Hutch Carpenter, a product manager at Connectbeam, mashed up this Wordle on what 10 leading enterprise 2.0 vendors are talking about on their sites. Vendors include:

1. Jive Software
2. SocialText
3. Connectbeam
   
4. Atlassian Confluence
5. Six Apart Movable Type
6. Newsgator
7. Traction Software
8. Near-Time
9. SpikeSource SuiteTwo
10. Worklight

See Hutch’s post here.

One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.

7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.

Luke Smith, said the newscaster on the monitor, who only yesterday controlled more proxy votes than any other advisor, has been reduced to irrelevance. Almost all of Smith's supporters abandoned him last night after he tried to use their proxy votes to pass a bill that would have allowed him to collect millions of dollars through a dummy public service provider. The country's voting platform gave all citizens the ability to vote on every bill. But many gave their votes by proxy to advisors.

I wonder how Smith thought he could get away with it, thought Donald. Open Collaboration Platforms (OCP) were now mandatory for any agency that received government funds. They gave citizens access to all of an organization's internal activities, including documents and meeting. Not only had these allowed greater collaboration between governments, businesses, citizens, and civil society; they had greatly enhanced oversight, and made it difficult for anyone to get away with corruption.

After the newscast, an ad played. These ads helped pay for the other content Donald watched. His friend Ralph had forwarded this ad to him. I just signed up. Its great, said a message from Ralph. The ad was for a new bank account from UniBank. It had low credit rates and high savings rates. Donald thought it sounded good, especially since profits were being used to support internet access for children in the developing world.

Donald decided to follow the link from the ad to the bank's website. He clicked on Open a New Account and was taken to the government's Central ID Management System (CIDMS). CIDMS linked all private and public sector databases that contain personal information, both to facilitate data sharing across databases, and to give individuals the ability to manage their privacy.

Donald confirmed that he would like to allow UniBank to create a record of him in their database. He then received a request from UniBank for access to his credit history. He allowed it. He was then asked if we would like to share his name and contact information with UniBank. Donald declined. Because all of his information is shared over the CIDMS, UniBank didn't need any personal information about Donald to confirm the information he had shared. Providing his name and contact information might have allowed them to give him a more personalized service, but Donald didn't trust them not to share his information with other companies.

After the account was setup, Donald electronically transferred all of his money and information from his old bank account. He saw that he had a bill from the Hospital of New Delhi. Donald was getting surgery there the following week. He was originally going to go to the local hospital, but there was less of a wait at New Delhi, and besides, it was supposed to be much better. The bill had already been automatically forwarded to, and paid by, the government's Health Fund. He had also just received his latest electronic paycheck. It outlined exactly where his taxes went: ten percent to education, five percent to the police

Looking at the clock, Donald realized it was already 7:30. He had to get going. He rolled out of bed, got ready for work, and headed out the door, remembering to take the trash to the curb. In his car, Donald logged into the Car Pool System (CPS). People who wanted a ride could enter a request into the CPS. Car owners were then notified of people they could pickup along their route. In return, the car owner got paid a portion of each passenger's daily transit allowance.

One of the passengers Donald picked up that morning was Sarah Johnson, the president of the neighborhood council. The council had been formed early in the year, when over half of the neighborhood agreed to create one in an e-vote. Neighborhood councils had authority to improve neighborhood roads and parks, put-up stop signs, and run community programs. In order to pay for their work, neighborhood councils were given money from the city on a per-capita basis.

You guys really need to improve that park, Donald said, referring to the park across from his house.

We're working on it. You should check out the design proposals on the OCP, said Sarah.

I will.

After dropping off his passengers, Donald went to work at the city planning commission. He logged on to the commission's online planning map. In addition to displaying current and proposed by-laws, the map provided an interactive, 3D model of the city, including 3D mock-ups of current and proposed buildings. The map was available to all citizens, who could use it to comment on and suggest modifications to proposals.

The Transit Commission had recently uploaded plans for a new subway line. Emergency Services was concerned that the design would make their response difficult in the case of an emergency. They were using the platform to work with the transit commission to solve the problem.

At the same time, citizens had been asked to help design the outside of the new subway stations. Donald's job was to lead this group of volunteers, and make sure their design stayed within budget.

Before he left work for the day, Donald logged on to the central government's voter platform and reviewed a list of upcoming votes and issues that may concern you. One of the big issues of the day was a bill to ban designer genes. It had actually been drafted by the janitor in Donald's office. Donald gave his votes by proxy to the New World Party. But the party had not made a decision on this bill. Donald voted against the ban, as the voting system had predicted based on his past voting history. This system of tracking voting behavior had previously suggested Donald transfer his proxy vote from the popular Conservative party to the niche New World party, which he had found was much more in line with his views. Donald donated his monthly allowance for political financing to the party so that it could grow, and garner more influence.

When Donald got home from work, he saw his garbage still sitting on the curb. Donald had switched to a new, environmentally conscious garbage company, but it never picked up his garbage. He logged into his garbage collection account, run by the city government, and switched back to his old company. Now his weekly garbage pickup allowance would be given to a company that actually did their job.

It was getting late, and Donald had a date that night. After a quick shower and a change of clothes, Donald hopped back in the car.

Would you like to pickup passengers? the CPS prompted him. Donald declined.

Probably not the best way to impress the ladies, he said to himself.

An article on CNN.com last week tells about a 25 year old teacher from the Netherlands who identified a whole new class of celestial objects. The amazing thing is that she has no formal training in astronomy or astrophysics. She is simply a member of the large online stargazing community called Galaxy Zoo. Anyone can join this community.

The site gives users instructions on how to identify objects and then lets the community go wild. Members are given access to high-resolution photos of outer-space. Everyone is then allowed to identify the objects, and if enough members concur the classification is accepted. The format is similar to Wikipedia.

This site is a great example of the power of open source communities. There are literally endless amounts of celestial objects to be identified. With the help of everyday people, scientists are able to chart the night's skies with speed and accuracy that was never before possible.

If you are looking for a new hobby check out Galaxy Zoo, and you can become an astronomer without ever leaving your living room.

As part of my effort to help you find meaning(ful applications) in your e-life, i'm starting a regular column called The netGuide. In these blog posts I will briefly talk about some of my website findings from across the web and how they help solve old problems in new and creative ways.

In today’s web wanderings we’re going deep into birdy territory with a.viary.com - a comprehensive suite of free online software that promises to be the next generation of media editing. Invites inside.

Website: a.viary.com
Category: Media Editing and Collaboration
Web Traffic: Launched in Oct. 2007, and growing quickly. Currently ranked 41,500 according to Alexa.

Aviary is a suite of online media editing tools that can be used to edit images, audio and video, as well as accomplish a host of other functions, like font creation and desktop publishing, all accessed through the web browser. There’s a few things that really distinguish Aviary from its competitors: the scope of the product offering is incredible - the numerous editing tools combine offerings from Photoshop, Illustrator, and a host of other software products that people pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars for. It’s free now but it will be interesting to see how it monitizes the website through ads, corporate licensing fees, etc. The tools are only accessible online, so for most people with stable internet connections, this means you don’t have to install software that eats up your hard drive and which locks you to only one machine. Additionally, the tools are applied on a collaborative platform that allows people to form relationships and work together in the editing process, which may change the way we develop creative content.

The Aviary suite of media tools promises to reinvent the way people access and edit media, using the Internet, and threatens many well entrenched companies. Although I have only tinkered with the tools, the experience is intuitive and user friendly, while still retaining a large degree of the depth required for sophisticated editing. Currently a.viary is invitation only as it develops, but despite this, or perhaps because of this, web-traffic to the site has skyrocketed as people spread the word about something cool and innovative (talk-worthy') to real world friends, e-friends, and community co-members.

I just received my invite (from weeks ago), which prompted this post, and I have 3 more that I will give out to the first 3 comments requesting one. I ask that in the sake of community spirit, if you receive an invite, please check back with this post to see if there are others after you who want one too!

Question Period:

This is an example of the first wave of web-based software that is replacing PC-based software. Increasingly we are seeing innovative web-solutions that are built on the Web 2.0 model. What do you think about this?

• What is the argument for, and against, web based software being a convenient solution?
• What are your thoughts on potential Intellectual Property issues related to Aviary’s media storing, peer-collaboration, etc.
• How do you think competing companies like Adobe will respond?

Jive Clearspace has begun an open community where e2.0 fans, friends, and enemies (that means you Tom Davenport :-)) can have an opportunity to share war stories, successes, and get questions answered. The community site is called ClearStep. Of course, you can always share your opinions on our nGenera site, as well. Oliver Marks tipped me off to this site too by Imaginatik which appears to be powered by Ning, but there are some great wikinomics-style case studies and discussion threads there you might want to participate in.

Second, I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile. Nick Barker has created a one-stop shop for aggregating all current goings-on and content related to Enterprise 2.0 at his Enterprise 2.0 Portal site. The site is free and should be on everyone’s feed reader. Make sure you check it out.

And, in case you missed it, the venerable consulting institution, McKinsey & Co. published its global survey results for “Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise.” It’s also free, but you have to give them your contact info.

Finally, Niall Cook who founded one of my favorite products, Cogenz, (in his spare time) released his new book, “Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software will change the future of work.” I have not read it yet, but I’m certain it’s another must-have for your e2.0 bookshelf– IF you have a liberal expense account. It’s a little pricey at $89.95. I asked Niall about the price, he said it’s because the publisher sells mainly to an institutional and academic market. I’m hoping for a review copy, or will have to wait for the eBook or paperback version. Or maybe I can get a discount because Don Tapscott wrote the forward? (Humm… just realized we need to update Don’s profile on Wikipedia to reflect nGenera. Damn these Internets, always need to be current!). Actually, Niall may have taken a page out of the Wikinomics playbook, because it appears you can co-create with the community to add more content on each of the book’s chapters with this wiki hosted by Socialtext. He’s also blogging on the major themes of the book here.

This is Haydn Shaughnessy’s first Guest Blog on the wikinomics site, focusing on the issue of design in relation to wikinomics. You can check out his gallery of Innovative Contemporary Artists here.

Artists and designers live by the wikinomics code, always have done. Well, perhaps not strictly so, but the competition model that launched Goldcorp to mega success in mining, and that is improving Netflix recommendation engine, are a way of life if you are an artist, designer or architect. For example, take a look at architecture room, a place where architects and designers go for intelligence on open competitions globally: thearchitectureroom.

It is normal for developers commissioning large new buildings to shout out for architects. Right now you can pitch for inclusion in a short list to design the new Munch Museum in Norway, be shortlisted to design the Olympic Village for Madrid’s 2016 Olympic bid, respond to Orlando, Florida’s competition to design the re-use of the American Federal Building… and there are many hundreds more.

So who is doing what right now in the corporate world? Nokia is calling for furniture designers to promote design that either removes obstacles to mobility or creates movable furniture. Lifestyle products company Muji is running its third annual Found Muji design award, and Peugeot is running its fifth concept car design award. The Peugeot competition has attracted around 3 million hits to the Peugeot website.

What does this mean for the wikinomics era? It’s possibly the best example of professions organising themselves, and the training of professionals, to work in under wikinomics conditions. It’s tempting to criticise the drift towards contests as a way for corporates to secure cheap ideas, and when you think Peugeot pays only Euro 10,000 to the concept car winner, you have to say there’s more than a grain of truth in the criticism.

Platforms that organise ideagoras, such as Innocentive, can similarly stray into the creativity-on-the-cheap territory. What’s missing that would make these contests more practical in the long term is obvious if you look again at architecture and design - the commission. Architects who win contests get commissioned to work on the building. That makes continuous competition bearable and indeed fruitful. It seems to me the Innocentive model is in its early stages and that what follows are deals that enrich winners. A P&G in future might not just shout over the walls for a few ideas but might use the ideagora award to fund the start-up and development of new suppliers who’ve proven their worth with the brighteset ideas.

Joe Westhead sent me an interesting email awhile ago in relation to the ongoing MyFootballClub experiment (and has an intriguing post on the subject that I’ll come back to later). For those that may have forgotten, MyFootballClub became relatively famous as it sought out 50,000 fans to not only co-own a professional football (soccer in North America) team, but manage it through the “wisdom of crowds” principles. To quote one of the many articles on their plans (wikipedia has a great overview of their history):

The probable new owners will manage the club, voting online to choose match lineups and buying new players. To help run the team, the fans will be able to view all the matches online and, after the game, receive statistics on how each player has performed. They will also get weekly updates from the team’s head coach on how each player is doing during practice.

It sounded really good - and most commentators particularly focused on the ability to vote on line ups as a key driver of participation. This functionality went live recently, but was hardly a resounding success - less than 2,000 of the over 30,000 members voted on the line ups for some recent games, and the vast majority that did bother to vote elected to let the coach decide. This lack of involvement has led to several articles like this one, which sees it not only a hugely negative development, but as potentially foreshadowing the collapse of the entire experiment. But is it really that bad?

Let’s start with the issue of team selection. When MyFootballClub was launched, numerous sports “experts” thought it would be a massive failure because the “crowd” wouldn’t be knowledgeable enough to select the squad. Now that the option is available, most of the crowd is choosing not to vote - opting rather to let the coach decide. While this is now being spun as a “failure” of the model, might it just represent that the crowd is rational enough to realize that the coach is in a better position to select the squad on a day-to-day basis, and they are happy leaving him to do so (until perhaps he proves himself unworthy?).

Connected to this, articles like the twohundredpercent piece make a quantum leap in logic - given that the majority of participants don’t appear interested in contributing to the day-to-day decision making, it appears they are unlikely to renew again next year. Given that these people did opt to purchase the membership, and many have never engaged in the voting process, isn’t it hard to argue that the ability to vote on everything regularly was the reason they signed up? To use an analogy, if I think people are coming to my hotel for the pool, but few of them use the pool, rather than meaning they’re not going to come back to my hotel, it might just mean that the pool wasn’t the reason they came in the first place.

I can’t say for sure, but I bring this up because it represents a common mistake we see in relation to collaboration - presupposing the reasons why people engage in something, and then declaring it a failure when behavior is actually quite different - when the behavior might just reflect the fact they had different reasons than you initially thought. I’d be very interested in a survey of the membership that asks them why they joined - and what they expect.

Maybe a lot of people are just attracted to the democratized ownership, and the ‘joy’ of co-owning a team rather than having it dominated by one person or a large corporation. And maybe many of these people are happy to let the professionals run the team on a day-to-day basis, but will actually demonstrate the wisdom of crowds in the event things seem to be heading in the wrong direction (i.e. demanding a coaching change, etc.).

I’m not saying these things will happen - I really don’t know, and only time will tell. But we should let this thing play out for awhile before it’s declared dead - and let this crowd prove whether it is truly wise, mad, ambivalent, or otherwise. However, I also don’t want to let MyFootballClub off the hook entirely. To quote Joe’s post:

Online communities, like any organisation, are not fully democratised. Various roles are assumed, such as contributors and leaders, to fully utilise the talents of individuals. The likes of MyFootballClub.co.uk would do well to use the community to discover and exploit the pool of resources available rather than a direct democracy. In football terms, this could have very interesting implications.

This is an important point - there are different ways to leverage a crowdsourcing model that aren’t built on purely democratic principles. Joe talks about the potential to engage part of the membership in the scouting process, similar to the “One for the Birds” contest the St. Louis Cardinals rolled out for their baseball team (I wrote about it here). Might there also be an opportunity to engage parts of the crowd in marketing, mashing up video clips for either entertainment OR game preperation (as Joe also suggests), etc.?

It is notable that approximately 3x more people voted on the uniform designs than the roster selection… which I’m sure few people would expect. MyFootballClub would be well served to seriously think about the best way to engage their community in a variety of different ways, and ideally leveraging all of the web 2.0 tools available to them, rather than just relying on democratic voting process as the differentiator.

Today, games are usually released for purchase both in stores (on CD/DVD) and online for download. The disc version of the game usually has a check built-in to make sure that the disc is actually in the drive, confriming that you’ve actually bought the game. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was no different, except that the downloadable version of the game also had this disc-check left in — clearly a problem for gamers who opted for the download.

Usually, online piracy groups release “no-cd cracks” that allow games to be played without a legitimate (or any) game-disc. These groups are violating the game developers’ terms of service agreements, and enabling the theft countless games — but, they write good code! So much so, that in order to fix the disc-check issue with Rainbox Six: Vegas 2, Ubisoft released a no-cd patch that contained code written by the piracy group named RELOADED. This was revealed by a user on the Ubisoft Forums.

The Register reports that Ubisoft had these comments:

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.

Followed by:

The file was removed from the site over a week ago now and the matter is being thoroughly investigated by senior tech support managers here at Ubisoft.

Needless to say we do not support or condone copy protection circumvention methods like this and this particular incident is in direct conflict with Ubisoft’s policies.

In terms of TV and Movie piracy, it always striked me as pretty amusing that the industry heavyweights were so viciously going after a network of people who do all of the legwork in terms of encoding and distrtributing content (completely for free!), instead of finding a way to track downloads and charge end users for the content they enjoy. But this seems different.

I think that The Register’s article title sums it up perfectly: “Ubisoft pirates game fix from pirates” — a move that is completely in line with any mandate to deliver top-notch entertainment.

Courtesy my Facebook feed and District of Columbia CTO Vivek Kundra here’s a fantastic example of a government agency actively trying to stimulate new ideas and innovation. Yesterday Kundra’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) released data representing more than 84,000 3D buildings for inclusion in Google Earths’ Cities in 3D program.

The release is meant to allow citizens, whether development experts or simply concerned city dwellers, a greater role in conversations and plans about the city’s future. Want to propose a new development? These 3D images should go a long way in allowing all parties a better, and simpler, platform upon which to build.

Over at the Google Earth blog, Barney Krucoff, the GIS Manager for OCTO, highlights why they released the data. I’ve cut the highlights of his remarks - visit the LatLong blog for the full version:

1. It is the right thing to do. Fundamentally, the District Government believes that data created with public funds should be available to the public.

2. Because every neighborhood can benefit from 3D. Economic development was a primary driver behind development of the dataset. The buildings provide the context in which to plan and debate proposed new developments.

3. We get better 3D performance from the cloud and we don't pay for it. Frankly, the District did not have the technical capabilities for distributing nearly 100,000 3D building across the enterprise. With the data now hosted on Google Earth 4.3, we expect DC Government users to turn to Google Earth just like the public.

4. We want to communicate with our residents. It is important to us that citizens, particularly DC taxpayers, understand what we do.

This is great stuff. We’re looking closely at what Kundra and his colleagues in Mayor Adrian Fenty’s adminstration are up to in DC. Whether it’s the use of wiki’s to bring transparency and accountability into the procurement process or releasing upwards of 80% of the real-time statistical data they collect via RSS feeds to the public, the team at OCTO is redefining traditional notions of what is and isn’t shared with the public. And in doing so they’re acknowledging that the public may be a significant asset in helping build a stronger DC community. Now what remains to be seen is what the impact of this transparency will be and ultimately how will we measure the success of Government 2.0

The popularity of wikis, while growing, hasn’t yet reached everywhere. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.

Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically playing tennis with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.

RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.

A little while ago I wrote a two-part series called “Looking into the blogosphere through a sporting lens” (part 2 is here). The purpose of the series was to look at some questions underlying a Costas Now program, which itself was supposed to be an insightful look at the role of the blogosphere in relation sports reporting. While the video itself devolved into something far less thoughtful then it could have been, the questions it raised about the role and value of comments in the blogosphere continue to be quite interesting to me.

What leads me to bring this up again is blatant self-promotion are two very interesting posts, with wildly divergent perspectives on the comments issue. The first is from social media expert Chris Brogan, entitled “Musicians play for tips - The importance of comments“. In the post Chris reminds readers that comments are important, presents his rough calculations on the percentage of readers who comment (roughly 1/4 of 1%), and admits that his own personal commenting habits are roughly in the same ballpark.

Chris then goes on to list some other ways readers can leverage social media to help share and promote blog posts that they like - things like Stumbleupon and Digg - but the underlying message is that comments are a critical component of a successful blog post. Chris also mentions Seth Godin, who writes a very interesting blog for those interested in marketing and social media, who just so happens to have his comment tool disabled.

Helping to make his case, the comments section adds a lot to Chris’ post, as many people made thought