Here are some examples of participatory regulation where workers, employers, NGOs, and citizens collaborate to help monitor and enforce workplace health and safety rules. The initiatives I’ve documented below focus on worker’s rights in the furthest reaches of corporate supply chains for consumer items ranging from chocolate and confectionery to running shoes and other apparel. Worker’s Rights Consortium – an independent labor rights monitoring organization, conducting investigations of working conditions in factories around the globe. Its purpose [...]

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Recent events have got me thinking about regulation and just how strained and ineffectual our current systems have become. It’s not just the global financial crisis, although this alone illustrates what can happen when both markets and regulators fail. Issues as diverse as climate change, emerging technologies, international trade, food safety, infectious disease, and human rights demand novel approaches and I think wikinomics could be part of the solution. Some of the issues that challenge [...]

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Following a theme here, I also like the distinction made between crowdsourcing and citizen science by Yale-based astrophysicist and Galaxy Zoo founder Kevin Schawinski: “We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because it’s a better description of what you’re doing; you’re a regular citizen but you’re doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, well, you’re just a member of the crowd and you’re not; you’re our collaborator. You’re pro-actively involved in the [...]

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Frankly, I’m not 100% sure what to make of this yet, but the founder brought this new virtual financial market to my attention and I found it intriguing enough to share it with our readers. According to the founder, amuktrade.com’s principal goal is to facilitate quick speculative asset pricing based on user estimates and equally novel quick cashless trading through exchanging of shares of large, illiquid assets like real estate. So assets that are currently [...]

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The Power of Information Taskforce, which was established to advise the UK government on how to take advantage of new developments in digital media, released it’s report to the Cabinet Office earlier this week in beta. There are 25 recommendations in all. Many themes in the report resonate strongly with the issues I have been discussing here and on wikinomics.com. I’ve paraphrased what I think are some of the more important recommendations and added my [...]

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I had an interesting chat this morning with a colleague who is trying to get wikinomics infused into the culture and operations of the United Nations and finding it tough going so far.  Like many observers of the international scene, I find it frustrating to watch international organizations like the United Nations fail to shake-off the sclerosis and bureaucratic inertia that have marred attempts to get anywhere near meeting the millennium development goals by 2015. [...]

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As a complement to my previous post, those of you interested in exploring the curring edge of public sector innovation will want to make your way to DC at the end of March for the inaugural Government 2.0 Camp. I would be there myself if I wasn’t already scheduled to be in Europe. Here’s a clip from their site: Government 2.0 Camp is the unconference about using social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to [...]

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Following other similar contests in DC and the UK, Sunlight Labs (an open source development team providing tools to make governments more transparent) has launched an “Apps for America” contest. If you have been following this blog then you already know what this is about. For those who haven’t, the idea is to crowdsource the creation of new applications that leverage public data sets (and in this case, the APIs that Sunlight Labs have made [...]

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