Pew Trusts has two new job openings for the web communications team at the Pew Environment Group.

"PEG" is ramping up its organization and its efforts - and so this should be an exciting time to work there! PEG focuses on addressing three major environmental problems- climate change, wilderness and biodiversity loss, and degradation of ocean environments and marine fisheries.

The positions are "Senior Web Associate" for online advocacy, and for communications:

http://jobs-pct.icims.com/jobs/1830/job
http://jobs-pct.icims.com/jobs/1833/job

Clive Thompson's article in the latest Wired on "The Future of Reading" is a compelling read. And I found especially interesting his mentioning of "what bibliophiles call book discovery."

He talks about the benefits of both putting book content online *and* also allowing people to engage/comment/mashup the text.

This would massively improve what bibliophiles call book discovery. You're far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you're far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.

This also applies well to what a lot of our clients who are focused on accomplishing - trying to have their policy analysis content reach the widest possible audiences and have the largest possible impact. In this context I'd say "idea discovery", or "policy discovery" is enhanced by having that content get picked up and commented on, cut-n-pasted into blog posts, snippets linked to from course curricula, woven into other people's work, etc.

How to do well with "ideas discovery"? I'd say the use of XML to make content as linkable and mashable as possible is great - but may be a bit out of reach just now.

So in the short run, I'd say put policy analysis and policy content...
-into web pages as in-line text (searchable and cut-n-paste-able)
-in logical sections/pieces so discrete (groups of) ideas can be linked to
-with feature for people to comment on the text
-with those sorta annoying little icons for "sharing" with Digg, StubbledUpon, etc.
-with social media tie-ins woven in, such as for FaceBook (looking for ideas on how best to do thi?)
-with author comments/answers about the analysis on a blog, with commenting enabled
-onto content sharing sites like Scribd , Slideshare, YouTube, Flickr
-with content in editable format (ie a wiki) to allow real user engagement...

Other ideas for enhancing idea discoverability?

I saw that our friends at the Pew Research Center are looking for a "Senior Web Associate."

I think this will be a *great* job because the PRC does fascinating research, and some of the PRC programs are already doing cool work online ( see Pew Forum Maps, or research on where people are getting swine flu information). PRC is looking to ramp up its online efforts - so this should be an interesting time to be there.

The World Bank and the BBC are running a live debate online and offline tomorrow, April 23 on the global economic recession.

(FYI - The online component of the debate is using Forum One's very cool Live Interviews Online service.)

I like how the Bank is combining the Live Interviews Online with the face-to-face event and also YouTube video questions. It will be valuable if they also capture the debate content and play it back out via Live Interviews Online text and YouTube - giving the debate a long life online.

A BBC World Debate titled "Global Recession: A Developing World Emergency" will be held on April 23rd at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The debate centers on how developing countries are being affected and what steps should be taken to reduce the impact of the global economic downturn on the world's poorest people. The five panelists will include Robert Zoellick, President of The World Bank Group, Luísa Dias Diogo, Prime Minister of Mozambique, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of India, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, and activist Bob Geldof.

The debate will examine the impact of the crisis on the developing world, and what the recent G20 Summit means for developing countries and the needs of the poor. The debate aims to focus on cooperative solutions while avoiding the "blame-game" of what led to the crisis.

Ask your questions here. Or post your video or audio questions on our Youtube.

Here's a YouTube video post from the moderator inviting participation.

"(T)o provide a platform for understanding, visualizing and analyzing global energy systems that will help the world accelerate the transition to cheap clean energy for all."

There has been a rising consensus that we need to transform our global energy system to reduce energy usage and to shift to less carbon intensive energy sources. (See Thomas Friedman’s book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" about the climate and geo-political reasons to change our approach to energy.)

As part of Federal stimulus spending, we think the government should expand funding for a very innovative online database project that will help with this transition, a project started at Los Alamos National Laboratory and called the “Global Energy Observatory” or “GEO”.

We think GEO should be funded because: it’s focused on an important problem – how we generate and use energy, it’s very innovative in its open-source and collaborative approach, it’s highly scalable and could be used by many around the globe, and it already has a well developed “alpha” version as a proof of concept. We think it’s an excellent and important “shovel-ready” project which should be more fully funded - to allow it to be completed and scaled-up for wider use more rapidly.

The GEO project is intended to collect and show data and geospatial information (on maps) of energy resources, generation, transmission, usage, and environmental impacts. It is intended to do all of this in an open, collaborative manner which will engage and support the work of numerous researchers, grad students, government policy wonks and others. It’s a very bold effort- and the creators are making great progress.

GEO was conceived and is being built by a team led by Rajan Gupta, a physicist with the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Lab. He has told me that he’s boot-strapping the project with graduate students and resources scrapped together from LANL, in a very entrepreneurial manner.

Rajan’s vision for GEO is “to provide a platform for understanding, visualizing and analyzing global energy systems that will help the world accelerate the transition to cheap clean energy for all.” The project is intended:

* To provide an easy to use and scientifically validated database of information on energy infrastructure -- power plants, fuels and resources and transmission.
* To encourage all interested people to understand and analyze energy systems and their impacts on the environment.
* To accelerate the transition to a world with cheap clean energy for all.

The project includes an editable database of information on power plants, fuel sources and CO2 footprints – and will be expanded to include energy transmission infrastructure.

I first spoke with Rajan about GEO about year ago, and, honestly, wondered how he would pull off his big vision for a wikipedia-like mass editable online database of energy sources and energy flows. But - he and his team are doing it - they are building a pretty convincing alpha model, have numerous students working away to populate the database, and are proceeding in completing the core database.


GEO will eventually include data, and data on Google maps, for:
1. Power Plants (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar PV, solar thermal, geothermal, waste and diesel/oil)
2. Energy Resources (coal and uranium mines, oil and gas fields, oil refineries, wind power density, solar insulation)
3. Energy Transmission (pipelines, ports and terminals, electric power grid, railway lines, shipping)
4. Distributed power generation installations (solar, geothermal, wind)
5. End-use of fuels and electric power (commercial and domestic)

Completing this project quickly, testing it and upgrading the infrastructure, and expanding outreach to get graduate students around the world using and feeding the database - will help the US and other countries understand their energy systems and transition them to less carbon-centric fuel sources.

And, we're guessing, all this, and more, could be accomplished for less than the cost of a mile of urban highway (about $38 million).

Again - the GEO site is here:
http://openmodel.newmexicoconsortium.org/

See our ideas for other "Shovel-Ready Online Civic Projects".

(Rajan got in touch with us at Forum One in 2008 because of our prior online data/map/API work for "Carbon Monitoring for Action" - and we've discussed his project several times, but not worked for him.)

This is the first of a series of blog posts we’re doing to identify “shovel-ready” web projects we think the federal government should fund. These are internet-related projects which we think are worthy of funding because they address important civic problems, they will catalyze important work by others, they are imminently scalable, and they are projects which the private sector lacks sufficient incentives to undertake.

[ Have suggestions for other Shovel-ready online civic infrastructure projects? Let me know - shovelready@forumone.com ]

Below I outline Project #1 - the "Global Development Commons".

We think there is a whole class of such online projects which can provide a new generation of “civic infrastructure”. By civic infrastructure we mean online services which:
-help people and government understand and address important social problems;
-will be a platform to support or catalyze the innovative work of others to address these problems;
-will provide benefits very broadly – and which benefits cannot be excluded from anyone;
-will be open and available for others to extend, build upon, and to use for new innovations;
-are projects which a private party cannot control sufficiently to capture the full value or revenue stream.

In the past, civic infrastructure included town halls, the highway system, and government R&D labs. Today, we’re in the information age and the rapid and flexible flow of information is critical to the business of government, to commerce, to education, and to individual development. We think civic infrastructure for this online age needs to include open-source standards and software which provide a platform or framework for many to use, and which are licensed to allow others to extend and enhance the services.

In our view these “online civic infrastructure” projects bear many of the attributes of what economists call “public goods”, and which government, and not the private sector, needs to be depended upon to provide for the population.

Project #1 Global Development Commons

About 1.4 billion people, 1 in 4 in the developing world, live on less than $1.25 a day (2005 World Bank data). While there is progress on this compared to previous decades, the numbers are still vast, and the current economic crisis will exacerbate this poverty.

There are multiple players working to address poverty and international development - UNICEF, CARE, Oxfam, DfID, USAID, Red Cross, World Vision, GTZ, and many many others. These groups do share and coordinate their efforts in various ways, but it is still difficult to get accurate and timely information online about who is doing what work, where, and what work is successful – and not. These development organizations each publish information, assessments and data on their own web sites - meaning that the information is in scattered locations. For example, if you want to find the most relevant information on successful “girls’ education in Africa” , or “irrigation management in South Asia”, you either need to know which group has the best information, or try you luck with Google.

One approach to aggregate this information is to do it by brute force, to manually collect and post this info on a web site property – such as is done by the UN's ReliefWeb and others. This is labor intensive, difficult to sustain in a timely manner, and also subject to the risk of excluding organizations that are “out of the loop”.

A much more robust strategy is to let all the players do their own publishing of information to their own web properties, but publish using content standards and services which will enable other parties to aggregate the information. If all the key development players published their data, assessments, and project data to the web using common standards, innovative individuals could decide how to mix and match the information to serve their needs - such as putting poverty data from various groups on a map, or building a calendar of key upcoming events across organizations in one part of the world, etc.

What’s needed? We outlined an approach on the wiki “Jump Starting the Global Development Commons - Content Ecosystem”, and it boils down to:
-define/settle on standards for a few core pieces of content
-build tools to enable distributed publishing of content with those standards
-execute a pilot project or two to show how the content can be aggregated and filtered (for example, a search engine of poverty-related projects in Asia, or an aggregated calendar of development-related events/activities by city.)
-evangelize
-repeat.

Benefits?
-quicker progress and innovation on development challenges – eg how best to manage irrigation systems to be sustainable? How best to run HIV/AIDS prevention education for at-risk populations in Africa? What’s working with community forestry?

Note: USAID has played a key role in launching the "Global Development Commons" concept. We applaud their role in this. But what USAID is focused on is building a destination web site, a clearinghouse of information about development and IT innovations. This is good and valuable, but it is a traditional "host organization builds and runs the portal" approach. It is not a platform which others can add to, use in new ways, and extend. We do not think it will lead to a sustainable standards-based ecosystem of web services.

Technorati Tags: Global Development Commons


Picture Credit
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobikefed/

The Obama Administration announced yesterday what had been widely expected, that Vivek Kundra, former Chief Technology Officer of the Washington DC government, would be taking on the role of Federal Chief Information Officer.

It's a pretty exciting development! It feels like a perfect storm in DC these days for innovation in how government uses information technology - with Kundra's appointment, the Administration's leadership in transparency and participation online through the campaign and in its first weeks on the job, the growth of the "transparency sector" (see Sunlight Foundation and read Jon Udell on the recent Transparency Camp '09), the maturation of the web as a platform for standards-based sharing of information, and the ongoing social adoption and acceptance of online tools for connecting and sharing and learning.

It's been mentioned that one initiative of Kundra will be to make accessible government data - using a site Data.gov, which is not yet online. This could be very cool - a much larger and consequential version of the online data catalog of the DC government when Kundra was CTO. (Kundra spoke about the online data catalog at one of Forum One's Web Executive Seminars.)

Some related posts about last weekend's Transparency Camp here by Joe Pringle, Michaela Hackner, and me.

Read more about the appointment - Computer Weekly Blog reactions, ZDNet blog, and NYTimes blog.

I had a great time yesterday at Transparency Camp '09 in DC - kudos to Peter Corbett, and Gabriela Schneider and Clay Johnson and others at Sunlight Foundation, as well as others for catalyzing it. There were folks there from NYC, west coast, and elsewhere, but about 2/3 were locals from DC. There really are a lot of amazing people working on web technology, strategy and policy in the DC area.

It's ongoing today - Sunday - and you can follow it by viewing the (high volume!) Twitter feed and Flickr pictures.

It's a great gathering of policy wonks, transparency advocates, IT geeks in from in and out of government - all excited and busy with shaping a whole new day in how government information will be made more accessible, valuable and transparent. And the "bar camp" format, or unconference or "open space" approach, really leads to meaningful topics and peer to peer discussions. See the chart of sessions.

Some highlights for me from yesterday:
* Fascinating side discussions with people from Sunlight, EPA, The Institute on Money in State Politics, The Center for American Progress, (the recent) Obama campaign, GSA and OMB...
* Craig Newmark, "a customer service representative" and supporter of Sunlight, speaking at the outset.
* Chatting with web strategy blogger Jon Udell about the challenges in his work to promote adoption by content producers and aggregators of the very valuable local community calendars.
* Tim O'Reilly very cordially introducing himself to me (I think he really wanted to get in to talk with Jon Udell with whom I was speaking!)
* Chatting with Andrew Rasiej about the very interesting Personal Democracy Forum coming up in June.
* George Thomas, of GSA and now OMB, about the technical architecture they are designing for tracking/reporting on the disbursement of the stimulus monies (picture). I did not understand a lot of the technical details, but it was clear that they are working very hard and fast doing some innovative work to aggregate information from a wide variety of sources into a "linked data" framework; the harder core IT geeks in the crowd applauded!
* A session I proposed and helped lead on "Drinking from the Fire Hose: How can a government manager handle citizen participation in the web 2.0 age?" We had about 28 people from a range of organizations - really good discussion (see notes).

More followup thoughts later...

Picture courtesy of stereogab

Technorati Tag: TCamp09

We're doing some interesting work this week bringing the online dimension to a face-to-face event. I'm in Kuwait for the 10th Annual Conference of the "Global Development Network", a "global network of research and policy institutes that work on facilitating and applying research to policy development and practice." It's a three-day gathering of economists and development policy experts from almost every continent.

Forum One is working for GDN to help extend the impact of the annual face-to-face event by better connecting the 300+ attendees, and by opening up the event discussions to non-attendees around the world. We're doing this by setting up a social network for attendees, by blogging and twittering about the event, and by aggregating news and video and photo feeds from the event.

See how it is unfolding here in Kuwait:

GDN 2009 Conference social network

Blog posts about session discussions and video interviews with participants:

Conference content aggregated in one place - comments on sessions, news feeds, photos, videos, etc.

More video clips on Blip TV.

Video of actual conference sessions

A participants map of the world

Google news feed about the event

(Suzanne Rainey wrote a related blog post about this, Getting More Out of Online & Offline Events )

Technorati Tag: GDNET09

Beth Kanter outlines on her blog a great framework for mapping out a social media strategy - summarized here:

1. Identify Objectives (what you want to accomplish - stated as SMART objectives)
2. Identify the Audience (who must you reach, what do they care about?)
3. Integrate (how to connect your various online efforts, and online+offline activities?)
4. Culture Change (how to get your organization to loosen up and adopt a social media strategy, and the very different way of interacting with people online that it entails?)
5. Capacity (who, what, where, how...)
6. Tactics and Tools (what are the best tools to use to reach your target audiences?)
7. Measurement (how will you gauge success? what information will you collect and how will you use it to learn and improve?)
8. Experiment (how can you get started, get your feet wet with this new stuff a little bit at a time?)

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has launched a new initiative called the Innovation Exchange, to build and strengthen a network of innovators who will develop and adopt environment-friendly business initiatives.

EDF has for some years done important work with individual firms to find creative solutions to reducing environmental impact - such as with MacDonalds, FedEx, Starbucks and others. The challenge for any group like EDF is to leverage these results from individual cases for wider adoption, to get 2nd and 3rd order "network" effects to expand the impact.

The new Innovation Exchange will address this, seeking to use the internet to expand networking, sharing, and learning, all to accelerate innovation and adoption.

Also exciting is that Dave Witzel will be leading the effort. Dave was one of the co-founders of our firm, Forum One, in 1996, and until 2008 was one of our expert consultants on the creative use of online tools (e.g. see his continuing news feed on "Policy Commons" ideas.) Dave is now focused on improving social outcomes by accelerating innovation - "using the web to build the human network". We'll miss working with Dave, but are looking forward to watching his work with the Innovation Network.

As Obama raised his hand and took the oath of office around noon yesterday the new administration launched its new version of the WhiteHouse.gov web site. It includes a new "White House Blog", and the first posting shows some smart thinking about how a government entity can use a blog. We think there is going to be an increase in interest in effective use of blogs for the government sector, so here are a few quick impressions of what is effective in this first blog post:

* Personal: “I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.” This is great - a real person with a name. Ideally, Macon will blog displaying with his own perspective and voice, which is a lot better than an unnamed bureaucrat writing in generic spokesperson-speak.

* Direct: It's direct - getting quickly to the key point "...Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities..."

* Scannable: The formatting it uses is important in making it easy to skim and see what are the key issues. The formatting reinforces that there are three key priorities, using three paragraphs led by the key subject words Communication, Transparency, and Participation.

* Hyperlinked: The post has about five links to other web pages to expand on or provide examples of what the posting covers. It's valuable for the readers of a post to be interconnected with related materials, providing context and the opportunity to explore further; such linking it is also valuable for search engine optimization.

* Placement: the blog's latest posting are listed front left on the home page.

In total, these attributes add up to what we call "Writing for the Web" and for blogs. Well done!

The blog does not (yet?) have open public comments. While public commenting is not essential for a blog to be valuable, we'd like to see more of it! It is challenging for a government agency to determine how to allow public commenting on blog posts; on the plus side, it allows for public engagement. On the downside, while private bloggers can shrug off negative or vituperative comments, that is harder for a government agency. That said - the ability to comment *on a blog post* (versus off in the "leave us your thoughts" corner) is valuable.

FYI - see blog comments about the new blog and web site: Technorati

And see a listing of current US government blogs, quite a large number, at USA.gov

US Agency for International Development has run an interesting contest to identify innovative ideas in mobile computing for international development. They got some interesting nominations and have identified the top three winners:

* Child Malnutrition Surveillance and Famine Response
* ClickDiagnostics: A Micro-Entrepreneurship Based Model to Transform Healthcare Delivery through Mobile Telemedicine
* Ushahidi v2 - Mobile.Crisis.Reporting

And will recognize the winners at a ceremony Thursday January 8th, 3-5 PM in DC. The focus of the contest, as stated by USAID, was:

Mobile technology, including everything from inventive applications for smart phones to simple text messaging, is increasingly ubiquitous in the developing world. USAID challenges you to explore its potential through an innovation for maximum development impact in areas such as health, banking, education, agricultural trade, or other pressing development issues.

Also related to international development, check out our "Development Commons dot org" wiki site devoted to how open-source and open-content strategies can help advance progress on development issues.

The incoming Obama administration is pledging to use some innovative internet strategies to expand citizen access to government information and processes. (This gets us at Forum One pretty jazzed - we've been evangelizing a long while about using online services to expand public access to information, enable new forms of collaboration, and build online communities.)

The transition team says the new administration will seek to expand the transparency of how the government works and give Americans new ways to participate in deliberations and decision-making. A tall order. A few of the things the Obama technology plan calls for (see the whole plan), and some of the related examples and opportunities we see, are:

Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities.

• The President-elect's transition web site itself is allowing people to participate, with the "Your Seat at the Table" feature with which people can track transition meetings with interest groups and leave comments for the transition team.



• At Forum One's September "Web Executive Seminar", "Web Sites Without Walls", we had speakers from nonprofits and government showing innovative ways they are now syndicating and sharing web content and data. For example, Vivek Kundra, the Washington, D.C. government CTO, spoke about how DC has created more than 200 data feeds on D.C. city issues and indicators.

Bringing democracy and policy deliberations directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to have periodic national online town hall meetings to answer questions and discuss issues before their agencies.

• The incoming administration provides a very cool "Open for Questions" feature which allows people to submit and vote for questions that are then answered by the transition team. They reported getting "600,000 votes from more than 10,000 people on more than 7,300 questions" on December 10-11. That's pretty wide participation. Related - TechPresident's Micah Sifry reflects on Obama campaign lessons and asks whether we have adequate tools for mass collaboration; these transition experiments may be showing how to scale up such collaboration.

• Also related to expanding civic participation, we recently worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to launch its "Next America" project web site. The project uses online debates, blogs and social media to engage future leaders interested in substantive foreign policy issues.

Employing technologies, including blogs, wikis and social networking tools, to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision-making.

• Quick scan - look who's already using Twitter:
  US "AIDSGov" Service http://twitter.com/AIDSgov
  UK Prime Minister's Office http://twitter.com/DowningStreet
  Red Cross http://twitter.com/redcross
  US State Department http://twitter.com/dipnote
  and us too (!) http://twitter.com/forumone

• An example of using a wiki to try to expand collaboration is the "Global Development Commons" wiki we at Forum One launched to explore opening up sharing/access in international development information. (add your own ideas!).

• Craig Newmark of Craigslist recently blogged about how the incoming administration could create "A Craigslist for Service" to facilitate volunteer opportunities for those motivated by the call to serve.

There will be a lot of interesting discussions and developments in the coming months. We'll be keeping an eye on some smart people on these issues - including:

Everyone on the Sunlight Foundation Blog
Steven Clift
Personal Democracy Forum
And, Allison Fine

Eager to hear other comments, examples, questions - please add below.

The “Green Enterprise Unconference” we’re hosting on December 3rd is looking extremely timely and interesting.

It’s timely because integrating environmental factors into decision-making is likely to become a key issue in 2009 for businesses and governments. Timely – according to The Wall Street Journal’s “CEO Council”, recommending today that the new Administration pursue a variety of alterative energy technologies, and “mandate” improvements in energy efficiency – strong calls by corporate CEOs.

Timely also, in the words of Thomas Friedman. "We have exactly enough time -- starting now…", he writes, to make dramatic changes to avoid the projected doubling of CO2 levels by mid-century. I heard Friedman speak last week at the Atlantic Magazine’s “Green Intelligence Forum” about his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. He makes pointedly clear that we must dramatically transform global energy technology, and that there is a need for the US to lead this (who else will?), and in turn restore its economy and standing in the world. (Agenda and speaker bios are available in PDF format. )

The folks attending the Green Enterprise Unconference are going to be a fascinating group – top executives and environmental/sustainability managers and consultants from a range of organizations:
Google
CarbonFlow
Cisco
Sun
Yahoo!
Random House,
GreenIT
Accolo
Resources for Environmental Protection
Positive Impact Partner, Inc
Sustainable Silicon Valley
Goodwill Industries
Acterra
Clean Tech Group, and many more.

See a fuller listing of attendee titles and organizations.

I’m also really looking forward to it because the "Unconference", an event format in which we the attendees shape the agenda – no death by PowerPoint, will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, (just named as one of Fast Companies most influential women in web 2.0).

Hope you can join us: The “Green Enterprise Unconference”