Last week I gave a keynote at Case Western Reserve University, as part of the President’s Symposium on Collaborative Technology and the Future of Education. I’ve posted my slides on slideshare.com and I’m working with the event organizers to make the video of my talk available here.

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The event was organized by Lev Gonick, Case Western’s CIO and a trailblazer in educational innovation. Check out Lev’s blog for an amazing compendium of breakthrough projects. Among other things, Lev and his team are introducing the use of QR codes across the campus — to the best of my knowledge they are the first North American college or university to do so. According to Lev, “The codes are found everywhere from transit stops, where students can scan them to see when the next bus would arrive, to applications on Facebook and MySpace, to the student newspaper where QVC recently began rolling out its own marketing campaign with Mobile Discovery.”

The symposium featured many other impressive guests and speakers, but I’ll quickly point out two. Casey Green moderated an impressive closing panel and presented what appears to be the most comprehensive database on the use of technology in higher education. The Campus Computing Project has data going back to 1994.

Cory Ondejka, who you will likely recognize as the co-founder of SecondLife, led a few breakout sessions during the symposium. His thoughtful paper on the role of MMOGs as a platform for learning is available here: Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life.

Earlier in the week I posted Chris Rasmussen’s wonderful depiction of the merits of wiki collaboration. I noted then how a participant at a recent talk I gave at Nokia had pointed out that the happy faces on the left of Chris’s diagram probably ought to be frowning. Chris then alerted me to an updated version of the diagram that reflects the personal and organizational pain that email so often inflicts (click on the thumbnail!)

True to form, my cross-post on wikinomics.com generated an interesting debate about whether the emailers on the left side of Chris’s diagram should be frowning, or whether they are, in reality, quite content with the status quo:

Steve Gutenberg says:

“It’s a matter of perspective. We’re the ones that frown at e-mail compared to wikis. The e-mailerers ARE happy to be e-mailing - their reality is completely different than ours.”

Euan Semple replies:

“Really Steve? I hear people moan about e-mail more than any other aspect of corporate life.”

Chris Rasmussen jumps in a little later to say (among other things):

“Email is not bad, it’s simply over-used. It’s a “when you only know how to use a hammer, all problems are nail” type thing.”

Which I thought pretty much nailed it (pardon the pun).

But you be the judge. Are occupational spammers blissfully overflowing your email inbox with overweight word documents and seemingly ignorant of the rising tide of wiki enlightenment that is bestowing happiness on a growing legion of devout followers? Or, are emailers painfully self-aware of the tragic cycle of email misery that obscures their path to wiki salvation?

BTW, if you care to help out our sad, downtrodden brethren on the left, please weigh-in with your tips for entrenching a wiki culture!

Google Earth has become a platform for revealing atrocities in Dafur, tracking the spread of the avian flu, and analyzing the effect of climate change on sea levels, among dozens of other great applications. Recently the State of Alabama’s Homeland Security department opted to use Google Earth as a platform for emergency management.

The site threads together thousands of pieces of information from across the state - including maps, photos, traffic cameras, current weather and other databases. From fire and police departments responding to emergencies to emergency management agencies assessing damage from natural disasters, Virtual Alabama provides city, county and state officials with near instantaneous access to information ranging from building layouts to fire hydrant locations. Here’s how Alabama describes the possible benefits.

Suppose a fire breaks out at an engineering building at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Firefighters can use Virtual Alabama to access floor plans for the building and find out which classrooms are occupied at that hour.

Suppose another tornado were to hit Enterprise. Officials could use Virtual Alabama to access aerial photographs from before and after the tornado to assess the damage, determine the property tax valuation of each damaged structure and quickly put together a disaster assistance request for the federal government.

Like other interactive geospatial mapping efforts, the potential applications are broad and potentially transformative. Alabama is in the process of overlaying tax maps, forestry maps, utility line maps, and other maps with tax records, up-to-the minute weather data, and live cameras on public buildings and highways. We’re documenting similar efforts for our Government 2.0 research — if you have any good examples, please let us know!

Some time ago I was asked by the U.S. General Services Administration to write an article describing how I envision the role of public sector CIOs. The article has now been published (Role of the Public Sector CIO) along side articles by Karen Evans, John Suffolk, Bill Vajda, Teri Takai, P.K. Agarwal, Jerry Mechling, Ken Cochrane and other influential leaders in government. I highlighted four priorities: infusing web 2.0 principles into government service delivery strategies, wikifying the public sector workplace, providing an infrastructure of large-scale digital engagement, and tackling the thorny issues of security and privacy. If you don’t care to read the entire article, I’ve posted the punchline below:

Transforming the structures of government from command-and-control hierarchies to innovative and agile networks of public and private participants is proving to be a major challenge. Deep and resilient legacies combine to frustrate progress. Common obstacles to change include conflicting timeframes and motives, particularly between the public service and politicians; a lack of incentives to innovate; and the absence of urgency in many quarters.

Persuasion has long been one of government’s most crucial powers, and CIOs will be called upon to master the art. Some early challenges will include:

• Persuading agencies to experiment with Web 2.0 technologies and new strategies for delivering services;
• Persuading managers that social networking technologies are not a distraction but an essential tool in today’s workplace;
• Persuading customers that data sharing will result in greater convenience and higher quality services.

It is truly a time when government either plays an active and positive role in its own transformation or change will happen to it. The transformation process is at the same time exhilarating and painful, but the price of inaction is a lost opportunity for government to redefine its role in a new golden age of democracy. Public sector CIOs can and should be leaders in driving this change.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think this one sums up the power of wiki collaboration better than any 1,000 word essay ever could (Click here for a better view). The model is courtesy of Chris Rasmussen at Intellipedia. I presented this slide during a talk I gave at Nokia today and someone pointed out that the happy faces on the left probably ought to be frowning — he had a good point.

Last week I gave a speech to a group of leaders from some of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) including World Vision, Oxfam, CARE, The Nature Conservancy, Red Cross, and others. The group was assembled to assess the possibility of putting together an industry standard for project design, monitoring and evaluation (DM&E) that could increase the transparency and effectiveness of the sector. My role was to provoke debate about what the future of the non-profit sector might look like in five to ten years time given the forces of wikinomics.

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One of the issues we discussed at length is the growing call for NGOs to embrace greater openness and transparency with regard to how they spend donor’s money and how they wield influence in developing countries. Organizations such as Intelligent Giving are giving donors more information, while others like Global Giving and Kiva are giving people the option to bypass established NGOs and provide micro-loans directly to local entrepreneurs and small businesses. The trend toward increasing transparency is putting pressure on NGOs to find new ways to maximize the impact of their efforts to address issues like poverty alleviation and climate change.

Growing transparency, in turn, means NGOs need to work smarter and harness opportunities to collaborate with all of the key stakeholders in the ecosystem, including their donors, their peers in other sectors, and the ultimate recipients of their aid. One can easily envision dozens of opportunities: from InnoCentive-like marketplaces that connect solution seekers with problems solvers (see the UN’s Solution Exchange, for example) to Digg.com-like forums where participants in the development community suggest and rank projects that require funding. Virtual worlds like Second Life could provide donors and recipients with a venue to build virtual mock-up of their projects, while e-Bay-like development auctions could provide governments, communities and individuals in the developing world with the ability to bid on the “development products” of aid agencies and NGOs. All of this NGO 2.0 activity would need to transpire in an environment where organizations worked harder to share knowledge and coordinate their activities through clearinghouses and other mechanisms that my colleague Dan Herman can elucidate.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the sector is accepting the newfound political responsibilities that come with their growing size and influence on the international scene. New geopolitical realties have created an opportunity – and some might say responsibility – for NGOs to play a larger role in governance at local, national and international levels. Decades of participation in local and international development efforts have shown that NGOs can be effective change agents and make important contributions to decision-making with a blend of effective leadership and adequate access to information and resources. Governments have even come to rely on NGOs in many cases to help create and implement policies that better reflect the needs and aspirations of citizens. But, as with governments, NGOs will face significant challenges fulfilling their new roles competently and responsibly.

Got any NGO 2.0 examples? Let me know.

I caught the BBC’s article on email overload this morning. The article points out that two million e-mails are sent every minute in the UK. That is almost three billion each day.

But what is the real cost of this information overload, they ask? Apparently one UK-based firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.

Everyone knows it’s a problem. Everyone hates trying to filter through hundreds of emails a day. So what to do?

Lots of organizations are now considering email-free days, as the article points out. We’ve tried to encourage our clients to adopt social media tools as an alternative to email, but the culture of email is so deeply ingrained that it will take most organizations years to convince their employees to adopt wikis in a bid to thwart occupational spam. So perhaps more draconian measures are warranted.

There was a fairly radical suggestion posed at our Government 2.0 conference in Washington on Wednesday. New Paradigm colleague Nick Bontis suggested a one-cent tax on every email sent. For a variety of reasons, I’m sure its totally unworkable. The financial and political costs of collecting the tax, for example, could very well exceed the revenue it generates. Or would it? The UK government would stand to gain about £3 million in tax revenue every day, which it could redirect to good causes like closing the digital divide and increasing literacy rates.

Anyways, I’d like to hear your proposals for getting out of email jail.

Recent data from the presidential primaries in the US suggests that youth participation has risen sharply. In some states the proportion of young people who turned out to vote has tripled and even quadrupled in comparison the primaries in 2000. All told, more than 3 million youth participated in the Super Tuesday primaries and 61% of young people polled said “they will definitely be voting” in the Presidential elections this year.

The data contradicts the recent claims by some pundits that today’s youth are disaffected and apathetic. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of these claims largely because they are based on the observation that 1) young people don’t subscribe to newspapers and 2) that they don’t vote.

Well, we can quickly dismiss the first one because we all know that young people read their news on the Internet. The second issue is more complicated, but at the root of it is the fact that youth dislike spin and polarized debate. Recent research shows that young people seek authentic opportunities for discussing public issues and while they may be ambivalent about formal politics they are active in their local communities. The broadcast-era model of big money politics fails to engage young people or speak to their issues so it’s not surprising that they have not bothered to vote–at least until now. It’s also the reason why Obama is so popular among youth — he’s promised (perhaps naively) to throw the lobbyists out of Washington and bring integrity back into politics.

The upswing in participation is promising, but is still not as high as it ought to be. However, the dearth of political engagement among today’s youth is a greater indictment is of the political establishment than it is of young people, a) because we have failed to make civic responsibility an important part of our educational systems and b) because political leaders have failed to earn young people’s trust and respect. The net result is that politics can seem irrelevant to many people’s lives.

This is a dangerous state of affairs. Disengagement erodes the government’s legitimacy and authority to govern and it opens the door to corruption and abuse in public office. Declining trust and confidence in government is the last thing we need in an age of global turbulence.

New Paradigm collaborator and avid Intellipedian Chris Rasmussen has a good article in FedTech magazine imploring governments to adopt a 2.0 strategy. It won’t be headline news for advanced users, but Rasmussen lays out a number of pretty simple Wikinomics ground rules for government agencies that are just getting started with web 2.0:

First, you need the “big three”: a wiki, a blog and a social-bookmarking service. You might want to augment these with an instant messaging service and about a gigabyte of free storage space for every user to post content — such as Adobe Portable Document Format files, audio and video — that link to wiki pages and blogs and from socially bookmarked URLs.

Second, you need a plan to start exposing your databases and business functions through Web services to your enterprise — and even the world — to draw upon the widest range of talent possible. Your agency or office can no longer innovate with internal assets alone.

It will help to keep this quote from Henry Ford in the back of your mind while moving forward with all of this: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” Take it to the next level.

Rasmussen raises another good point: government agencies should reinvent their service portals as hubs for user-generated content and citizen engagement. That’s something I have a lot more to say about, but I will save it for some other time when it’s not late on a Friday afternoon.

Incidentally, I also have an article in FedTech on government and the Net Generation. You can read that here.

Wikinomics was published with 11 chapters, but only the first ten chapters had been written. Chapter 11 – the Wikinomics Playbook – was a blank slate with an open invitation for the world to help us write a suiting conclusion on wikinomics.com.

Over the course of 2007 something remarkable happened. A community of readers and experts formed and took on a life of its own. Thanks to a great deal of diligent “wiki gardening,” the community crafted a compelling and insightful guide to embedding wikinomics concepts and principles in 21st century organizations and business enterprises. Personally, I think it’s an amazing accomplishment given that the Playbook covers so many topics ranging from wiki adoption strategies to leadership in a “wiki organization” to mass collaboration in politics.

Hundreds of individuals generously volunteered their valuable time and ideas to the Playbook and we are grateful to everyone who took this journey with us. However, twenty six contributors deserve special mention for the hard work and creativity they put into writing this chapter. They are: Ron Long, Michael Laine, Max Ugaz, Kartik Ariyur, Al Safrata, Franciel Azpurua-Linares, Mark Temple-Raston, Gabriel Draven, Michael Pilling, Bob Iliff, Kartik Ariyur, Kate Raynes-Goldie, Joost Bekel, Jeff DeChambeau, Steven Streight, Alex Todd, Critt Jarvis, Neal Locke, Ryan Riley, Todd Dunn, Martin Cleaver, Bert Murray, Franciel Azpurua-Linares, Brendan Long, and Peter Haine.

So, while you can now download and enjoy version 1.0 of the Wikinomics Playbook, the opportunity to continue the dialogue is by no means over. We’d still like to hear your stories about how Wikinomics is changing your organization or sector. May this be the one of many wiki-books to come!