Manor Labs aims to collect user driven ideas for improving their city. Once those ideas receive a sufficient number of votes it moves into the validation stage where the relevant department head determines if it is a useful, viable project to undertake. In the emergent stage all department heads discuss ease, cost, and value of undertaking it. Finally, the project is either implemented or rejected at which point the community is told why the decision was made.

“Manor Labs is the official research and development division of the City of Manor, Texas. Manor is a small, but growing, community of about 6,500 innovators (citizens) located on the outskirts of Austin.”

So far they have deployed Manor Labs itself (which runs on Spigit) and QR codes which are 2d bar codes that are posted at locations throughout the city. These bar codes — when photographed by a cell phone with the right app — link to a URL which displays information about that location. Other projects likely to be implemented relate to RFID tags, Google Waves, Android apps, and Augmented Reality. They have even incorporated some gaming aspects to the site ranking users based on reputation and contribution to the community. (Users gain Innobucks which can be turned in for things such as a t-shirt or a ride-along with the Chief of Police.)

I have talked a lot here about the use of feedback in product design, but this illustrates one of the early steps in using it as direct feedback for running a city.

Data.gov is an initiative to open the varied data sets housed within government agencies and opening them up in a standardized form in one centralized site. Opened a year ago with 46 data sets it has exploded to 272,000 sets. If you believe the old saw about sunlight being the best disinfectant, setting these data sets loose on the world where they can be mashed up, made into powerful infographics, and analyzed, this is an unvarnished good. Many times hard-fought, contentious bills are enacted with little to no follow-up. This data will help expose which projects worked and which did not and where we are spending our money. I hope the administration continues to add to these data sets and that they become integral as the back-end to countless apps and sites, thereby making it very difficult to shut down.

Other interesting related links:

EveryBlock: Tracks information and events down to the block level.
Sunlight Foundation: “Making government Transparent and Accountable”
USASpending.gov: “Users can search anything from bombs to toilet paper and filter government spending by location, timeline, agency, extent competed, recipient, product/service code, NAICS and fiscal year.”
OpenGovTracker.com: Tracking ideas and votes across the web across various government agencies.
What does Government2.0 look like?

Democrat, Republican, Green, or Libertarian you have to love a more transparent government.

Government 2.0: Government As Platform is a post from: co>innovative

Are these folks useful partners in the co-creation process or a motley crowd of passive consumers?

As with everything else there is no clear answer but a spectrum of answers that will work for some companies in some situations and not for others. (Speciation and useless business advice)

Item: A recent contest calling for designs for Smart cars. A nice marketing exercise, but what came out of it? Did Smart gain any true fodder for new designs? Will any of them be made available? Likely not. Customers may feel a bit more affinity to Smart cars after participating, but the number of people interested in designing their own car exterior or paying to have one applied, I would contend, is extremely limited and niche. Perhaps the market is large enough to sustain several niche businesses such as Infectious which crowdsources decals for cars, phones, laptops, skateboards, and other objects. Or Ryz for shoes. Or Cardsink for greeting cards.

Item: 100×100. Daniel Schipper has a design up for a lamp that he would like to produce. He needs 100 preorders before it will be produced. This makes the process efficient for the manufacturer, but for the consumer it requires uncertainty and a lot of patience. Very cool, but, again, very niche.

Item: The king of co-creation, Quirky allows anyone to post an idea for a product for $99 which is then worked on by the crowd to decide whether to move forward with it and how to improve upon it. People who have the most influence on the product receive a certain amount for every item that is sold once a set number of presales are made. I haven’t seen anyone else come close to executing on this concept as well as Quirky has. They filter out a lot of crappy ideas up front due to the $99 posting fee, they provide a good monetary incentive for people to contribute, and have the expertise and industrial design experience to pull it off. My sense is this is a powerful platform but that it will be relegated to niche products and low volumes.

The key is eliciting and using feedback in the right situations and in the right way. After all, you only need a small subset or sampling of customers to provide feedback or help with co-creation to create value for the rest of the passive consumers. And from the other side, you need to understand when NOT to listen to your customers, who can provide great insight into the present but have difficulty with predicting the future.

The Disputed Value of Customer Engagement and Feedback is a post from: co>innovative

Buy A Beer Company has secured $214 million in crowdfunded pledges to buy Pabst Brewing
Pretty amazing feat: 2 ad agencies got together to raise the $300 million necessary to buy the fine purveyors of Pabst Blue Ribbon via crowdfunded pledges. In return you get, essentially, the amount you pledged in beer. I question both the legality of this as well as the liklihood that if the total number is reached, pledgers will actually make good on their commitment. However, I still love the idea. If you can’t get enough of open sourced beer, a couple of years back Flying Dog created a crowdsourced beer. You can also make your own using the recipe and label for the open source “Free Beer”.

ThrustFund: A speculative, crowdsourced loan for social entrepreneurs.

Thrust Fund Entrepreneurs are looking for support to put their current ventures on paths to sustainability and to support them as they pursue new ventures. They are matched to Thrust Funders who are looking for meaningful opportunities that pay both social and financial dividends. Thrust Funders don’t acquire a portion of the Entrepreneur’s venture, however. The terms are individualized based on mutual trust and respect.

In exchange for providing funding for a social entrepreneur, you receive, generally, a percentage of the entrepreneur’s earnings over a period of years. Kooky? Yes. Risky? Yes. But also potentially beneficial to the world, so it’s got that going for it.

A new way to buy furniture with MyFab
MyFab squeezes the inefficiency out of the furniture supply chain using crowdvoting to determine what to make next. Only the most popular items are made available for pre-ordering and after a set period, myfab puts in an order for the exact amount preordered by customers. Items are then shipped directly to customers with prices for shipping ranging from $15 to $99 for a sofa (which sounds like a pretty sweet deal). They are only available in CA and several European countries right now but have plans to spread to the rest of the US soon. Not only are they perhaps filling a need for well designed products that customers wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, but also selling these items hyper-efficiently leading to very low costs.

March Crowdsourcing Odds and Ends is a post from: co>innovative

There are a ton of great examples of what is going on in this space, so I hope they leave the complete list of nominations up after the competition is completed on April 8th.

Thanks to a previous commenter, Daniel, for pointing me in the direction of IndieGoGo, a crowdfunding platform for filmmakers. I just nominated IndieGoGo along with Kickstarter (which was inexplicably missing from the Open100 list). Looking forward to the results.

Open 100: Finding the top 100 open innovators in the world is a post from: co>innovative

Once you know what a ripple looks like, and the content of that ripple, you can track it. And you start to see the others. And eventually, you start to identify the ripples that preceded a discrete event instead of the ones that followed. (Via OccasRazr)

Item 1: Google Search Trends and Insights allow you to enter any search term and see how it has relatively trended over the last 5 years. Beanie babies (why beanie babies? why NOT beanie babies!?) for example, had been on the steady decline [thankfully] until recently when they got a huge spike when Teenie Beanie Babies were brought back (whatever that means). The highest search volume coming from Reston, VA. Of mild interest unless you are a seller or manufacturer of beanie babies, then it becomes massively important. If I were looking to start a beanie baby store, Reston, VA would be at the top of my list for potential locations.

Large companies would pay handsomely for an up to the minute trending of their relevant keywords. Imagine being able to have a week or two of advance notice that a product is about to hit it big? I would guess the evidence in searches would predate the data on the ground by weeks or months.

And, what about as a measure of the success of a branding campaign? Companies could track exactly how much of an effect a campaign is having. Are people searching for the brand more? Has one campaign been more successful than others? Did one particular brand exposure have a disproportionate effect?

Item 2: Google Finance Domestic Trends Indexes These track search terms related to various industries. Combined with data on consumer price indexes and consumer confidence, one might be able to predict a rebound in a particular industry. After all, financial markets are built on the confidence and sentiment of the universe of investors and if you can wedge yourself in the time between the upswell of negative/positive feeling about an industry and the increase/decrease of an index, you can rule the world.

(Here’s a tip: the lowest volume of searches around airlines and travel have occurred at about December 15th each year over the last 5. I’m guessing if you want to reserve a room or a plane ticket, that is the time to do it. That also happens to be a good time to buy a car.)

Item 3: Google Flu Trends. Google has “found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms” and can predict flu outbreaks 1 to 2 weeks earlier than the CDC and is 97% to 98% accurate. (This becomes less useful when cases are in the hundreds as opposed to thousands, becoming far more valuable in an epi- or pandemic.)

As Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi (Google’s Chief economist and Decision Support Engineering Analyst) pointed out they are currently only focusing on predicting the present, but given the mounting data available, the diverse channels and types of data available, and the identification of significantly correlated variables in models they will be able to predict the future. (Here is a model that uses Google trend data to improve predictions of changes in credit levels.)

Search can be an early warning of people’s shifting interests and intentions, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. However, the accuracy and importance of these predictions will be ever increasing given:

• the increasing number of people online
• improvements in sentiment analysis and scoring
• increasing importance of real time search (i.e. Twitter search)
• their ability to bring in data from other services such as Gmail, blogs, and news sources

Google Predicts the Present… and soon The Future is a post from: co>innovative

If I got better at working the system I could probably kick the earnings up to $3. Assuming a 50 hour work week, I could make up to $600 a month, $7200 a year. Of course, I would have long before gone completely insane and been evicted.

So, what kind of work did I do?

Subscribed to a YouTube channel. $0.01.
Reviewed website layout and copy. $0.05.
Evaluated whether 100 sites were phishing or not. $1.
Transcribed audio, a difficult-to-hear 5 minute interview. $2.

The Original Mechanical Turk

The Mechanical Turk Experiment: How I made $2.18 an hour – and how you can too! is a post from: co>innovative

Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions.

Remember this concept if you ever decide to run a crowdsourcing, idea generation, or co-creation system with your customers — or anyone, for that matter. Simply making the tools available will do not good. Nor will a vague sense of who is in charge. Central leadership is still necessary. Enterprises shouldn’t believe that putting a project out in the wild without definitive leadership and support will produce anything of value. Everything needs a champion to drive it forward.

Simple enough, but the real value I see created in what I write about here has sprung out of a – sometimes hypothetical – balancing and blending of external inputs or votes or intellectual property or funding or designs with a strong plan, leadership, and vision. That includes rejecting bad ideas. Saying NO to your customers when you feel strongly about it (37 Signals’ favorite past-time.). Retaining focus on what is important and getting rid of the extraneous.

Essentially: co-creation doesn’t take the work out of what you do but it can enhance it and help you more deeply understand the people you serve.

Open source succeeds under a benevolent dictatorship — and so do co-creation projects is a post from: co>innovative

(Odd side-note: I spotted Clay Shirky (about half way down the page) among those who participated in a project my girlfriend ran as part of her art collective’s Windows Brooklyn project last summer.)

In a video and transcript from last April – yes, it takes me a while to process and write about things at times – Clay lays it out thus:

A British historian argued that the critical technology in the Industrial Revolution was Gin. The changes were so rapid and disruptive that the British went on a bender for a generation.

“And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.”

The Sitcom was the US’ palliative after World War II. We suddenly found ourselves with free time and disposable income, and we started watching a lot of TV. A lot.

“And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.”

My favorite part of his thinking: He was talking to a TV journalist about the recent rash of conversation surrounding Pluto’s planetary classification on Wikipedia to which she responded: “Where do people find the time?” His response:

“No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

He estimates we expend

“About 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year … watching television… I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing.

Thus, the free time and brain time outside of work remains, the question is what percentage of it will be occupied by the completely unproductive versus the semi- and extremely productive? An example of a successful use of brain time, in this case for the common good, comes from InnoCentive where about 20% of their projects are non-profit. Uncompensated. Using people’s free time.

Going forward, the big thing will be experimenting and figuring out what works in collective work and production. As I have covered here, experiments abound, some successful, many not. There is a long way to go, but as Clay says, this is not something society will grow out of, but something society will grow into.

Cognitive Surplus. Love it.

Cognitive Surplus: What are you going to do with yours? Clay Shirky explains… is a post from: co>innovative

Collaborative (or crowdsourced) content creation: A group effort to contribute to and edit portions of content for the expressed aim of producing a specific overarching project.

For some reason, examples of collaborative creativity keep popping up in the film-making arena. It’s Our Movie began with a script and a director (Alex Jovy, an Oscar Nominated Producer) and used the community to find its actors. (While this may not technically fall under “content creation”, it does bring a community into the overall creative process of a film.) Anyone could upload an audition for one of the characters and then the best were voted up. A Swarm Of Angels was a more ambitious project in which everything from the concept to script, casting to funding was created by the crowd. (It was up and running for several years but now the website is under construction, status unclear.)

CoWrite is essentially a script writing competition in 10 page increments. Each week anyone can enter a submission (along with $10) and, each week, the best entry is awarded $3,000 by an internal panel of judges and becomes the next 10 pages of the script. The final script will then be rewritten by one of the weekly winners who will be paid $5K. Another perk of winning is a meeting with Benderspink (Production company behin American Pie, A History of Violence) who will also review the final script and decide what to do with it from there.

Assignment Zero, a project sparked by Jeff Howe who coined “crowdsourcing” and Jay Rosen, began with the goal of having “a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.” Jeff Howe considered it “a highly satisfying failure“.

In some cases, the experience of contributing itself becomes the purpose of a project, not what is produced in the end. Contributing a sentence to a growing story can be enjoyable and creatively inspiring regardless of the poor end result of the totality of the project. And, as creative types know, most of what you produce, regardless of your brilliance and success, will be poor.

Any other examples I’ve missed?

Wikipedia
A Swarm of Angels
It’s Our Movie (The movie is in production as of winter 08/09.)
Ze Frank The great and noble Ze Frank who has called on his community to write, draw, execute power moves, and make earth sandwiches in order to create works of art and entertainment and bring joy to the downtrodden…
Assignment Zero
Protagonize supports “addventure” which is collaborative writing in which people can branch stories off into new paths
Spike Lee Nokia Ad

Read the rest of the Crowdsourcing article series.

Part 8: Collaborative Content Creation; or, Crowdsourcing your way to creativity is a post from: co>innovative

Help Obama prioritize and solve problems with the Citizens Briefing book: Of course, it’s inauguration week, so how could I resist? Leading up to the transition (and going forward, I assume) the Obama administration has set up the Citizens Briefing Book on change.gov which allows you to suggest ideas and priorities for Obama and vote on the best ones. These will be compiled and presented to the President. Regardless of whether it turns into something of substance or not, it is a great example of what I discussed in Part 3, the Digital Suggestion Box. As with any of these efforts whether it be from Dell, Starbucks, or Obama, the impact this technology will have depends on how whether it becomes a useful, two-way conduit of information. Are popular measures acted upon or, at the very least, responded to? (Case in point: the first and third most popular ideas with 16,000 votes involve relaxing or doing away with marijuana prohibitions.) And is the tool effective at surfacing quality?

Crowdsourcing classifications: via MadeForOne, Scott Klososky at TechnologyStory lists his view on classifications of crowdsourcing:

Voluntary vs. Involuntary
Social vs. Commercial
Rewarded vs. Unrewarded

CoInnovative Roundup: 3 Odds and Ends to check out is a post from: co>innovative