals choose to collaborate so aggressively, yet are also highly particular in how, when, and why? What are the factors that drive effective social participation and are there predictable patterns in human behavior that we can use to help facilitate collaboration?

I had the good fortune to hear Clay Shirky speak last night at Harvard Law School. The event was hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center as a lead-up to their 10 year anniversary celebration. The event also coincided with the release of Clay’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay spent the majority of the discussion outlining the book. He began by pointing out that the book is not necessarily targeted to just the folks in the room (various flavors of webophile), but rather to a wider and more generalized audience. His argument for this was that "the web is no longer a decoration on society, but a challenge to it," meaning that usage and adoption of the Internet has become ubiquitious and integrated into how we do things to the level that for many of us, the Internet has become "the dashboard for our lives". So, theoretically, the book should have more universal readership.

I attempted to Twitter the presentation. I tried to capture his sound bites and cogent points, but Clay is a veritable font of wisdom and one-liners. I ended up with a serious case of twitterrhea. Below is a slightly cleaned up transcript of my tweats over the course of about an hour. Shirky direct quotes are in quotes. Everything else that isn’t labeled as my own thoughts [Ed:] can be attributed to Clay Shirky.

From Clay Shirky website: "If I had to describe what I write about, it would be "systems where vested interests lose out to innovation."

Historically, media innovations that allow two way communications produce active groups. Broadcast technology... not so good at this.

If Clay had to boil the book down to one bullet point = "Group Action Just Got Easier"

"Groups get complex faster than they get large" [Ed: i.e. the network effect, Reed’s Law, etc.]

The Internet acts as a prosthetic for existing group activity.

New social tools on the Internet make group connections ridiculously easy to form

Email was an afterthought of the Internet

"Reply all" was the Internet's first social feature

Curiously, once the technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting [Ed: by this, he means once the technology gets out of the way, becomes commonplace, and slides beneath the radar of awkward attention, then it becomes integrated into how we function as social creatures and the most interesting social effects of a technology begin to emerge]

"Me First Collaboration" = social effects that emerge from self-serving behavior, e.g. del.icio.us lets me store my bookmarks, but ultimately becomes useful to all [Ed: Or Google extracting social relevance from individually created links]

The annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade is an example where amateur photographers leveraged ad hoc online sharing (via flickr)

HDR photography as an example of using a flickr group to accelerate innovation through a community of practice (what used to take 8 years for a technology/process to emerge from lead users to professional process to documented practice to trade magazines to amateurs to shared understanding now takes weeks)

"every URL is a latent community"

"Sharing + conversation leaves a residue of instruction"

A comparison of a Buffy discussion board moving to a new platform is like a hermit crab changing its shell

Sharing -> Conversation -> Collaboration -> Collective Action are things that require increasing amounts of synchronization of group action.

"Thinking is for doing" [Ed: by this, he means that the purpose for human thought is so that we can then take action; quote attributed to someone I’ve forgotten] => "Publishing is for acting"

"Flashmobs are the Flagpole sitting of 2003"

"Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream"

Ridiculously easy group-forming improves sharing, conversation, collaboration, and collective action

Behavioral economics states that social behavior online is more than just enlightened self-interest, for example, see the ultimatum game and the self-defeating individual act of punishing defectors

Irrational individual behavior spent towards generating social cohesion cannot justifiably be explained away by enlightened self-interest

Social technology can be used for more than just good… case in point, YM magazine shutting down their discussion boards because pro-anorexic girls were swapping practical tips

What’s the future of investigative journalism and its impact on smaller cities that can’t afford newspapers who have historically played this role? "I don't yet see a way that blogs can create sustained observation that stops civic corruption"

There are no good examples of long-term collective action - institutionalization becomes a problem over time

What works with collective action right now [to stimulate participation and worldwide attention] are surprises... but they are a wasting asset

Where individuals change their behavior BECAUSE they're members of the group is the key definer of collective action

"Immersive games get us out of the hell of continuous partial attention"

A couple years ago, I wrote about Neil Gershenfeld’s cool MIT Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory). On Monday I was fortunate enough to join the Boston Dorkbot crew for a tour of the Boston Fab Lab. I’ve posted a photoset of a few machines. Pictured are three computer-controlled prototyping machines, including a room-sized router, a micro-milling machine, and a laser cutter. Missing from the photos is a sign/vinyl cutter, several non-computer-controlled tools, and a nicely-outfitted electronics workbench.

The mission of the fab lab is a noble one: to empower creative people to make things with the assumption that, well, we’re all creative. Exposing individuals to commercial prototyping machines encourages people to explore, learn and have a significantly wider range of choices – both in what we might envision and make, but also in how we view the world and imagine our role in its future.

In a neighborhood near my home, there is a school playground with an enormous three story chain link fence along one side – presumably as a barrier for errant basketballs. The fence is constructed inches away from an adjacent home. I thought to myself "that would suck - I would probably rather have broken windows than live behind that huge fence". Then I thought of all sorts of examples of aggressive organizational behavior in our society that is tolerated, even though their behavior could easily be perceived as unfair or intrusive. I'm not suggesting that all business behavior is universally tolerated, but rather that their fundamental commercial presence is often quietly accepted. For example, we forgive the school's fence because we deem urban play areas for children are worth the tradeoffs. We also forgive Apple's fierce closedness, Google's ads, and Nike's ubiquitous branding. What's most interesting to me, however, is that we don't have a single standard for what is tolerated. There are some interesting nuances here. For example, I doubt my neighborhood would have tolerated a condo developer building a fence like that, and ubiquitous branding around your religion’s holiday is generally frowned upon.

Looking carefully at our culture's relationship to commerce, every business in some way lives on an unspoken agreement by the community to tolerate an incursive aspect of its existence (I'm presupposing that of course businesses provide meaningful value to customers ahead of their potentially invasive aspects).

Now consider our emerging hybrid economy. An organization operating in this new hybrid economy sits between the commercial economy of financial transactions and the sharing economy that thrives on free and open distribution of value (think of sharing as found within Wikipedia and Open Source Software). Take Google - a business operating in the hybrid economy with, among other things, YouTube. They rely on people openly sharing video content while they generate revenue from the accumulated eyeballs.

The emerging hybrid economy now shines the spotlight more brightly on a business’s tolerated behavior. If people don't embrace all aspects of a business, individuals might not just stop buying their products, they might stop sharing, which is an altogether new and potentially more disastrous fate. Rejection of a business would mean defection from its associated shared commons – to the detriment of society, not just specific product consumers.

The obvious question becomes then, how do you construct a business that leverages a hybrid economy without poisoning the sharing and good will? Where can these businesses carve out a profit and advantage around commercial behavior that is culturally tolerated? What specific aspects of hybrid businesses are required to facilitate social tolerance?

What's the smallest portion of a person's name that can be typed into Google before the Suggest feature returns their full name? To allow for meaningful analysis and comparison, I propose the Google Infamy Coefficient (GIC).

GIC = (# successive characters entered into Google Suggest before the full name is revealed) / (# characters in the full name)

The results on the way to my own name are graphed below (The GIC of Keith Hopper = .727). The most infamous Keiths appear to be Keith Richards and Keith Olberman, tying at GIC's of .23. Anyone know what name might have the lowest GIC? Blog props and bragging rights to anyone who figures it out and lets me know.

Hat tip to uber-geek Randall Munroe (.385) for the inspiration.

Has news innovation stalled? The last decade has seen significant shifts in how news is created and delivered: grassroots publishing and online news aggregators for example have resulted in shifting advertising dollars and widespread panic in traditional mass media outlets. However, fresh approaches both in traditional media and in new media exploration has felt scarce as of late. Most of the recent thinking around news delivery involves slapping the latest social technology idea or delivery device onto a news outlet and calling it innovation. Or worse, a retreat into potential profitability through a focus on niche or hyperlocal audiences. Of course, some exceptions exist, but there is too much opportunity tied up in new technology and the shifting demands of the public to slow down the exploration of new ideas.

I think this lack of exploration is due to limitations in our assumptions about where to innovate. For example, participatory media means more than just tapping first-hand knowledge and citizen footage. Why can’t low-cost production tools be utilized by professional journalists as well as regular citizens? And what about the content itself - why do we assume short-form written articles or anchor-delivered video segments are the only relevant news vehicles? As the lines between producers and consumers of news blurs, can we forge partnerships based less on clearly defined roles and more on where creativity and power surround a specific story? Perhaps this requires organizational innovation and cooperative production that is merely enabled by emerging communications technology. Please stop with the same old approach repackaged on twitter from mobile phones via facebook. It's time to get original again folks.

As you have no doubt heard, Radiohead skipped the middleman with their latest release, offering the album online for download. This resulted in an estimated $10 Million in profits from 1.5 million downloads over the past week, more than the first week sales of their last three albums combined. Not too shabby, particularly when users could set their own price for the download, including being able to set the price of nothing. Radiohead's VRM-like experiment did trigger a flood of promotion, but at the end of the day, fans still volunteered to cough-up an average of $8 per album. Gets one thinking, don't it?

We will undoubtedly see more stunts like this to promote online sales, along with an increasing willingness to go cheaper and wider by offering digital downloads for free. But I want to know, will we see more customer-driven price setting? It feels a little like a public radio pledge drive, essentially asking the customer at transaction time - what is this worth to you? Applying this sort of purchasing model to product transactions is one approach that the VRM project is exploring - where the customer takes a more proactive stance in setting the relationship terms with vendors. Doc Searls introduces this idea in the context of public broadcasting at the tail-end of a Berkman.tv video on the future of public media. Don't miss the first part of the video either, as Jake Shaprio takes on predicting the future.

Conversations around VRM often include impassioned demands for more customer control. We live in an increasingly decentralized world with more customer choice, yet vendors continue to fiercely collect and control customer data and exploit the opportunities therein. It is no surprise that VRM can serve as a rallying cry of sorts for frustrated customers wanting to take back control from vendor lock-in, offensive communications, and privacy and security concerns in a world of mishandled personal data.

However, rooting the VRM opportunity in us vs. them, emotionally-driven arguments is an unlikely way to pave a path towards better relationships between customers and vendors, and I believe better relationships is ultimately the goal of VRM. The more I learn about VRM, the more I hear about the importance of benefits for both the buyer and the seller.

The big question that remains then is, how is VRM good for business? As we consider and construct tools that put the customer in control of their data, how will existing businesses be convinced this is a good thing? And what opportunities are in store for new businesses that can leverage VRM models? In short, how will companies make (more) money in a VRM world?

Here are some initial thoughts. I look forward to fleshing this out if others have input.

Customers share the burden of storing and protecting the data
Vendors face growing privacy concerns from consumers, liability for breaches in security, increased compliance and awareness around the risks of data sharing, and just the plain old cost of data storage and management. Might there be an opportunity to reduce the risks and costs for certain businesses by offloading responsibility to consumers in exchange for their increased control? I suspect there are certain businesses, such as those in the healthcare industry, whose costs here are significant and may benefit from a fresh approach.

New opportunities for vendors who are unwilling or unable to benefit from CRM
Implementing CRM systems and making them useful can be expensive and time-consuming. CRM is a particularly difficult sell for new, small businesses that don’t yet have significant value tied up in their customer data or the capability to extract value from it. Additionally, the increasing prevalence of niche businesses in a long-tail marketplace suggests many vendors might be less interested in the benefits of mainstream marketing methods deployed through CRM. Instead, ideas like the personal RFP showcase the value of customer data that is not centrally managed by one-size-fits-all vendors. There are likely many unexplored opportunities here with the potential to reduce costs and create new opportunity for vendors while increasing choice and control for customers.

Increased access to information about customers
In a world where customers might extend access to their own data, there can be direct benefits to the customer to share more data rather than less. For example, customers may share information around the nuances of their needs and wants. With the ability to enforce anonymity and protection from solicitation, it is likely the customer might be willing to share even more about themselves (e.g. information about purchases across multiple vendors). Customers might share more because they know that this information could result in not only the resolution of a specific request, but also overall increased choice, improved products and services, and more efficiency in the overall marketplace.

Implied in all this data sharing is the possibility for vendors to access more information, learn more about shifting demand, and respond more effectively in the market. It becomes less about who can control the customer, and more about who can respond better to customer demand with better products and services. In this universe, everyone that brings real value to the table wins.

New opportunities for those who can leverage customer-controlled data to create value
Perhaps the most valuable area for opportunity is in unexplored, new services that stem directly from previously unavailable access to customer data. Opportunities exist for leveraging customer data to create entirely new types of value that go beyond mere adjustments to existing products and services. Imagine, for example, if individually-managed medical data was made available in support of massive research initiatives. Additionally, sharing personal data could provide specific value back to the individual. For example, what’s my increased risk to specific ailments based on my medical history as mapped to that of my family, my neighbors, and the world?

Vendors treat their customers like cattle and blast us with unwelcome messaging because it’s what they know how to do and frankly, it works. It’s unlikely that many vendors will stop this practice. But it’s also unlikely they will adopt new ways of relating to customers unless we provide them with methods that reduce cost and increase opportunity while satisfying the customer’s need for greater control.

Thanks to the Project VRM team, I now understand the concept of a personal RFP (Request For Proposal). The idea is simple: have the individual consumer dictate what they want and at what price. Let the vendors who can match this need come to them rather than the other way around. Product marketers currently have an annoying habit of telling us what we need and then inundating us with a sea of unsolicited communications around products we may not want. Removing this vendor behavior would reduce an unwanted advertising burden on the consumer (annoyance) as well as on the marketer (cost). This should decrease total unit costs, and by extension the cost to the consumer.

A Project VRM participant (I believe it was Chris Carfi as referenced here) suggested that Google’s AdWords already is a great a vendor matching tool for highly-personalized consumer requests – albeit around the broader realm of information rather than more specifically of products (I’m paraphrasing). I think he was implying that an AdWord ad is a real-time response to an individual's "three word RFP" (e.g. keyword search).

Leading up to this insightful comment, I had been noodling on who might be the perfect VRM vendor. If we found a good fit to sponsor a VRM initiative, the solution definition and adoption would be a cinch. The secret is to find a vendor with a unique customer acquisition problem that can be best addressed by the VRM model – an organization that would benefit only if consumers were driving the relationship and a traditional vendor-consumer model just wasn’t working. This is essentially the crossing-the-chasm strategy for high tech products – focus on a vertical that is uniquely positioned to benefit from the format and structure of your solution. In essence, who is the perfect vendor candidate for what VRM could provide?

Traditional large product companies would probably be a bad fit for VRM. Their competencies are centered on creating narrow demand, not addressing widespread niche demand. Chris’s comment about AdWords got me thinking that when looking at a personal RFP, you are essentially looking at the Long Tail of demand – a big chunk of typical, common requests followed by an endless sea of nuanced consumer need. But large, traditional companies are experts only at The Short Head of product options. The combined forces of scarce shelf space and the economies of scale explains why these companies meet demand the way they do and are wholly unprepared to respond to individualized consumer demand. For example, scarcity of parking and the economies of mass production explain why you won’t find a convertible, hybrid-powered rental car with an MP3 player. For many existing mass-market products, these laws push less consumer choice into the short head of product options. In other words, they will not respond to the majority of personal RFPs. But then, who will?

I propose that those best suited to responding to niche, personalized RFPs will likely be those already in the long tail business, such as product aggregators like Amazon, retail aggregators like eBay and the thousands of specialized merchants currently relying on search and filter technology to drive personalized demand to their unique solutions.

How can a public radio listener take greater control of their relationship with public media?

This was (more or less) the question posed to a public media-savvy group last week at Harvard’s Berkman Center. Led by Doc Searls, our ad hoc team explored how to equip the public media audience with a VRM tool to better drive their relationship with existing broadcasters, distributors, and shows.

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is the reciprocal to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). VRM explores the idea that individuals could create more value if they had better control over their vendor relationships rather than the other way around (my definition). The rise of participatory culture and its subsequent impact on vendors suggests an environment where this is not only possible, but highly desirable for everyone. Perhaps the long-term outcome of VRM will be to facilitate the dissolution of traditional consumer and vendor roles. Identity will be managed by the individual, but value production will happen across a spectrum of participants in a variety of capacities. In this environment, it will be difficult to define the meaningful boundaries of an organization, and what exactly constitutes an employee, vendor, consumer or producer.

There also seems to be a compelling overlap between what’s going on in participatory culture and what already exists surrounding public broadcasting. A whole new generation of creative consumer has the potential to rediscover public broadcasting and co-opt it for its potential as a non-commercial, open network designed explicitly to serve the public. I would ask, how can we encourage this?

...triggering more questions on engaging with public media in a participatory environment:

• If we were to reinvent public radio in an end-to-end environment like the internet, what would it look like? How would it compare to what exists, and what important differences might emerge? What can we do to fill those gaps?
• What does the long tail of public media look like? What are the democratized production tools, potential aggregators, and filters that drive demand down the tail?
• As a creative consumer, what is it that I want to do with public media? What are my Lego building blocks, and what would motivate me to play?

In trying to answer these questions, one particularly promising idea that emerged was a model for a new type of public radio station - one that is not centered on broadcast. Such a station could have many of the traits of a participatory, web-based environment while leveraging the existing broadcast audience and media. In this way, we would have a transitional strategy of sorts – understood and embraced by traditional participants (both the audience and infrastructure), but able to transcend boundaries by reinventing itself from scratch, online, and with the public itself to steer its direction. These unique characteristics would drive important differences on how to fund, program, create, and manage its media. Without too much wild-eyed thinking, you could imagine an encouraging and experimental mix of user and collaboratively-programmed media, integrated online conversation, multiple device support, and a breadth of media types, alternative funding methods, etc.

Rethinking public media from a new, more participatory direction reveals an opportunity to redefine people-oriented broadcasting. And what’s more people-oriented than public media?

While investigating traditional media's initial acceptance of user participation, I saw two relevant studies that were published, both focusing to some degree on the emerging adoption of user participation by news organizations as a subset of a larger (and admittedly more amorphous) media industry. Below is a quick synopsis of the relevant aspects of these two important studies. This blog entry is Part two of a series investigating the continued adoption of user participation by the media industry. Part One reviews the initial benefits recognized by early adopters in traditional media organizations.

Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement – News Organizations Forge New Relationships with Communities
A Report from the Center for Citizen Media

"News organizations are recognizing that their audiences are more than empty receptacles waiting to be filled with information selected an editorial priesthood… [they] are beginning to understand that the audience can, and should, become part of the editorial process."

This report, by Lisa Williams (of placeblogger and h20town fame), focuses on traditional news organization experimentions in online community engagement.

Some relevant findings include:
• In a strategic redesign their newsroom, USA Today plans to ask their audience to produce watchdog and investigative journalism. Related examples are given of the New York Times and Reuters
• Most news organizations now believe that user-generated content can be used to save money and build online audiences
• News organizations are going beyond republishing news on the web to explore "conversational journalism", including user-generated content, blog hubs, online communities, and more transparent newsrooms
• Recommendations include the suggestion to experiment and take risks, incorporate flexible technology, and develop well thought-out online communities

The State of the News Media 2007 – An Annual Report on American Journalism
by the Project for Excellence in Journalism

"Technology is redefining the role of the citizen — endowing the individual with more responsibility and command over how he or she consumes information — and that new role is only beginning to be understood."

Some relevant findings include:
• Journalism does not seem to be becoming irrelevant; rather, there is merely diminished economic potential as ad revenue shifts away from newspapers
• Press is no longer the gatekeeper over what the public knows – for example, online search could be a kind of journalism
• Some of the most interesting experiments in new journalism continue to come from outside the profession (e.g. Global voices) http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/
• Organizations the press has been charged with monitoring are moving more quickly in this space – for example, politicians have revealed that they are putting bloggers on secret retainer

Aside: If you’ve read this far but haven’t checked out Frontline's four-part investigation into the future of news, go watch the whole series online now.

This blog entry is Part 1 in a Multi-part series investigating the continued adoption of user participation by the media industry. Read Part 2.

Increasing explorations into online user participation by traditional media organizations is perhaps more revolutionary than the growing trend of participatory media itself. A year or two ago, inviting in the audience was akin to cavorting with the enemy. Media pundits were predicting the ultimate demise of traditional media at the hands of, well, everyone else. Dwindling audiences, widespread file-sharing, shrinking advertising revenues, and the rise of amateur content production and distribution seemed ominous, and the industry took protective action. Panicked responses ranged from corporate consolidation to highly visible copyright protection actions.

The new take might look a little different, and be more like what Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, is calling a convergence culture. Much like when other disruptive communication technologies have been introduced historically, traditional content and channels will likely not disappear or be replaced, but rather will find their place, coexist, and even work in conjunction with newer methods. Jenkins calls this

"…a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture."

This translates into a strategy of "if you can’t beat them, join them" for traditional media organizations. The $1.6 Billion purchase of upstart YouTube along with a series of successful, (yet less-visible) participatory media efforts is triggering a reversal in the strategy of media producers and distribution channels towards embracing the use of the Internet rather than admonishing it. There is sudden recognition of the value in taking advantage of "free" user-generated content, highly engaged online audiences, and unexplored methods for fresh ideas to integrate across media.

As media organizations get cozy to the idea of audience involvement, there are some immediately recognized benefits. While these perceived benefits may be mildly misguided, they can provide the initial motivation to begin experimenting and better understanding the participatory media landscape.

Some initial realizations might include:

• The web is a cheap distribution channel – this means that more people can consume our stuff, and more eyeballs are better, right?
• This online audience seems to share stuff a lot. Thought of in the right way, that’s just free marketing. Let’s get viral!
• The Internet as rolodex: someone out there might know more about this subject than we do (and maybe they’ll tell us).
• Content production is woefully expensive. Let’s take the best audience content in exchange for a little fame (production quality may be lacking, but we’ll just blame that on them).
• If we let them have a conversation, they’ll be more engaged. Increased engagement yields stronger brand-affinity and increased customer lifetime value. ROI!
• If we don’t own the community, someone else will. Landgrab!
• Maybe there’s a way to make money online. I know we tried before with our (fill in the blank) business model in the '90s, but there are new opportunities with this user participation stuff.
• If we don’t control the conversation, they could start bad-mouthing us.

As media organizations gain experience working together with individuals, there is growing acceptance in getting beyond these perceived benefits. For example, successful engagement of online communities includes lowering corporate barriers, increasing transparency, and releasing control over the conversation. These learnings lead to different ways of interacting with online communities, and I will investigate these in part two of this essay: The Media’s Evolutionary Adoption of user participation.

Online co-creation describes an exciting subset of the online user participation phenomenon. Co-creation includes activities undertaken by existing organizations to involve their various constituencies more aggressively in aspects of knowledge-sharing, marketing, design, or support. Co-creation holds enormous potential as a strategy for helping traditional organizations transition into more open ones that embrace participatory and engaged users.

It’s hard for traditional organizations to release control over, well, anything. This is often where they perceive their value. However, many organizations are beginning to see potential in lowering the walls and inviting the engaged public into their processes. This is difficult and awkward territory for first-timers.

James Cherkoff & Johnnie Moore put together a manifesto entitled Co-creation Rules! (found on changethis.com) to help companies introduce aspects of customer co-creation into their enterprises. In this PDF, they list 17 rules of thumb for company-customer co-creation.

These rules of thumb apply equally well to co-creation between any organization and their audience, and I have generalized them as such in my brief descriptions of each rule below. In their manifesto PDF, they provide significantly more detail, relevant examples, and in the true spirit of co-creation, a do-it-yourself exercise.

Co-creation Rules:
1. Yes, and…
When working with co-creators, look for potential in their contributions and build on it. Avoid “No, but...”
2. Make an offer
Invite people to participate.
3. Set the scene
Being clear and specific in your invitation to participate permits individual success
4. Make your customers look good
Turn the spotlight away from your products and onto the lead users
5. Create opportunity
Hand ownership over to the users to appropriate for their own agendas
6. Play
Fun has energy and breeds meaning, sharing, and value
7. Understand the environment
Your audience is smart and is in charge of the rules. Do your homework before getting on stage.
8. Work at it
Continual responsiveness lets others know you are committed, listening, and open
9. Love the 1%ers
Your lead users will always know better what people want than you
10. Get vernacular
Avoid marketing-speak
11. Make mistakes
Admit mistakes, change, and move on
12. Lower barriers
Eliminate initial learning and commitment to get involved. Simplify.
13. Let the mess show
Behind the scenes is exciting. Exposing it builds trust
14. Share secrets
You create more value when you share openly
15. Be changed
There’s potentially more value in what is learned by co-creating than in what is created
16. Show the humanity
Inside voices show the passion of what you do
17. There are no rules
Open up to not knowing where you’re going

Someone just asked me if you could use web 2.0 technologies to effectively drive enterprise knowledge sharing and knowledge management. My immediate response was that of course you could. Upon further consideration, the problems with traditional knowledge management tools may make this thornier than I first realized. At minimum, "KM 2.0" should focus on leveraging what is currently stimulating contribution on the web.

By “Web 2.0” I mean online participation technologies – things like blogs, wikis, user-contributed content frameworks, online social networks, etc. I’ll define the concept here as:

Using the web to facilitate large-scale individual contribution by trading centralized control for empowered user participation.

Let's briefly discuss this big concept, and then apply it to knowledge management. The participation concept works by providing an infrastructure (like a software tool) that allows people to exercise their self-interest and satisfy social needs through content contribution and online interaction. If done correctly, the end result is a lot of created stuff that hopefully yields aggregate value (think Wikipedia). Theoretically, if you were sitting in a position of power and demanding that everyone contribute to your environment, you would find it very difficult to achieve this level of value. Interestingly, this is exactly the problem with traditional knowledge management (no one contributes).

A good analogy is trains vs. cars. Trains require a significant command and control infrastructure to function. For example, there are many centralized decisions regarding how many trains run, where they run, laying track, train schedules, etc. Travelers give up their independence (control over schedule, location, privacy, etc.) to gain individual benefit (low cost transportation). Cars on the other hand allow for more autonomous travel. I can choose when, where, and how to travel. Setting aside the negative aspects of ubiquitous driving for a moment, it turns out that this freedom can inspire more volume and breadth of transportation and stimulate valuable activity (e.g. economic). Essentially, people use the freedom of autos in creative ways and end up being more productive. A democratic-style free market blossoms. Everybody celebrates.

Both trains and cars need infrastructures to function (tracks vs. roads). Using the transportation infrastructure to encourage more travel would be akin to using a knowledge management infrastructure to encourage more knowledge creation, so the question to ask is, “how do I stimulate contribution in a bottom-up infrastructure?” The secret for encouraging train use is merely to make trains more convenient for the traveler. The secret for encouraging driving, however, is to increase freedom and access. More specifically, increase the ability to satisfy more people’s unique needs. Make roads more flexible in solving individual’s problems. Open road-based travel for all types of driving activity. Provide the ability for more people to take advantage of this freedom. Allow travelers to “own” the road as a means to their own ends. Encourage aspects of driving that satisfy other human needs, such as for personal expression, identity, and social interaction. Essentially, make car travel a tool for satisfying any individual human goal and integrate it into everyday problem solving. Make travel more empowering in every way.

I’m suggesting here that if you build a bottom-up knowledge management solution, make sure you provide an infrastructure that increases freedom - allow participants to meet their own unique needs effectively. Put yourself in the seat of the knowledge worker and ask yourself “how could I use this KM infrastructure to solve my own problems? How can I own this infrastructure and bend it to my will?” By understanding what’s important to the knowledge worker (hint: not spending more time documenting their unique knowledge for you), an infrastructure can be built that will solve the age-old KM problem of contribution.

For those new to the phenomenon, Lonelygirl15 began as a series of video clips posted on YouTube (summer of 2006), representing various dramatic storylines around a girl and her (yawn) suburban life - filmed primary from her bedroom using a webcam. These videos became extremely popular, to some degree because of their controversial nature as possibly being fictionalized (15 million+ views). Soon after the postings began, YouTube users questioned the authenticity of the clips, posting their own homemade reactionary videos and blog entries - as reviews, responses, and even pseudo-investigatory reporting. Some of the more creative posters, who became "famous" in their own right, even used mash-up style editing techniques to incorporate original episode footage into their own running commentary.

Eventually, the creators of Lonelygirl15 admitted it was fictionalized and planned from the get-go (see LA Times article). They appear to have even intended (and perhaps seeded) user participation by planting 'clues' in the episodes that would raise suspicions of the viewers, hinting the whole project was designed as a sort of video-based alternative reality game.

In running a search on YouTube for LonelyGirl15, you may start to get the idea that a new participatory art form is being hatched. Official episodes are intermixed with user videos, some of which are riveting in their own right. The viewer experience is quite different when you witness the totality of the contribution - the storyline has been co-opted by the viewers themselves, introducing unintended, yet popular characters and even semi-official spin-offs. Lines get further blurred between viewer and creator when you suspect (as many have) that some of the reactionary viewers are actually plants (do you get credit for being an actor that doesn't appear in your own movie?), and the latest fan conspiracy theories are in a feedback loop with the creators, fueling new episode content.

This new type of movie not only invites, but requires the participation of the viewers to build-out a full storyline, thus causing us to further push the boundaries of what a "movie" really is. Is it simply a serialized video, or could this be better described as an open game? A multi-channel media controversy? A public art project? Whatever it is, I'm excited by the creative potential and look forward to the next ground-breaking approach to participatory media. The race is on!

The importance of trust has long been recognized as a key factor in ensuring effective online interactions. To date, the emphasis has been primarily on trust’s role in individual financial transactions. This is not surprising. Online commerce has been one of the key drivers of large-scale adoption of the Internet. Over the past ten years, ecommerce has developed a foothold in fits and starts as users come to accept the Internet as a safe place to transact. Adoption has occurred in part due to significant efforts by players such as Verisign, Epinions, and eBay to develop an infrastructure of trust (i.e. validity, security, and reputation).

As modern humans, we all participate to some degree in a market economy that supports the open exchange of goods and services. This economy has many features that we inherently assume are in place and functioning, such as agreement on the value of money, and the right to seek recourse for being cheated by a seller. These features are necessary for effective and seamless transactions to occur. Imagine the effort required for a buyer to develop a level of trust with a seller without these underlying structures to support trustworthy commerce; structures like consumer-protection laws, financial currencies, and the extension of credit. It is important to recognize that these structures have not always been in place. In fact, for the vast majority of human history, it is likely that commerce was transacted only between people who were quite familiar with one another. Without an underlying market infrastructure for trust, the transaction cost of interacting with strangers was probably too great.

On one hand, it pays to avoid those we don’t trust. On the other hand, an individual or group increases its chances of survival and comfort if it can transact with a wider range of individuals. For example, imagine early farmers with an abundance of crops. By being able to transact with others beyond their neighbors, they could ensure the receipt of food throughout the winter and other goods by which to live. Here we have a dilemma. If the cost of transacting with strangers is high, but the benefit of transacting with a wider range of individuals is also high, what do we do? The answer is that we must develop ways by which to rapidly assess the trustworthiness of others (and instill their trust in us). By reducing the cost associated with developing trustworthiness, we can increase the payoff of transacting with other trustworthy individuals. Since regulated commerce infrastructures did not exist throughout the majority of human development, humans have instead acquired highly sensitive and efficient methods for assessing and developing trust in others.

Imagine what transactions may have looked like for thousands of years before structured commercial markets. Exchanges took place where the value of goods and services was difficult to determine. These exchanges were probably separated in time by weeks and months (here’s some extra zebra meat… please remember me the next time you bag an antelope). Exchanges of information were probably just as important as exchanges of goods and services (don’t trust Dave, he won’t return the favor). These exchanges themselves are critical in developing trustworthiness, and we can begin to recognize the importance of communication – both overt and more subtle cues – towards developing trust and willingness to exchange, interact, and increase the mutual value inherent in doing so.

As we look more closely at the nature of trust in human interaction, we see a broadening definition beyond purely financial transactions. Humans have developed complex social interaction behavior that significantly pre-dates structured commerce. Historically, trust has been a critical part of these social interactions. The methods by which humans assess and develop trustworthiness is embedded in the nature of our communications and our ability to evaluate each other and our surroundings. I won’t attempt to describe these complex trust-oriented communications here - there is a significant body of information and research on the topic – however, it is important to understand that these trust-oriented communications are at the heart of increasing the mutual value inherent in human interaction. We can more rapidly encourage these interactions by facilitating trust-oriented communications, and this yields greater value for all involved.

Through the widespread adoption of commercial markets and later ecommerce, we have shown that trust-inducing structures facilitate increased mutual value of financial transactions. Perhaps the next logical step in increasing value production online is to introduce complex trust-oriented communication in a more generalized interaction space. Looking historically at the development of human social behavior, we can see not only a wide range of value-generating human interactions hinging on trustworthiness, but the complex social mechanics required to yield the unrealized potential of these interactions. If we are able to more effectively introduce these social mechanics online, I believe huge returns in mutual value will result from increasingly meaningful online interactions.

So the nagging thing about community is… what exactly is it? I feel compelled to ask, since the term gets tossed around quite a bit in the blogosphere and elsewhere. The term “social networking” was great back in 2002, but community seems to better capture the current ethos of getting together to do something meaningful. Or when referring to an online community, at least complaining about something meaningful.

Dictionaries yield a wide range of definitions for the word community. Let’s start by assuming we’re talking about a community of people (as opposed to a community of property). Most definitions seem to imply a distinct and uniquely identifiable collection of individuals, with the exception referring to society as a whole, as in “effective justice systems benefit the community”. This is meaningful in so much that it helps us define what community is not, such as, say, a herd of elephants. Although I suppose even that is arguable.

Within this “identifiable, distinct group”, our definitions become more interesting. For example, a community can refer to people of a specific physical region or government (the local community). Since community can represent more than locality, things get complicated quick, so I need to get visual. See figure (1) below.

Aside from locality, communities can be defined by their interaction, like a discussion group community. A community can be a segment of society, like the homeless community, or a group with shared interests, like the software development community. If you think about community as a series of interconnected circles, with what’s in a circle is community and what’s outside a circle is not community, you start to build a fairly interesting picture of how communities can be defined and how they might even share multiple characteristics. Potential overlaps between communities introduce interesting twists on the power of such combinations. Take for example, a special interest group also bound by their online interactions like a Dean for President internet community, or a regional segment of society, like, say rural Alaska’s gay community. But why stop there? How about an intersection of all aspects of community, like Boston’s republican homeless software development discussion group community?

Dictionary definitions, for all their permutations seem to miss a good deal of implied meaning in the word community. There are community actions and community goods, retirement communities and planned communities. You’ve got a feel-good sense of community and community service. I guess the only thing communities probably aren’t is something bad. Certainly, people can have bad opinions of a certain community, but no one would use the label community to refer to some overtly negative grouping of people. For example, you’re unlikely to find the following passage in a novel:
“...and over the hill came the torch-weilding, vindictive community demanding payback for wronging their unique blend of social identity and special interest…”

By and large, there just seems to be something warm and fuzzy about communities. Community feels like a good thing. Setting aside the groupings and the angles and the overlaps, when I close my eyes and imagine the perfect community, I see everyone with a big smiley face default profile.

Call the trend what you will: crowdsourcing, democratization, decentralization, the mechanical Turk. It all riffs on the fast-growing idea of extracting the value out of people’s voluntary participation online. When Web 2.0 was first identified as a hot new buzzword it was all about AJAX, web-based software, and the Internet as a platform. But that’s shifting – it now seems to really be about tapping user participation. We finally understand that the latest round of web innovation is not in the technology, it’s in the people. Web innovators are figuring out new ways of organizing people to get stuff done. And the world will never be the same. Unless you’ve been sleeping at the wheel, you’ve already read about this. I’m more interested in what people aren’t writing about… yet.

Now that innovators have built the big new participation sites, the next round of discussions will be about what's working and what’s not. There are at least three big craigslist copycats and a dozen content contributor networks. Everyone’s plugging in a wiki or trying to apply the wisdom of crowds, but soon there will be industry head scratching around which models appear most functional, and why. How do we best apply collective contributions to create value? One person likes the model of EBay while another thinks Wikipedia is the answer, but no one model is probably better than another at its core.

The realization I am coming to is that each bottom-up business problem is unique and demands its own participatory framework. Each way of inviting user contribution begs a different model. How should we best incentivize our members? Should we expose peer ratings? List with ranking algorithms? Offer Tagging? Abuse flags? Meritocracies? What about contextual advertising? How can we best avoid gaming?

The participatory feature set is exploding. The concerns are new, but the decisions are still critical. This is a brave new world, and not many have figured it out yet. Those that do will win this round. Those that understand the deeper patterns will win in the long run.

About a year ago, the subjects of user-driven value creation and distributed amateur participation had only the beginnings of popular interest. To be fair, these ideas had already been explored aggressively by academics like Eric Von Hippel and had popped up in blog posts by pundits like Chris Anderson, but most of the popular thinking was only notes in the margins of larger and more familiar success stories. These initial successes, such as open source software development, paved the way for more modern ideas by triggering important realizations in the eyes of those that saw their ground breaking potential.

The curious success of Open Source Software Development got a lot of people wondering how they too could build software for free. A million Wikipedia entries helped us realize that fantastic content assets could be built by strangers scattered across the globe. Flickr and YouTube reminded us that content wasn’t only text. The rise of social networks like Friendster and Myspace showed that value can be in the connections as well as the content. The value in phenomena like tagging and Google’s search algorithm taught us that intelligent solutions can emerge from aggregate participation. User-driven product reviews on sites like Amazon nudged us to see that seas of people may be willing to expend valuable effort for reasons other than cold, hard cash. Posing as the poster child for The Long Tail, Amazon also created collective head-scratching around the potential of a million individually-driven niche markets and the idea of selling less of more.

Of course the list continues. Since I began writing on this topic about a year ago, several high visibility events have heralded in the age of the participant. But more on that in another post…

Great Business Week article zooming in on the happiness factor of innovation and (yeah!) trashing traditional innovation rhetoric. Death to creativity consulting processes! Incidently, the article was written by Diego Rodriguez from Metacool.

Links to popular writings on The Pro-Am Revolution are long overdue. Here's a good lead-in post on The Long Tail and the real meat of the pro-am diet can be found in Demo UK's Downloadable book (PDF).

The Pro-Ams (Professional Amateurs) are "innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards." Pro-ams threaten to overthrow the entrenched professionals and corporations who once held undisputed control of our economy. Due to many factors, such as the plummeting costs of creative production and easy access to knowledge and distribution through the Internet, the popularity of pro-am activities and its subsequent recognition has grown significantly. There are many successful examples providing inspiration for burgeoning amateurs world-wide, such as the adoption of open source software and amateur astronomical contributions to eBay storefronts, blogging, and myriad innovative web solutions emerging from the social network of the web.

More Links:
BBC Article
Institute for the Future

"Many of the solutions I and my colleagues seek out and write up have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, an appreciation of science and a willingness to experiment. The majority of models, tools and ideas posted on WorldChanging encompass combinations of these characteristics."
- Jamais Cascio @ worldchanging.org from his TED Conference "Earthphone Speech"
Worldchanging.org