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

To illustrate, my personal Internet media habits consist of publishing:

Status updates/links: Twitter, Facebook
Articles: here at Co-innovative
Bookmarks: delicious
Photos: Flickr, Facebook
Email: Gmail

Comments: rarely.

And consuming — nee devouring! — content from:

10 news/tech sites I check regularly
Google Reader where I subscribe to 150 less frequently updated sites that I don’t want to miss a word of
Facebook
Twitter
Email
Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu
Podcasts

And I have tried to limit this list, while more heavy users would list dozens of sites.

What doesn’t exist yet is a useful, intuitive dashboard that allows for digital lifestyle aggregation and seamless lifestreaming: one place to go in which I can easily interact with, consume from, and publish to all of these disparate services through the use of various media. It may end up being impossible to handle all in one place, but who knows.

The problem is some content I don’t want to miss — certain feeds, contacts from friends, emails — while other content I am happy to look in on occasionally to see the latest stuff — Twitter, links posted by friends, news sites. On the flip side, when I’m posting content sometimes I want to share it with the world at large — this article — other times I want to share it with just my family or just my friends — Facebook. Throwing in another wrench is the fine line between business and professional related online interactions and personal interactions.

It’s a confusing mess involving a ton of different sites. Just posting photos is annoying: “I want to post this for just my family as my friends will be bored to tears.” “One of my friends in these photos isn’t on Facebook…” What comes along with this is a certain amount of inexplicable, ridiculous anxiety; “Am I missing something awesome?” “I better document this and remember to post it.” “I’ve got to get through my emails and my RSS feeds.” While there is some inherent attraction to capturing and aggregating everything digital in your daily life from books you rate highly on Goodreads to a Flip video, there is no easy way to set it all up in a nice looking centralized site, though Posterous is pretty close. But really, is it of value to anyone to see EVERYTHING you do? Few people care and they only care to a point. It might be satisfying for you to see and to look back occasionally on what was going on at a particular time, but that’s about it.

Selectivity in publishing will make the online experience better for everyone.

Facebook is getting close to solving some of these problems but still has a variety of issues. Further, a centralized service is not in our best interests as users; content and connections should flow freely through standards based connections that allow for multiple front and back ends and mashups. Decentralized, distributed services wouldn’t be beholden to outages nor would one company have all the power and it would spur innovation to boot.

Dave Winer and Marc Canter have been saying similar things since about the Clinton administration from the standpoint of infrastructure and connections while Steve Rubel has been more recently discussing it from a publishing and consumption lifestream perspective.

All of this ignores the higher level issue of whether one should even be doing any of this, whether one should disengage more fully and focus on what is really important in their personal, professional, and creative lives — a la Tim Ferriss and Zen Habits. For me, I think I have found a good balance of checking in when I can but unplugging the rest of the time — notwithstanding the occasional marathon sessions.

My prediction: services will become increasingly open until information is exchanged between services via standards that will allow for the type of innovation, reliability, and decentralization to produce a better, more coherent experience online.

The Fractured Digital Life: How many more social and media sharing sites can we handle? is a post from: co>innovative

1. Centralized aggregators: Get Satisfaction, Suggestion Box, FeVote, Featurelist

   Anyone can start a product or company page on these sites to submit ideas, suggestions, or complaints which are then voted up or down, Digg-style, and commented on. Companies pay for access to data, more powerful features, and the ability to “claim” pages and register official employee moderators. Similar to review sites like Epinions, the conversation will happen on these sites with or without you.

2. Tool providers: SalesForce Ideas Management, Uservoice, IdeaScale, Get Satisfaction, Kindling.
   

   These systems provide similar functionality to the above sites but are controlled by and run by the companies themselves. They include features such as ratings or up/down votes, moderation, limiting the number of votes per user, running time-limited contests, limiting access to certain groups, and automatically searching for duplicate ideas during idea submission.

3. Integrated innovation management suites: Imaginatik, Brainbank, SalesForce Ideas Management, BrightIdea, Spigit.
   

   The idea management portion of these suites generally have more robust capabilities such as weighting the contribution of particular users according to expertise and trust, creating virtual currency systems, providing enterprise class security, and customizing information captured. By integrating idea capture and prioritization into a more robust and sophisticated system, companies can then evaluate the costs of ideas, put them through formal review processes, and track performance of ideas from conception to execution.

So go check out the post: Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators I’m pretty happy with the end result, enjoyed the process, and hope to write another post for RWW on the tool providers soon.

Guest Author Post on ReadWriteWeb: Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators 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

So, let’s set out with a few of the current names for it and related concepts that feed into it:

The overarching themes revolve around: Crowdsourcing; Outside Innovation; Innovation Networks; the Wisdom of crowds; and Customer co-creation.

These larger initiatives are supported by: Web 2.0/Social Computing; Mass Customization; the Long Tail; Open Innovation; Peer production; Prediction markets; Voting and ratings; Competitions and prizes; Lead users; Transparent business practices; and Democratized content creation and distribution.

(Don’t forget, Sami Viitamaki has a pretty generalized but effective take on how to think about Crowdsourcing in particular with his FLIRT model.)

So, going forward I am going to touch on a variety of topics that will hopefully clear things up a bit. Some of the topics I will cover:

• Crowdfunding
• Prediction markets
• Crowdsourcing: Graphic design
• Customer co-creation and crowdsourcing: New product development
• Home Fabbing and Crowdsourcing: Physical product design and development
• Crowdsourcing: Content creation
• Crowd feedback; or, Business starts to listen
• Crowdsourcing: Problem solving
  
• Many hands make light work: The atomization of work resulting in the completion of massive jobs.
  
• Crowdcooperation
  

All of this stuff is connected somehow, is undergirded by similar philosophies, tools and technology, and methodologies — and I love geeking out about it. There are some powerful changes hidden in all of this and, while many of the concepts have been with us and operating for some time — centuries even — only recently has a confluence of developments led to the ability to really harness it all.

Part 1: Figuring out crowdsourcing: What does it mean? What’s working? What isn’t? is a post from: co>innovative

“Customers lead us beyond a customer-empowered Web strategy to a customer outcome-driven business strategy.”

With Web 2.0, customers are talking to each other. With Enterprise 2.0 customers are talking to businesses in much more dynamic, deep, and interesting ways than ever thought possible. The line between employee and customer has become blurred in some cases and interests are aligned. Biz 3.0, as Patricia defines it, will bring those two pieces even closer together. The customer is no longer at odds with the firm but an integral part of the entire process.

Well, I think it’s exciting….

What comes after Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? is a post from: co>innovative

LISTENING. Finding out what your customers are really saying. Best tools are brand monitoring, private communities like Communispace, ratings/reviews.

SPEAKING. Connecting with your customers in new ways, extending PR and marketing. Best tools are blogs, podcasts, participation in MySpace/YouTube and other user-generated media.

ENERGIZING. Getting your best customers to evangelize your products. Best tools are public communities and ratings/reviews.

SUPPORTING. Helping customers solve their own and each other’s problems. Best tools are blogs, forums, wikis.

EMBRACING. Working with your customers to make products better. Best tools are communities, user-generated media.

What all companies should be doing. is a post from: co>innovative

Cluetrain Manifesto: Still kickin… is a post from: co>innovative