Patent Office Tapping Online Community Contributions

Monday, March 5. 2007

There's fascinating news in the Washington Post about a new effort by the US Patent and Trademark Office to enlist the public in commenting on pending patent applications.

What's interesting is that this effort springs out of a very pragmatic need for the Patent Office - the need for help with the vast volume of reviews they have to conduct:

Last year, the agency's 4,000 examiners, headquartered in Alexandria, completed a record 332,000 applications. The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics.

For a pilot set of patent applications, the PTO will provide online a new way for people to comment:

Anyone who believes he knows of information relating to these proposed patents will be able to post this online and solicit comments from others. But this will suddenly make available reams of information, which could be from suspect sources, and so the program includes a "reputation system" for ranking the material and evaluating the expertise of those submitting it.

The Patent Office will do several smart things with its online collaboration system:
* transparency: they will provide "extensive details" about commenters, to help users gauge the quality of people's contributions
* voting: the community will be called on to vote for the top 10 items that should be passed on to the Patent examiners.

We see online collaborative projects as offering many organizations tremendous opportunities to get their work done more efficiently, and often more effectively, than just doing it internally. Some examples of online collaboration to create value:

* MediaVolunteer, a collaborative online media contact database for non-profit organizations.
* Iowa Electronic Markets (FYI - Market for "Pres08_WTA
2008 US Presidential Election Winner Takes All Market" shows Dems at about 56% versus Reps 44%. )
* Ashoka's Changemakers.net uses online contests and collaboration/voting to identify and select innovative solutions to key social problems (disclaimer - client of ours.)
* Mars Clickworkers project by NASA enlisted thousands of volunteers to help it by mapping the outlines of Martian craters.

Other examples? Add them to comments below - thanks.

Technorati tags:
Collaboration
US Patent and Trademark Office
USPTO

Posted by Chris Wolz in Collaboration at 06:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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More about the "community patent project" at:

http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/
and
http://cairns.typepad.com/peertopatent/

#1 Chris Wolz (Homepage) on 2007-03-11 11:41 (Reply)

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Influence covers innovations in communication, Internet technology and strategy to generate influence on important public policy issues. Chris Wolz manages this blog with the help of his colleagues at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.