Dear Wikinomics community member,

I want to thank you for your support and interest for Wikinomics.com. We created this site more than four years ago as a follow-on forum for the ideas Anthony D. Williams and I presented in our 2007 bestseller, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The book revealed how mass collaboration was reinventing the way businesses communicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace. Since its inception, Wikinomics.com has hosted many good discussions with insights from posters and readers alike.

Now we want to continue and expand the same great discussions on a new site, Macrowikinomics.com, which derives its name from my most recent collaboration with Anthony, Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet.

The book’s thesis is that we are mired in more than just a recession. We’re seeing the precipitous decline of the industrial economy as a whole. Many of the institutions that have served us well for decades—even centuries—seem frozen and unable to move forward. Yes, the industrial economy brought us unprecedented productivity, knowledge accumulation and innovation that resulted in undreamt-of-wealth and prosperity. But that prosperity has come at a cost to society and the planet.

It is clear that the wealth and security enjoyed in advanced economies may not be sustainable as billions of citizens in emerging markets aspire to join the global middle class. If we continue on a business-as-usual path, today’s global instability will surely increase. Indeed, we believe the world has reached a critical turning point: reboot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or even collapse. We look at more than a dozen fields—from finance to health care, science to education, the media to the environment—that are ripe for reinvention by mass collaboration.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google says that “Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ insights about the power of collaborative innovation and open systems, and their call to ‘reboot’ our institutions—business, education, media, government—haven’t come a minute too soon. Macrowikinomics inspires by chronicling these path breaking developments and pointing the way forward for all of us.”

Please join all of us at Wikinomics.com as we make the move to Macrowikinomics.com. This site will continue to be available as an archive of all of the discussions that have gone on to date. New posts and comments will not be possible. Recent posts on this site have already been copied over to Macrowikinomics.com, and you can continue any discussions there.

If you haven’t read Macrowikinomics yet, I encourage you to do so. Visit Macrowikinomics.com to get your copy.

Best,
Don Tapscott

His personal answer to copyright is to give away his “ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing.” He then attracts readers who buy hard copies. Having two books on The New York Times bestseller lists in the last two years, he says, validates his particular approach.

But his piece online at The Guardian, published today, takes on a much broader issue than how he’s perceived by others or even the idea that copy-prevention is futile. “… here’s what I do care about. I care if your plan [to stop people from copying your work over the internet or to build a business around this idea] involves using ‘digital rights management’ technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won’t be able to catch infringers if you can’t spy on every video.”

[Breathe here.]

Many of these strategies are already being employed and Doctorow enumerates several: 40,000 people in the US sued by the record industry; mandatory DRM requirements for several digital distribution channels negotiated by Sony, Apple, Audible, and others; three strikes rule in effect in France that disconnects anyone (and their family) from the internet for “unsubstantiated accusations of infringement”; efforts by Viacom to prevent Google and other companies from allowing anyone to “upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance.” This last one seems particularly intrusive and Big Brotherly to me because what Viacom wants is for a court “to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.” The incredible arrogance of Viacom is that it wants to court to validate the presumption that everything posted on YouTube and similar sites violates copyrights. So, for example, if this came to pass, would a video of someone watching an NFL game on a network be a copyright violation if it included in the video the actual broadcast in the background? What if you post a video of someone dancing to music? Would the presumption be that the music was pirated? Such a ruling, Doctorow says, “would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second.” If he’s correct, the impact on culture, society, daily life would be immeasurable.

There’s a great deal more in the article about artists’ attempts to make money doing what they love and how he thinks they might succeed, but for me, Doctorow’s piece snapped me to attention about DRM. My eyes will no longer glaze over when I see that acronym or the words Sony, Viacom, and others. The idea that my privacy is merely a gossamer wall to be breached by private, for-profit companies who assume I am a thief is incredible and as threatening as anything I’ve ever heard.

If you are sick of hearing about it, then you may agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s perspective on Facebook members in his New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why the social revolution will not be tweeted.”: “The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”

I tweeted about this (completely incorrect) perception that day, saying, “Gladwell: ‘The evangelists of social media…seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend’ Well, do you?” No, I did not expect answers; probably a bad rhetorical question. But fortunately later that day I found a nice quote on the No Pun Intended blog in response to Gladwell’s assertion, which I also tweeted because it expressed my personal experience with Facebook: “To M. Gladwell: ‘Nobody who actually uses Facebook…thinks a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend.’”

Now before I make you sick of me for talking about my tweeting, let me get this in. Almost no one who “actually uses” Facebook – and there are now more than 500 million active users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site – confuses “Friend” with friend. And if they do, it is not because of Facebook but due to some other cause.

How do I know this? Well, I don’t, in the sense of knowledge based on proof with data, scientific inquiry, survey data, or anything else. I “know” it because I see how the 108 friends I have use it: most post irregularly, some often, some every day; some post personal info, some their location, trip plans, dinner plans; some are companies or sites that I want to follow. I use it because I like to see what other people are thinking and doing. I do get to communicate with people I never or almost never see or even talk to, including relatives. I keep up with people who have moved on to other companies, some of whom I never actually “met” because we worked in a virtual company.

As for Facebook’s ability to mobilize people to do things in the real world, a local group set up a Facebook page to announce a fundraiser for a friend who has cancer; it is sold out, not necessarily because of Facebook but Facebook sure made it easier to communicate the event and information about how to buy tickets and participate in a silent auction.

I wondered last night what my life would be like without Facebook and my first thought was “thinner.” Facebook enhances my personal life but does not substitute for real interactions with real people in real time over real beers watching real sports events or riding real motorcycles fast over real “Blue Highways” (one of my favorite books). Nothing does that for most, if not the vast majority, of people who belong to Facebook. The fact that there is a pretty widespread perception – often based on no or little real Facebook experience – that Facebook is the same thing as life for its members is disheartening to me. Right now, like it or not, detractors, approximately 7.25% of the world’s population seem to like Facebook. That data says something about its popularity but also the perception of its value.

Facebook may well be replaced someday or jump the shark. Right now, neither event is even on the horizon, despite the misperceptions of some observers about its extrinsic value.

nGenera Insight invites you to participate in a new survey designed to gather information on platform usage, impact, and challenges. The survey is open to all levels and functions—if you are reading this we would love to hear from you! It only takes about 7 to 10 minutes and as a thank you for your time we will provide you with a summary of the findings.

The survey is designed to gather information and help answer questions like:

• What popular platform technologies are being used for business purposes?
• What progress is being made on creating customer, as well as internal, communities?
• What are the major enterprise challenges faced by those using collaborative platforms?
• How do business leaders view the future of collaborative platforms and their long-term impact?

To participate, please click on one of the links above or simply click here. To learn more about why platforms are important and what makes them successful, read Nick Vitalari’s posts Apple and the Rise of Competitive Business Platforms – What Other Companies Must Know and 12 Critical Success Factors for Business Platforms.

Thank you in advance for your participation, we look forward to sharing our results with you.

For every Like that is made, Facebook is able to correspond a product affiliation to demographic information such as sex, age, geography, and education, as well as social graph data about relationships and influence within a group. With Places, Facebook can even correlate product activity to mobile location data. If mobile payments ever take off, they could get actual sales data as well.

Ad Age recently asked the very poignant question: What Happens When Facebook Trumps Your Brand Site? (alternate title for the article is: How Facebook Became the Biggest CRM Provider). The online article was accompanied by the following graphic showing the top ten brands on Facebook (in terms of total Likes):

Top brands are garnering millions of Likes, yet only driving a couple hundred thousand visitors per year to their branded sites. What this all means is that Facebook has better data about customers than most consumer products companies do. As Ad Age notes:

For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based “owned media” is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.

While fan pages may work a lot like a marketer’s traditional “owned media,” they’re not actually owned by the marketers. Facebook hosts the pages and provides analytics for free, but growing marketer dependency on the network for CRM programs, combined with simultaneous declines in traffic for many of their own brand websites, could give Facebook a valuable revenue opportunity.

Of course, it would be difficult to sell granular individual data about users (people would object); however, Facebook could sell aggregate data (trend analysis and market research) and act as a “black box” CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution whereby companies offer targeted promotions and messaging to individuals with select profile characteristics, mediated through Facebook. Already some companies are using basic Like data to hone their retail strategies. In one example, Urban Outfitters is arranging clothing in its online store based on Like activity and offering select promotions to all those who have liked products. Additionally, Facebook is making information about the Like activity on ads (i.e. “social context” data) available to advertisers on its site. Armed with this data, advertisers can decide to further optimize campaigns by targeting people who have expressed a Like for the ad.

With the Like button, Facebook is benefiting from the power of weak tie relationships (Facebook calls it “lightweight sharing”). Many markets point to the fact that people that Like a product aren’t real fans or brand advocates in the traditional sense. This is s feature, not a bug. By lowering the bar for Liking something, Facebook has opened a channel to—and is gathering data about—ordinary consumers of the brand who otherwise would have no formal connection to the company or its products other than isolated, anonymous purchases. This connection can be potentially valuable in terms of loyalty programs and promotions, market research, and customer support.

A number of factors suggest that the number of Likes will probably continue to grow, including: the continuing growth of the Facebook user base (see chart above, which shows no indication of plateau), expansion in global markets (70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S.), the recent proliferation of the Like button on a range of products and services (the Like button is now on over 350,000 sites), and the growing use of mobile technologies that allow users to Like physical products and experiences. With this in mind, it’s by no means hyperbolic to think that Facebook could be the largest single CRM provider in the world.

“The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.”

The main way we’re seeing this happen is through pay walls and locked down services, mostly in the form of apps and specialty devices that emphasize convenience over control. Most users aren’t savvy enough to dig into the nuts and bolts of technology—geeky techno-details be damned, they want what they want, immediately. Unfortunately, the consequence of this apathy towards technology is a future where a select few companies will control a significant portion of the content we consume. Apple would be the key culprit here with sleek must-have devices that, although tremendously well-designed (full disclosure: I own an iPad myself), lock users into a convenient, ‘black box’ mentality of computing.  Powered by iTunes, the App Store, and iDevices Apple controls the flow of content (the new TV network), monetizes the media you consume (the new record company and music store), has final say over which apps you can use on your devices (a new software monopoly), and controls the end user experience via extremely inflexible devices (recall Ma Bell owned all the actual telephones at one point as well).

Mobility is also a big factor. With more people creating and accessing data via mobile devices (e.g. smart phones, Kindles, and iPod Touches), we see more niche uses of the net that don’t include browsing and the open distribution of content. As the Wired article notes:

“Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.”

The emphasis on convenience over control has built other media empires as well, including services that use templated experiences to simplify the web (think web presences on Facebook or even Blogger, as opposed to sites created by individuals and designers). Author and web pioneer Jaron Lanier derides many such efforts as dehumanizing and anti-intellectual, and cautions us against lock-in to design principles that were conceived by those more interested in advertising and data aggregation than people and intellectual property. His recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget” serves a manifesto for those unhappy with the current direction of most web 2.0 initiatives. He notes,

“Lock-in removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.”

It’s nice to think that lock-in and disempowerment is happening to help consumers and create better experiences, but it is also happening because it’s profitable. The ‘ease of access’ versus ‘freedom’ argument is a false dichotomy; you can have both, it’s just more work and more costly. But, it can (and should) be done. However, for companies, it’s easier to cite reliability and security concerns and far more profitable to keep things locked down. Lock-in allows for monetization via proprietary formats, advertizing, and device replacement. In a poignant, yet fairly targeted jab at Google, Lanier goes on to say:

“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”

Herein lies the problem. Apple is creating its own walled garden, but has effectively created a way to monetize content and distribute money to artists and application creators. Google on the other hand has taken a much more open approach, but monetizes content via advertizing, which is not distributed to content creators. In both cases, the individual consumer feels cheated.

I wrote about much of this before in a Wikinomics post about Jonathan Zitrain’s book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” The main issue: locked down appliances like the iPhone that could eliminate the PC, and with it the “test bed and distribution point of new, useful software from any corner of the globe,” and “the safety valve that keeps those information appliances honest.” The move towards appliances also dumbs-down the user experiences. When appliances break you don’t open them up yourself to fix them, you call the manufacturer. This is exactly how the Apple approach varies from the PC approach. The internet dystopia that Zittrain feared could be upon us, and most users (even tech savvy ones) don’t even perceive this as an issue. As one commenter to my Zittrain post mentioned:

“The death of the PC should not be an issue. It’s like caring about the death of the CD, who cares, something better has replaced it. There will probably always be PC’s for those who prefer optimal performance in certain hardware and want large visual displays. But the majority of the population makes a waste of all that good hardware just by only using a PC to go on Facebook or chat with friends. Let them have their mobile devices and gaming consoles.”

Ah, but PCs do matter and here’s why: Without PCs we lose control over how we experience media. Media that is streamed at us through apps and gamining consoles treats us as passive recipients in a similar way that TV or radio did; it hosts purely sanitized content, it is controlled by companies not individuals, and it’s infused with advertising. The reason we don’t notice (or don’t care) is that it is social and so gives us the perception of control and creation. But what we perceive as control is data entry into predefined fields and forms that limit our expression. We need PCs to truly create new content.

Social media has debased intellectual engagement and self representation by making it effort-free. The cognitive load required to type something on Facebook, comment on a blog post, or even post a video on YouTube is small because these sites are designed to mimic a stream of consciousness. Although little creative energy is expended to interact, time is still spent, and information is still created and consumed. Much of the content includes off-the-cuff remarks that would traditionally have dissolved the way idle chatter does; however, repurposed using social media they are often compared in the same light as actual article writing or high-quality productions. Most apps don’t encourage the thoughtful creation of content, whereas using a full blown desktop is all about creative freedom. In a fairly balanced response to the Wired piece, Shane Tilton from the Center for Society and Cyberstudies Journal says:

“Creation vs consumption: Most of the promoters of the death of the open web are looking at it from the viewpoint that we go online to get our information, check in with our friends and maybe post a picture or video. If this was the case, the closed web would have won years ago. However, we like the ability to do create works from time to time and love having a way to share it with a larger community. The app based system of uploading content is relatively simple, which is the good and the bad point about the system. You can share content as it is in the real world, however it is moderately hard to edit it and add a creative mark to the content. An open web system gives access to online editors and content creation tools. The close system, for the most part, lacks these qualities.”

The multi-billion dollar question is, are locked-down devices, apps, and internet pay walls the future? Or, will it be open devices powered by the likes of Android and Symbian, and supplied with open content via web search and peer-to-peer networks? As long as the web is free and open and accessible to all, companies like Google can index it and derive value from it. And, with the launch of Google Instant, it seems that Google is trying to move people away from integrated search bars back to the home page (where it can better monetize its ads). Whether it’s Google’s web or Apple’s apps, one thing is clear, the next phase of the internet will be monetized by a few key players and far less free than it used to be.

On September 12th the banking regulator, the Bank for International Settlements issued what’s known as the Basel III accord. That is a set of new capital adequacy rules. Generally speaking Wall St likes them and so too do the cities of London and Frankfurt. Bank shares rose. But the sting in the tail is that banks now fear that their national regulators will take the capital adequacy issue more seriously and impose harder targets.

“Top bankers in the UK, US and Switzerland are braced for their national regulators to impose tougher capital requirements than those required by Sunday’s landmark global agreement, even as investors bid up bank shares on relief that the standards were not more rigorous.”

The real issue here is not just that the targets might be set too low (there are arguments for and against) but that the reforms won’t be fully effective until 2019 some 12 years after Lehman. At the same time the International Accounting Standards Body is trying to reform lease accounting – in response to the Enron crisis. Again the lag between need for action and enforcement will be some 12 years.

What’s wrong with taking your time? It’s better to get this right than make more mistakes?

It seems that national regulators might well agree that change needs to be deeper and quicker, though we have yet to find out for sure.

The point that I think it raises though is that banks need more exposure to the faster cycles of modern business. Between now and 2019 there is almost certainly going to be one more crisis. We have now the experience of an 6 – 8 year bubble cycle, from the dot.com boom and bust to the housing boom and bust.

Accelerated information flow might be the reason. As with individual products (the iPhone, Facebook, Google) it is now possible to go from a standing start to hyperscale in the same time frame.

On the one hand banking stability is good, but on the other hand banks are integral to booms and busts. When stability is needed they are seen to be embroiled in these hypercycles. So there is an argument that says the new capital adequacy rules will come too late to prevent the next morphing of capitalism.

The better path would be for banks to become more engaged, for bank employees to be better schooled in how business is now done and how consumers now think and behave. This is being done in small doses, the bank blog, the mobile app. And behind the scenes banks are trying to adopt collaborative platforms.

The problem lies more in the relationship of the bank to the regulatory world, which seeks to be over-protective, and provides an excuse for inaction on social technologies (we are a regulated world, cry the banks when advocates of social technologies argue for change).

It leaves bankers in the same position as lawyers and accountants, two professions that self-regulate and also remain impervious to change. What I would like to have seen from the BIS is a Committee on Social Technologies and Banking, one that would formalise and give credence to a vision of the future that goes beyond capital adequacy to other forms of adequacy, adequacies in more modern customer engagement.  It raises this question: how does the wiki-world engage with the world of regulators?

1. OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi as tools for change
   

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

2. Where is my trash? TrashTracker
   

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

   

3. The nice facebook: Diaspora

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

4. Investigate environmental crime: Infodoalamar.info
   

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

I took away something else from this piece: how important being technologically competent is, and will continue to be, probably forever (or until the machines take over if you envision your future Terminator-style).

Here’s what Griffith says about Zipcar customers: “Our research shows that Zipcar members are highly technically savvy, reporting heavy use of computers, smartphones, social networks, and other digital devices and services.” The business succeeds because of technology and, of course, “a lot of self-reporting by customers.” Essentially, the customers make the business and they are comfortable with self-service in general, Griffith suggests, because of positive experiences over the years with self-service banking, self-service checkouts, self-service airline ticketing, and services like Netflix. Zipcar, I think, is at least as personal as the other self-service experiences they have had.

None of the “self-services,” including Zipcar, requires deep technical understanding, but they all require a level of competence (not to mention trust) with a variety of interfaces, including the iPhone, for which Zipcar has an app that does everything in the location and reservation process, including honking the horn of your rental car in the parking area to make it easy to find.

Competence is built on experience with technology, but is enabled by access to it. I don’t think lack of access to smartphones is a barrier to growth for such cool services as Zipcar, and I expect that the threshold for facility with technology is going to continue to fall over time and that all things technical will become simpler just because people want things to work right, easily, and fast with little work on their part.

But I do wonder (not worry, just wonder) whether we (I will include myself in this) whose jobs involve use and knowledge of new things technological almost as fast as they come to market have an insider’s version of the world, one that does not fit the rest of the world populated by billions who do not know or care about technically cool and useful things, but just want to survive. There are more and more groups, organizations, NGOs, governments, and individuals whose lives are dedicated to harnessing technology to reduce poverty, provide livelihoods, prevent human disasters, and more, and I tend to forget about them when the newest cool app appears for my Droid. These organizations provide both access and minimal competence that opens up technology to people in places that may not have much infrastructure to support more sophisticated uses. There are many great initiatives and endeavors by these groups; the first one I was aware of is txteagle, which gives corporations access to the 2+ billion literate mobile phone subscribers to perform tasks and gives those subscribers a chance to earn money or airtime for performing those tasks.

I did not know I was going here when I started this post and it certainly is a bit off track from the title, but it now occurs to me that technological competence is too often taken for granted by people like me because I have access. It occurs to me now that providing access to the billions without it creates the opportunity for competence, along with the opportunity for improvement; technology provides the platform.

But I have a different perspective, and believe that many brands (and companies) can succeed on Twitter without necessarily engaging in conversations, or being particularly active. Not only that, but I believe the hypothesis that customers necessarily want to be engaged in conversations with brands needs to be challenged, as I don’t think it’s true as a blanket statement.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this recently, but today I’ll just provide a few different Twitter accounts that appear to be doing very well, in terms of followers, without engaging in conversations (or doing any of the other things most people are recommending they “should” do on Twitter).

@woot:  A quick glance at their Twitter page reveals they typically post once a day (occasionally 2 or 3 times). This post is a link to a daily deal. There is simply no conversation or two-way engagement. They have over 1.6 million followers (#90 overall, between Biz Stone and Penn Gillette), and have been listed 7,000 + times. This makes woot one of the most popular brand accounts on Twitter (out of companies that actually sell stuff).

@zappos: this account is operated by CEO Tony Hsieh, and Zappos is frequently mentioned as one of the leading companies in delivering compelling customer experiences, and engaging in social media. But if you look at his actual activity, there are few signs of conversation to be found. It’s mostly some quotes he finds interesting, a few links, and some seemingly random thoughts. He also doesn’t post that often – less than once a day. He has over 1.7 million followers (#72 overall, between inStyle and Serena Williams), and has been listed almost 10,000 times.

@mashable: Mashable is the online guide to social media. If anyone was to be using Twitter “correctly”, you think it would be them – and this account is run by Pete Cashmore, the CEO. It is popular – @mashable has over 2 million followers (#45 overall, between Pete Wentz and Mandy Moore), and has been listed almost 50,000 times. But again, just look at the activity – a continuous series of links to various articles. More active then the two examples above, yes – but conversational, absolutely not.

You might think I just cherry picked these examples, and that they are the exception to the rule. But I didn’t – there are many more examples where these came from. And as for the rule, well, I think the rule is wrong.

That social media can be used to engage in conversations is absolutely true, and many people and companies are doing that effectively. I don’t dispute that. But somewhere along the way, there seems to have been a near consensus emerge that:

a) two-way conversations is the only way to use Twitter.

b) two-way conversations is what every customer wants on Twitter.

I don’t believe it. The fact that so many people seem to be interested in so many accounts that do the exact opposite is rather telling on this front. And as more and more people engage on Twitter (and other platforms), and create more and more connections, with the potential for more and more messages, I truly believe we’re going to see more and more people realize that “conversations” isn’t what it’s all about.

Visualize Business Models

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

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

Value Model of Open Data

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

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

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

Open Government: It’s all about timing.

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

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

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

Bureaucrats of Toronto, take note!

Now, Cataphora is in the business of modeling “informal networks” within the enterprise for HR and operational efficiencies, as well as to monitor compliance with internal policies and external regulations. By analyzing the relationship between e-mail data, documents that are shared, calendar information, call logs, and people, Cataphora can assess employee productivity, uncover shadow networks, and map collaborative behavior. Digital Mirror offers some of these capabilities to the public for free by analyzing your archived data from Microsoft Outlook.

I ran Digital Mirror on my own Outlook data and came up with some pretty interesting results. A caveat I would add is that you need to have a lot of archived data for this to work well—several outputs such as “Blow-Off Scorecard,” “Buck-Passing,” “Temperature Gauge,” and “Loud Talking” didn’t work for me due to lack of sufficient data. Some of the other interesting outputs that did work are shown below:

Who have you spent quality time with?

Who have you talked with, about what, and when?

Who has been stressed out, and about what?

The goal of Digital Mirror in its current incarnation is to illuminate relationships, topics of interest, tensions, and hidden processes in the workplace. I think over time, digital reflections and analytics such as these will become increasingly important and, in many cases, baked into our both our personal computing as well as corporate processes.

As more data (beyond simply data from Outlook) is incorporated, I can imagine much richer, higher-definition mirrors. Aspects of our rich digital selves that are open for analysis include things like education; employment, and resumes; health records and government documents; search history; profiles on social networks; comments and posts on forums and blogs; and location information from cell phone signals and GPS-enabled devices. They could include aspects that we actively update like registrations for groups, associations, and publications, or aspects that we are not aware of like un-tagged photos of us on other people’s Facebook or Flickr profiles and images from closed-loop IP-enabled surveillance cameras.

Today most of this information is disassociated, residing in many different databases and in many different organizations. More often than not, the information is not under the control of the individual. In the future, we can envision a composite digital picture of the individual that will augment and accompany each human from cradle to grave. As the world becomes more instrumented, multiple machines—some under our control and others not—will be slicing our data and making observations about our activities billions of times each minute, in parallel.

Beyond optimizing processes and sparking what is likely to be heated debate about privacy and data ownership, digital reflections will also help people understand how they are perceived by others. With this knowledge in hand, we can go forth in the online (and offline) world making conscious decisions about how we want to represent ourselves in different contexts. Most people don’t step out into the real world in the morning without—at least briefly—consulting a mirror. Why should the online world be any different?

My first issue is with the word now. From my perspective, the customer has always been in control – the fate of companies providing products and services in a capitalist economy is ultimately determined by what customers choose to buy. In turn, the analysis shifts towards social media somehow giving customers slightly more control than they had before – a small, but important, distinction.

The typical argument is that as customers have connected with each other through platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, the opinions they share amongst themselves have increased in importance, while the typical “broadcast marketing” approaches have decreased in effectiveness. While I do believe there is some truth to this, there is another way to look at what’s happening.

For starters, if customers only wanted to hear each other’s opinions, they could do so without engaging companies at all – either in somewhat self-organizing fashion through Facebook and Twitter, or “neutral” services like Yelp. But many, many customers are also opting to directly connect with companies – liking, following, lurking in communities, etc. – through these very same platforms. In doing so, many are effectively asking companies to engage with them.

Second, being “in control” takes time and effort. I would argue that many customers may want to “take control” in relation to certain product and service decisions, for many others they are happy to be passive recipients of messages (and offers) from their preferred brands. For example, the #2 reason given for becoming a Facebook fan (based on a survey earlier this year) was to receive coupons. And while I don’t have time to go into it here, one of the consistent findings from my research is that customers like being “broadcast” to on social media more than many people think.

On a related point, I believe that many customers are being overwhelmed by all the brand-related conversations taking place. For example, many brands on Twitter now commonly send 30+ messages a day, responding to specific people. Many consider this to be engaging. But if you follow (say) 30 such brands, that’s over 900 messages a day – most of which will be of absolutely no interest to you. Perhaps the method will persist for many more years, but perhaps not.

Finally (at least for today), as “word of mouth” marketing has moved online, and more and more data is generated, it’s becoming ever easier for brands to monitor exactly what people are saying, thinking and feeling about various things. I personally believe that all this information points towards a world where many brands can be far more “in control” than they’ve ever been before.

Tying it all together, I’ve taken to asking what someone like Don Draper – the lead character on Mad Men – would think about the rise of social media if he was ported into 2010. Would he look at all the new tools and behaviors and say “wow, I can’t control anything here!” Or would he say “wow, I can influence, monitor and control things more than ever before!”

My sense is that it would be the latter – and many companies would be well served by taking a similar line of thinking. After all, to be in control implies having power; it is commonly said that knowledge is power; and all this information is giving companies more knowledge than ever before.

1. How do we get the attention from the people for our platform? The noise on the information highway is loud and it makes signal difficult to hear. As Clay Shirky analyses, the 80/20 Rule is also applicable to the web: roughly speaking, 20 % of all blogs account for 80 % of all the traffic. The web is a system where people have the free choice to read anything they want. To find the information that is useful for them, they look what are the preferences of people they trust – friends, family, colleagues or other important persons.
2. How do we get the users continuously engaged?

The answer for the first question is a combination of a deliberate social media strategy and advertising. For answering the second one I feel that more and more platforms use game mechanics to tackle the problem. There are numerous examples who use badges, reputation points or prediction markets: Manorlabs, Microsoft’s Townhall, Vencorps, the location based service Foursquare and many more.

Empire Avenue

I recently stumbled onto another site that uses game mechanics: Empire Avenue (EA). This site determines the social influence of a person in a web. The EA nuance is a virtual stock exchange market. People can buy and sell share of users, earn badges and dividends from their virtual investments. The price of your shares is mostly determined by your activity on twitter, facebook, flickr and blogs. Therefore you have to connect your social media accounts with EA. The higher the social media activity, the higher the prices of your shares will rise.

I tried the site out and it sparked my interest. My share price is now 12.864 eaves (the name of the virtual money), which indicates according to the EA blog, that I am an average social media user. Adriel Hampton, who dedicated a blog to game mechanics writes, that people use the site for “networking, for fun, to make money or a combination of those.” This statement makes sense and I will use Malone’s Genome Model to qualify it.

First, it is fun. I love the being active on the site. I am curious if my share prices rise. Which leads to the next motivation: Glory. I want to achieve a high share price, to gain the reputation as an “exceptional social media user.” And of course, money is a motivation. On the one hand, users can earn virtual money and buy upgrades. On the other hand, users and businesses can monetize their network (for example by better targeted advertising or connecting to key influencers).

Should EA gain a critical mass of users (If Obama joins EA they probably have a breakthrough), it will add another feature to the advertising market. Businesses and persons can “buy and sell advertisements with the cost of those advertisements likely based on a players influence.” As we look for the preferences of other people to determine our buying decisions, this seems like a powerful tool.

Learmonth wonders how this online stalking may affect the Zappos brand, which has great customer loyalty. He never loaded anything into a cart, but was just browsing, yet the recommendations followed up. He warns: “If the industry is truly worried about a federally mandated ‘do not track‘ list akin to ‘do not call’ for the internet, they’re not really showing it. As ads become more persistent and more customized, consumers are going to demand one place to opt out of everything, and not to have to check boxes at Criteo, Yahoo, Google, Blue Kai or whoever else is targeting them that day.”

Coincidentally, within this past week, Wall Street Journal writers Julia Angwin and Tom Mc Ginty began a series about the increased “spying on consumers” that’s happening on the internet. Example: the chief marketing officer at Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company, claims that via its software, which captures what people type on websites such as comments on movies or interest in parenting, it can “segment it all the way down to one person.” Lotame packages the data it collects into anonymous profiles of individuals and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers.

Angwin and Mc Ginty say online tracking files placed on individuals’ computers “represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time.” They acknowledge that the Journal site itself installs some 60 tracking files. “Some tracking files can record a person’s keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.”

Tracking is almost universally declared in privacy policies, but tracking companies can develop profiles on individuals that are nearly “anonymous in name only”: personal profiles can include “age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.”

Angwin and Mc Ginty may not exactly be breaking new ground in the series, at least about the spying in general, and I’m sure some people are happy to get personalized ads and recommendations as they move across the internet, but, to me, they do raise an important issue: the amount of data about individuals that’s necessary to provide this “service” is growing. Let’s face it, the vast majority of people do not know much about this process or seem to care about it – yet.

My question is: Is it necessary to spy on customers to help them? Why can’t the spying companies or, better, the sites they serve disclose up front what’s going on and offer it as a service rather than do it essentially surreptitiously (hyperbole warning: find me 5 people who read or even have read, word for word, any privacy policy on any web site ever)? I think there are plenty of people who would still opt in, albeit selectively, to help them make decisions or perhaps be directed to sites that can provide information, product ratings, etc. They might even volunteer more information if they thought it would produce more accurate recommendations, etc. I have a CVS loyalty card, which I volunteered for, which tracks my purchases there and provide discounts on things I regularly buy and also accumulates discount bucks. I know what CVS knows about me, but I choose to participate. If I found they sold my data to some other companies, I might change my mind.

To paraphrase something attributed to Abraham Lincoln, you can sneak up on some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Companies that would like to spy on all of the people all of the time in the name of commerce would be wise to beware of what they are wishing for: no one likes to feel duped, even if you can offer them shorts for $5 less.

Sort of: once StarCraft 2 reached a stage where it was reasonably polished and playable, Blizzard-Activision moved it into a public beta, where anyone could download the multiplayer component of the game for free and play to their heart’s content. Based on usage and feedback, the strengths and abilities of various game pieces were tweaked and refined, and the beta saw continuous, iterative improvements. The beta wrapped up about a month before the official July 27th release of the game, but when the final product shipped, it did so having been vetted by countless thousands of players–players who not only had a chance to make the game better, but had a chance to get addicted to it and line up to buy a copy of the finished product. The game is great and would still have been great had Blizzard-Activision not had their open beta, but the extra time to polish the product made it that much better, and saved them post-release efforts in squashing bugs and tweaking dynamics.

In another smart gaming industry play, one that coincides with StarCraft 2 both in terms of timing and theme, Valve Software also recently released a “marines in space” style game, Alien Swarm–except that in Valve’s case, the game was released for free; not even as a beta, just as a free product. The closest thing to a catch with this is that in order to play Alien Swarm, players need to install Steam, Valve’s content delivery/social network/game storefront platform. Any player who installs Alien Swarm to play with their friends via Steam will see all of the games that their friends have, be updated when and where their friends are playing, and have a very easy to use purchase/upgrade path should they want to buy any games through the platform. By bringing gamers to a platform where purchasing, playing, and socializing take place, Valve has made a very clean and unified user experience, one that seems to resonate strongly and positively with users.

Video games, like movies and music, are readily susceptible to piracy. In a future post I’m going to explore how parts of the gaming industry have opted for a much different solution than the ones explored by movie studios and record labels (litigation): making “going legit” easier and superior to piracy. I’m convinced that across the board, businesses of any type can learn a lot from what innovating gaming firms are doing.

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

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

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

So what happens when people make professionally damaging mistakes with social media? It seems they either are very emotional about a topic and simply forget the facts of public and permanent, or they forget that what they write can be interpreted differently than how they meant it. The process of getting what we mean to say – what we think we are thinking – into text or video is complex. Even the very best writers and speakers can forget to imagine how what they are writing or saying may sound to an audience that does not share the same context with them. In a time when there are more public words in audio, video, and text than at any time in history, and so many attentive readers, it becomes harder and harder not to make mistakes. And when made, mistakes grow the more they are chewed on.

What fascinates me is that pundits and talk-show folks and now even politicians who simply state their biases and bitterness and anger openly seem to get away with it while often well-intentioned people who misspeak or just screw up their writing or speaking are driven from their jobs and vilified with language and criticism that used to be addressed to the most vicious of criminals – people who meant to do harm.

The warning about the minefield of social media still stands but perhaps we should start accepting that mistakes will be made and that every mistake may not be a fatal character flaw. After all, that may be you – or me – who is thrown onto the Mel Gibson pile at any moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market and Social world

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

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

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

Goals and Results of time banking

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

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

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

Obstacles and constraints of the model

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

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

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

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

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

Key issue: participation rate

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

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

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

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

Specifically, I was talking about surveys about Gen Ys and the conclusions being drawn, by us and by others, about them – generalizations really, not conclusions, e.g., that Gen Ys are closer to their parents than other generations; more altruistic/less altruistic; more resistant to authority; more interested in finding their own way; and so on. My wife’s friend countered that the survey could not accurately represent some people who probably are not surveyable, e.g., the Gen Y children of illegal migrant workers in Missouri, so no conclusions about Gen Y or even generalizations about them are valid because they are not likely to reflect the views of or apply to this subset of Gen Ys who are likely not going to be reached by a survey.

My understanding of her position is that unless 100% of the people you are targeting with a survey are included, the survey data have no meaning. Okay, I admit to losing it here in that discussion and just withdrawing. There was no argument I could muster against “perfect or nothing.”

I won’t argue that surveys reveal “The Truth” (if that exists), but data from statistically valid and well constructed surveys do reveal a reality that may or may not apply to everyone but that does exist.

I also admit that it was hard for me to argue my position because I am already suspicious of how accurately Gen Y surveys actually reflect the Gen Y population. I tend to rely on anecdote – which has little validity – as a touchstone to what the surveys reveal. I have two Gen Y children so I tend to ask myself whether survey conclusions about Gen Ys work for them. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. My children are more open by far than I was about their lives, but they do not reveal everything, nor do I want them to.

All this is really a lead-in to saying that survey data – about Gen Ys or anything else – at the very least provide something to think about and consider, even if the surveys and the data are always imperfect. To simply declare that we can know nothing unless we talk to everyone is too easy and lets everyone of us off the hook when it comes to digging into the why of everything. That said, I tend to validate survey data by the organization that does the work; like everything else, some are just much better than others at this. We at nGenera will continue to survey because we are curious.