The City of Toronto’s web 2.0 summit is coming to a close this afternoon so I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a few quick observations about what I’ve learned so far. For those who missed it, I’ve also posted my slides from yesterday’s keynote. Unleasing Wikinomics in the City of Toronto View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: government services) 1. Mass collaboration could change virtually every aspect of government: From the way we [...]
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Technologists and science fiction writers have long envisioned a world where a seamless worldwide network of Internet-connected sensors could capture every event, action, and change on earth, giving us unprecedented real-time information about the state of the world. Such remote sensing and surveillance capabilities could easily have Orwellian consequences, but they can also empower citizens in new ways too. Take the Berkeley-based “Common Sense” project, where an innovative group of researchers claims that a few [...]
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The City of Toronto’s web 2.0 summit kicks off tomorrow at City Hall. If you’re in the area, you may want to join other citizens, community leaders, city staffers, and local councilors as we discuss how web 2.0 technologies can help improve municipal services and give citizens a greater voice in local decision-making. For a sneak peek at what a web 2.0 strategy for the City of Toronto could look like check out iLive.at, the [...]
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Last week I spoke to a group of realtors, lawyers and accountants in Kansas City during a seminar organized by CBIZ to assess the economic outlook for 2009. To say that the mood was gloomy would be an understatement. Most of my talk was about the role of mass collaboration could play in driving the success of small and medium size enterprises. While the focus in Washington has been on organizing bailouts for large enterprises [...]
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Good friend Alexandra Samuel has assembled a true smorgasbord of web 2.0 ideas for the Obama presidency. Quite a feat actually (50 ideas in all), but the way this is going the Obama administration will spend more time concocting nifty web 2.0 tools than implementing real policy!
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Just over a year ago I wrote about how advocacy movements are increasingly harnessing the Web to reduce isolation, build far-flung networks, and co-ordinate collective action. Even iron-fisted government control over telecommunications in Burma could not prevent individuals from posting numerous grainy, and sometimes gory, videos on YouTube that exposed rampant human rights abuses throughout the country. Organizations like Peter Gabriel’s Witness traveled deep into the jungles of eastern Burma to document the military’s persistent [...]
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In my last post I started posting my initial thoughts on how Obama can tap into the same grassroots energy and organization that propelled him to the White House to address the major challenges that await his administration. A few readers have posted their thoughts and I’d like to highlight one from Justin Thorp. Well he doesn’t seem to be utilizing any of the web 2.0 tools that he had in the campaign. His Twitter [...]
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Obama’s election win was a real beauty. It was a vindication of the American people (if I may so say), a shot in the arm for democracy, and it probably changed the world for the better over the course of one truly historic day. But as we all know, the tremendous goodwill and hope that Obama has summoned will evaporate if he fails to harness the same grassroots energy and organization that propelled him to [...]
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In their 2007 bestseller Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams taught the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in the new global marketplace. But much has changed in three years, and the principles of wikinomics are now more powerful than ever. In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we [...]
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