Hi everyone!
Just a quick update from Davos. It’s been a great annual meeting so far. More details to come after, but I thought I would share this brief cameo I made on a German news program discussing what the Forum’s Global Partnership to Assist Haiti’s Economic Development, a partnership we’ve launched with the Clinton Foundation and the UN.
One of the defining characteristics of change of the past decade has been without doubt the growing trend towards collaboration. Assumed by many to be driven by technological advances in information and communications technologies (ICT) this trend has reflected itself in many aspects: from an abundance of collaboration tools using voice, video, white-boarding tools, desktop sharing etc. to the more interesting appearance of collaborative production models such as open source software, open source hardware, co-creation, crowd sourcing and the many other names assigned to various aspects of this phenomenon.
Policy – The Grass Roots road
The policy development area has not escaped this trend. We witnessed the proliferation of grass root movements aiming at reclaiming control of at least certain elements of the policy articulation and development processes. This was the decade of Orange Revolutions and of the Obama campaign that redefined citizen engagement in the United States. One example much closer to home of such movements is Change Camp, an “unconference” organized in Toronto (Canada) in 2009 with the stated goal: “Re-imagine Government & Citizenship in the Age of Participation“.
The ideas and methods of Change Camp Toronto quickly spread to other geographies and became a full-fledged movement advocating radical improvement in citizens engagement, change in how policies are developed, and building tools that enable better organization and mobilization of citizens. These grass root movements constitute a new and innovative bottom-up approach to collaboratively articulating needs, developing solutions and defining policies.
Policy – The Hierarchy Road
Meanwhile government institutions at every level continued their traditional century-old top-down planning approach to policies development, and while some efforts were made to increase consultations with constituents (the traditional town-hall meetings or the occasional costly public hearings), it can be argued that no significant systemic improvements in the participatory nature of these processes were achieved.
A Dangerous Gap
There is an inherent problem in that no one has figured out yet how to link the bottom-up approach with the top-down one. These two processes are currently not sufficiently communicating and have definitely no designs for convergence or integration. In his recent Unfinished Business lecture at the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) of the Ontario College for Arts and Design (OCAD), David Eaves summed up this problem as “digital citizenry trying to work with analog government“. He warned that this gap is dangerous and cannot continue. The question is whether it will be closed peacefully or violently.
Changing Government from the Inside
Not everything is bleak. In July 2009 the Canadian federal government published a report titled “Canada@150: Towards a New Era of Collaboration & Innovation in Government“. In it are the findings of a year-long internal initiative “to help build cross-cutting, horizontal networks that could unite people, issues, expertise, and departments in new and innovative ways“. While this initiative provides some hope for the evolution of government, it is clearly limited to internal multi-disciplinary government collaboration.
Making Ends Meet
Still, Eaves gap analysis resonated well with me. In the context of developing a syllabus for a graduate course on Business Model & Policy Innovation, I have been discussing with Mark Kuznicki (one of the founders of Change Camp) and others how to connect these two fundamental approaches to policy development and innovation. We will have an excellent opportunity to advance our thinking on this issue in the upcoming Change Camp 2010 which is being designed in the context of the Ontario municipal elections scheduled for late October of this year.
I am looking forward to Change Camp 2010 and to participating in finding solutions and designing processes to close this gap, at least in the City of Toronto.
Last week, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti ravaging the country’s capital Port-au-Prince. The International Red Cross is estimating that at least three million people were impacted by the quake, with Haitian government officials citing that up to 200,000 people have been killed. Major infrastructure damage was also reported including the destruction of Parliament and the Presidential Palace.
The Internet community quickly rallied around this cause and provided an excellent case study of how social networks and open data can help in crisis response.
TWITTER:
Within hours of the quake, Haiti was a trending word on Twitter and users in Haiti provided live coverage of the earthquake including sending pictures, and information about damaged areas. In addition, some users are using their twitter feed to provide the names and conditions of survivors and coordinating rescue efforts in saving people who were still trapped in the rubble.
Facebook:
On Facebook, over 250,000 people have joined a group called Earthquake Haiti. Members are using the social network to post pictures of missing family members, as well as exchanging information on how to locate survivors, donate money and offer words of comfort and support.
Wikipedia:
The Haiti 2010 Wikipedia Page was created within seconds after the quake and according the HuffPost, the page has received over 168,000 pages views and lists over 106 article sources. Smart Phones have also allowed Haitians to upload footage of the wreckage to sites such as Youtube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites. The day after the earthquake, over 4,000 Haiti related videos were uploaded to Youtube.
In addition to quickly disseminating information about the unfolding crisis, social media also provided a powerful platform to let people know how they could help. Users quickly shared information about fundraising campaigns and directed people to links where they could easily donate funds.
The American Red Cross launched an SMS campaign enabling people to donate $10 right from their cell phones. The campaign proved immensely successful and raised a record $7 million within the first 24 hours. In Canada, the Canadian Red Cross reported over $15.4 million in donations, with 85% of donations coming in online.
I don’t think it was just the increase of information available, but the fact that we were witnessing this disaster unfold through the eyes of those living it that made such an impact. The human element combined with an easy to do call to action made it simple and intuitive for those who wanted to help.
Both Google and Facebook launched in Disaster Relief pages.
Facebook:
Facebook recently launched their Disaster Relief Page. According to the official Facebook blog this page is for:
“…the more than 350 million people on Facebook can educate themselves and find out how to help not only in Haiti but wherever disaster and misfortune may strike.
Every minute, people have been posting more than 1,500 status updates on Facebook that contained the word “Haiti.” People have contributed thousands of dollars through the Causes application on Facebook, and groups including the American Red Cross, Oxfam America and Partners in Health have mobilized supporters through their Facebook Pages and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last 24 hours alone.”
Currently, the group has over 100,000 members and the Causes features has raised over $95,000 to date.
Google:
The search engine giant has also created a Disaster Relief page that allows people to easily donate and stay up to speed on breaking events as they unfold. In addition to donating one million dollars to the cause they are also offering free phone calls to Haiti via Google Voice.
Most interestingly, they have released a new data layer for Google Earth that allows users to see satellite images of Haiti post-quake. They have made this feature available via plugin, which you can get here. Users are encouraged to upload any information, pictures or footage and tag it through their Google Map Maker feature.
Many news organizations have created “Peoplefinder” sites, a way to enable people to find information about missing family members. Boingboing published an open letter from Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, on how to make these initiatives more effective by opening their data:
“In the response to the earthquake in Haiti, many organizations worked to create sites where people could find one another, or least information about their loved ones. This excellent idea has been undermined by its success: within 24 hours it became clear that there were too many places where people were putting information, and each site is a silo.
We recognize that many newspapers have put precious resources into developing a people-finder system. We nonetheless urge them to make their data available to the Google project, and standardize on the Google widget. Doing so will greatly increase the number of successful reunions. Data from the google site is currently available as “dumps” in the standard PFIF format (on this page), and an API is being developed, and licensed through Creative Commons. I am not affiliated with Google — indeed, this is a volunteer initiative by some of their engineers — but this is one case where their reach and capacity can help the most people.”
Ultimately, creating data silos will not do anyone any good. We need to have open and transparent data that can be easily accessed and shared by various NGOs, governments and other interested parties who (like Google) can use it to create applications that can help and add value in a time of crisis. The New York Times has already indicated it would make it’s data available to Google and I hope more news organizations will follow suit.
While still in its infancy, I am happy to see that social media is creating opportunities for large groups of people to quickly share information and mobilize in support of those who are in need.
In response to changing priorities in the world economy the 40th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) traditionally held in Davos (Switzerland) is being held under the motto “Improve the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild”.
The premise of Davos is that changing the world requires global cooperation, which in turn needs engaging stakeholders from business, government, the media, science, religion, the arts and civil society.
The rethink component is driven by the work of over 70 Global Agenda Councils involving over 1000 experts that meet on a regional or sectoral basis to advance ideas and solutions to the most critical challenges facing the world.
The redesign components builds upon the ongoing work of the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative (GRI), an unprecedented multi-stakeholder dialogue with the ambitious goal of adapting structures and systems of international cooperation to meet present and future challenges challenges that the world is facing.
In order to support a continuing dialogue before and after Davos, WEF has been building a Web 2.0 collaboration platform called WELCOME. Our own Rahaf Harfoush is a key member of that initiative. You can follow the Davos events and discussions on WEF’s web site, or on aggregator sites such as the Eqentia WEF portal. You can also follow them on Twitter (@davos or the tag #WEF). You can also watch on YouTube Lee Howell, Managing Director, Head of Programming & Global Agenda Councils discuss the themes of Davos 2010 here.