We've posted a proposed pilot project approach to "Jump-Start the Global Development Commons Content Ecosystem" to our global development Commons wiki.
Our pilot project proposal describes how to get a model of the GDC up and running by selecting an interesting an valuable content/data type(s), developing a data standard for it, working to get a number of groups to begin publishing using the standard, and then providing an aggregation service to show how the feed can be collected and used by others.
Very important - we intend the pilot to provide an initial demonstration of these Global Development Commons principles: (See www.developmentcommons.org)
An ecosystem to enable the sharing of information and ideas on the internet among international development stakeholders.
Is enabled by the contributions of various sources and contributing partners, each of which own and control their contributions.
Any individual or organization can contribute, and any individual or organization can make use of the information that composes the GDC.
The GDC uses open- and nonproprietary standards for information and technology to encourage inter-operability, cost-effectiveness, and wide adoption.
It is supported by a robust network of online services to track and organize information, services which are provided by multiple players in collaboration.
It can be composed of information at various levels - data, information, opinions, discussions, tools, and more.
We've blogged previously about what the Global Development Commons concept is and could become.
Our friends at the Institute of Medicine have a great job opening. IOM is looking to do some new and interesting things with its web site so this position will have some opportunities!
The Web Content Assistant will be responsible for updating and maintaining web content, including drafting, reviewing and editing copy and managing web features. He or she will generate ideas and write columns and articles for online media, both internal and external. This is a marketing and communications position. A successful candidate will be one with a minimum of two years of experience, who understands the web as a communications and marketing tool and is interested in tackling both challenges head on.
Yesterday, my colleague Chris von Spiegelfeld shared some impressions of our recent event Web Sites Without Walls. I just encountered another interesting posting on PBS' MediaShift Labs from Amanda Hickman of Gotham Gazette Commenting on a presentation by DC Chief Technical Officer Vivek Kundra, Hickman writes that Washington DC is giving New York City a run for the money:
While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live data feeds and maps, and has mandated that no city agency may acquire software that cannot publish to the data warehouse.
Post-event feedback shows that Vivek Kundra's presentation was extremely popular. We'll be sharing his presentation within the next week or two.
The model for disseminating web content is evolving. Traditional barriers between consumers and real-time information are falling.
People curious to learn more about these trends packed a room at the National Press Club in Washington on September 16 to discuss the challenges and successes of content syndication.
Our latest Web Executive Seminar, “Web Sites without Walls,” featured four speakers who are helping change the landscape for content sharing. Speakers came from Stephenson Strategies, DC government, NPR, and the Sunlight Foundation.
The speakers wasted no time discussing the values and benefits when opening up the flow of information. Some presenters jumped at the chance to defend Jeffersonian principles through the timely release and transparency of public information. Others went on to crown the achievements from the participatory public sphere that have arisen as a result of increased access to content. Their messages shared overarching themes, which I have distilled below:
1. Old school vs. New school – David Stephenson kicked off the panel by highlighting the decline of the “managerial” role in control content. For too long, tight controls were placed on information released to the public. Spawned by exaggerated fears, governments and content publishers distrusted their constituents or audiences and would only release information once it had been filtered, cleansed, or massaged. However, these traditional models are breaking apart.
Vivek Kundra, Chief Technical Officer, for the District of Columbia, discussed the District’s radical transformation a model of the to the digital public sphere model. The District, never a beacon for transparent governance, sought to reverse course when he joined the new Adrian Fenty’s administration. The District adopted consumer technologies for use in the public sector to make the District’s public information more accessible. This included putting all videos of procurement bids on to YouTube to releasing real-time data sets in a catalog of 261 data feeds, the DC government has quickly become a leading example of data transparency. Already, the Fenty Administration is seeing dramatic changes in the way government is operating as it works with the same real-time data that is accessible to the public. Citizens are more quickly adept to hold government accountable for its actions.
2. People are coming together to create cool technologies – Syndication and programming tools such as APIs, widgets, and RSS have provided publishers with a bevy of methods to disseminate information. And increased accessibility of this information has people innovating and repackaging content in meaningful ways. The rise of data aggregation and collections has spurred tremendous collaborative interactions among people. Mash-ups, the interrelation of at least two data feeds, are rearranging content in ways that were never imagined by the content owners.
For example, someone could mash-up a feed containing requests made to DC’s Department of Public Works with a map as done by Everyblock.com. The tools are coming together to help people collaborate and receive real-time information such hurricane movements. It also allowed the U.K. government to run a “Show Us a Better Way” contest. The winner is the one who creates the best new model for displaying government content.
Clay Johnson’s presentation of Sunlight’s Capital Words widget, a tool that distills a day’s worth of congressional testimony to the most commonly used word, had the audience awing over the keyword patterns discovered. The crowd was especially amused when Clay drew election year patterns. As it turns out some words have incredible spikes in election years and then rarely get mentioned again. This was the case for the highly politicized word “marriage.”
3. Ready for launch – It is not all smooth sailing. There were challenges along the way for the presenters before the content could be syndicated. For Kundra, old paper records had to be digitized. Clay Johnson taking knocks at Congress, though seeming easy to do, actually had the problem of working with too much information from Congress, most of it unusable. And NPR’s senior management was concerned that the organization’s brand equity might suffer once its content was thrown into the wild. These common issues are what face organizations looking to get into the mix. Below are the three areas where challenges were identified:
Setup – Collecting content for syndication is sometimes a challenge unto itself. Fortunately for DC, an entire team was devoted to the data warehouse and scoured paper files, databases, and people’s brains to set up the catalog. Having people with technical expertise helped get them to the 261 feeds they currently supply.
Shape - Though Thomas Jefferson probably would have wanted his namesake, Thomas.loc.gov, to be the go to place to find legislative discourse, he might have been dismayed to learn the site is a challenge for the public to glean the main topics from testimonies. Sunlight Foundation took the otherwise clunky testimony information and created compelling data feeds with it helping users actually know what Congress is talking about on a given day.
LaunchPermission - Brand defamation? – Not quite. NPR’s real-time content syndication ensures what consumers are using is the same information publishers are distributing. Andy Carvin’s “brand and release” phrase pretty much summed it up. Just brand the content at syndication and release it into the wild. NPR also requires users of its API to use a unique key. This way, if the syndicate violated their terms of use, pulling the cutoff switch is easy.
Check back here soon for narrated "slidecasts" of the speakers' presentations, and let me know in the comments what your experience has been at working with APIs, RSS or getting your boss to buy into the idea.
A lot of the organizations we work with and others we see in the policy-issue, advocacy, "intellectual-commerce" realm, are interested in their work being more influential. (Don't we all !)
Here are some thoughts on how to use the web to go beyond just providing information, to being more influential. These are drawn from some work we did in an evaluation (see the report) of the ReliefWeb web site of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
We've long believed that being able to exert influence comes down to becoming a trusted voice, to building strong relationships, and - having done those - to shaping how people view an issue and the possible solutions.
These are all things that can be done amazingly well online, and at a scale that cannot easily be replicated offline. The challenge is that many organizations hesitate - they are not sure if they want to be "out there" with their own opinionated views of what should be done, or they do not want to go through the leg-work of becoming a trusted source, building relationships, and then being able to shape the issue and the response.
One way to look at the stages of increasing value to web site users is shown in the chart above. The top row shows how a web site can be used to aggregate information - which is a valuable service for users, and which requires the web site host to collect/screen information, a fairly "mechanical" work process.
While aggregated information can help build trusted customers, it does not move the host organization to becoming influential.
To be influential a web site should frame an issue - tell people what is important about it and how they should look at at, and also analyze the issue and the possible responses. These get to the "highlighting" and "analyzing" approaches in the second and third rows of the chart.
We outlined this paradigm of influence in the evaluation of ReliefWeb, because it was grappling with whether and how to take a more direct approach to exerting influence in the humanitarian relief sector. ReliefWeb has been and is still primarily an aggregator of information for the humanitarian relief community - compiling every day 100-200 new pieces of content from many dozens of relief organizations. In our evaluation we concluded that for ReliefWeb to have more of an influence on how the humanitarian relief sector works, e.g. to make the various players more effective in responding to disasters, that ReliefWeb should go beyond just aggregating information. We recommended that ReliefWeb seek to provide greated value to its users online by increasingly framing key issues - providing expert context, and also analysis - commenting and recommending on how organizations should view and address key challenges.
BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) is a very interesting and innovative group focusing on key global health issues, and they have some important job openings.
BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), a non-profit organization, is harnessing the biotechnology skills and resources that have transformed medicine in the industrialized world to create new medicines for infectious diseases of the developing world. We work at the interface of industry, donors, product development partnerships and academia to break down barriers to biotechnology industry initiatives in global health, and catalyze industry investment through new market-based solutions.
Nice to see that we got listed in the Washington Post's "Face Time" event listing today.
What I find exciting about the topic - and the discussion we'll have with representatives from NPR, Washington DC's CTO, and the Sunlight Foundation - is how syndication changes the possibilities for what is an effective web strategy.
It's no longer (just) about building a great web site that provides valuable services and attracting your key audiences to it. It's about getting your content and services distributed widely across the web to wherever your important audiences may be. It's about building tools and services that other web sites can take and use - to their benefit, and yours as well.
NPR even has a blog where their tech team writes about their various open "API" (application programming interface) work and ideas.
More reflections after the event tomorrow - and there is still room if you want to sign up and join us - www.forumone.com/walls
When Hurricane Gustav set its eye on New Orleans last week, internet professionals didn't just idly stare at their computer screens.
Led by NPR's Andy Carvin, internet professionals sprang into action. Over Labor Day weekend, they created a social media effort in support of Gulf Coast residents affected by Gustav.
It began with the creation of a Ning community titled the "Gustav Information Center." This community was renamed the Hurricane Information Center as focus turned toward preparing for Hurricanes Hanna and Ike. The online community is now coordinating the efforts of over 600 volunteers.
Thanks to the volunteers' efforts, the site is now aggregating video, photos, and Twitter updates. The community also created an annotated Google Map of Evacuation Centers and Routes, and an integrated volunteer match service.
A cornerstone of the work has been the creation of the Hurricane Information Center Wiki. Derived from a three-year-old Katrina-focused wiki, the site now offers information related to shelters, aid agencies, health and safety information, and other resources.
This effort shows a couple of things about the current state of online communities and data sharing:
First-responder organizations and agencies cannot afford to continue to ignore the power of online communities and social media approaches.
The technology barriers to creating online communities keep getting lower. Ning and similar services offer tremendous functionality that can be configured and deployed in hours.
Twitter, IRC, Skype, and instant messenger enable real-time collaboration between dozens of people. But there are still logistical issues related to the fact that people are using widely different services and channels.
Asynchronous communications such as emails, blogs and postings remain vital because volunteers work at different times in different time zones.
Services that provide location-specific information are maturing. It's clear that text-based updates (e.g. Twitter) and video-based updates (e.g. Qik) will become vital to helping emergency responders get situational awareness of a quick-moving event such a hurricane, wild fire, or terrorist attack.
Data in common formats (such as RSS) is much more widely available than it was during Katrina. This makes it possible to aggregate and filter large amounts of information quite easily.
As I write this, Hanna is dumping rain on my roof and Ike is drifting toward the Gulf Coast. There's still much work to be done. If you want to help out, join the Hurricane Information Center community.
We have a limited number of scholarships available for next week's seminar, Web Sites Without Walls. It's on Tuesday, Sept. 9 at the National Press Club in Washington.
If you are college student or work at a small nonprofit organization with a limited budget, contact me at acohen@forumone.com for more information.
This a terrific session featuring Andy Carvin of NPR, Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation, District of Columbia CTO Vivek Kundra, and data guru David Stephenson. The session will be moderated by Dave Witzel. The speakers will discuss practical strategies for syndicating content and data from your site all across the internet. It's a burgeoning technique, and they will share their pioneering experiences and practical tips.
Successes and tribulations of the new African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) blog, including new leopard camera photos from South Africa, remind me of our experience planning, installing, and operating the innovative QuetzalCam in the cloud forests of Costa Rica way back in 1999.
That early remote-wildlife-cam project, which Forum One implemented with the World Bank and the Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica in effort to help publicize the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor, yielded wonderful photographs and scientific data that seem to resonate with the AWF experience today:
Technology is not the hard part; politics, permissions, and unpredictable animals are! AWF camera abusers include elephants and rhinos. Our vandals were monkeys and a very mean weasel .
To keep web users engaged, it is important to construct a story-line around the image feeds. AWF does this powerfully with their blog. Back in the pre-blog days, we did something similar by having field researchers post updates and educational information. These were some of the most visited pages on the site, as people would come to look at the most recent photos, then flip into the educational and interpretive information to learn more.
Viewers want to participate in the story, not just see the photos, and are willing to reward their involvement with support. (Thanks to a kindly AWF donor for replacing one camera taken out by an elephant.)
The images are powerful for science and fun. Scientists manage AWF's leopard work, and our Quetzal cameras captured thousands of images used by researchers.
Read the AWF blog to track the daily action in Africa, including trials, tribulations, and images from the wildlife research cameras.
We've posted a proposed pilot project approach to "Jump-Start the Global Development Commons Content Ecosystem" to our global development Commons wiki. 
A lot of the organizations we work with and others we see in the policy-issue, advocacy, "intellectual-commerce" realm, are interested in their work being more influential. (Don't we all !)
BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) is a very interesting and innovative group focusing on key global health issues, and they have some important job openings. 
When Hurricane Gustav set its eye on New Orleans last week, internet professionals didn't just idly stare at their computer screens.
