Just back from NYC after a hectic few days attending the Web 2.0 expo held at the famous Javits center.
A summary of some standout keynote sessions which stood out for me include:
Government Crowdsourcing:
Beth Noveck the United States deputy chief technology officer for open government who leads President Obama’s Open Government Initiative on the concept of open.gov was interviewed in a session with Tim O’Reilly.
Government Crowdsourcing is a method whereby politicians, parties and government bodies source change, ideas and methods of improvement via the Internet. I believe this is a great way for government to listen to the people whilst also giving the greater public a view on other peoples thoughts & opinions. What I’d really like to see is a site dedicated to sourcing these ideas on a .gov site and including a ranking mechanism, the ability to post new ideas on spending, bringing to light the biggest issues facing the public to debate in Parliament sessions such as health care, education , taxes, defense. Not a bad project for someone who capable and inclined.
Tummling:
“Stop focusing on the broadcast, start focusing on the conversation circle”
Basically sums up this keynote by Heather gold who hosts the Heather Gold Show featuring bold conversations about politics, relationships and big life questions mingling web innovators with the avant-garde. Tummling is a Yiddish word and Heather described it the process for involving various points into a conversation for the benefit of all.
If you want to known more check out the YouTube Video – How to be a Tummler which was recorded during a previous Google Tech Talk….funnily enough exactly 1 year ago since her session at W2E NYC.
IBM on “Whats a Friend Worth?”:
Nine hundred and forty-eight dollars.
That’s the annual dollar value of each person in your email address book at work, according to a novel IBM study published in the Winter Information Systems Conference in February 2009. This session was presented by Ching-Yung Lin from IBM Research.
IBM researchers in the SmallBlue project, together with researchers in MIT, were looking to scientifically determine how valuable electronic social networks are, such as those in a group that primarily communicates electronically. Using mathematical formulas, honed by observing the email traffic and financial success of 2,600 anonymized far flung IBM consultants collaborating on thousands of projects during one year, researchers found that not all email relationships were equal. I used to work at Big Blue and this concept is not new. The basic idea and rationale is if you have a large organisation such as IBM (400,000 employees across 170 countries) someone will have an answer to your question. If Big Blue is about to do a deal then the deal maker could potentially tap into his companies universe to seek answers.
It kind of reminds me of Aardvark…just at a corporate level.
Indeo On Social Design:
This session was presened by Gentry Underwood from Ideo the guys who design the world first ergonomic mouse and laptop.
He made a rather funny comparison basically stating that the current Facebook.com is the equivalent of Windows 3.1 from the early Nineties. Just as early computer interfaces were complicated and non-intuitive, most Web 2.0 tools today are socially awkward. I get it! The added complexity of designing not only for the human-to-computer interaction but also for human-to-human interaction is a real challenge. Maybe Facebook should run a project to crowdsource their design from their millions of users. Maybe they do it? But it’s not sold hard enough to it’s users.
If you want to know more about Ideo and Gentrey head over to his profile site here.
Tags: Crowdsourcing, enterprise crowdsourcing, heather gold, ibm, ideo, Innovation, open gov, social design, tim o'reilly, tummling, Web 2.0