This is Big Ideas from the ABC.
Let's dive first into crowd sourcing and what it is.
Now I've got to confess, even though this talk's title was crowd sourcing, I hate the term.
So it kind of rose to prominence in 2006.
A guy called Jeff Alrote, article for Wired magazine.
And it's kind of been adopted by everybody.
It's an all-encompassing bucket of ideas and generally it's starting to be felt to be slightly negative
because it feels really transactional.
It feels like you're just taking from people and giving nothing back.
And so to me, and hopefully through the course of this talk, you'll see that actually I think it's just
the first incarnation of something far, far more exciting that's going on.
So if we think about why crowd sourcing to date has the traction it does, it's nothing new.
You know, through human, well, since certainly the Industrial Revolution,
in let's say the 17th century, we've started building really efficient structures.
We're building structures that are all about just command and control.
They're about controlling what you produce.
And by definition, it's expensive to run them.
So it was only a matter of time before people realized that it might make sense to take stuff from outside
that sort of pyramidal hierarchy.
And there's examples of this that range all the way back.
I mean, one that I'm inspired by is the Longitude Prize.
So in 1714, the British government struggling to keep hold of their ships.
They kept running into islands, probably including some close to here.
They thought we need to know better where we are and that was exceptionally valuable to them.
So they ran a crowd sourcing competition.
They ran a competition to award £20,000 at the time, which is huge amounts of money, as you can imagine,
for the person that actually enabled them to pinpoint the longitude of their ship within 20 nautical miles.
And this guy, who commemorated plaque you can see here, John Harrison, he won that prize.
And the thing they did that was smart is they actually incentivized people just to make little baby steps of progress.
So crowd sourcing is not new.
It may suddenly be fashionable. We may all be hearing about it, talking about it, hating it, loving it.
It's not new. It's been around for ages.
And you've got some good examples of it in Australia.
So one I find really inspiring is 99 Designs.
It's an Australian company.
They've moved the head office now, I think, to the West Coast on the States.
But they've completed about 45,000 projects, usually around brand, usually around communication design.
So they're paying, on average, designers over $600,000 a month in prize money.
So it's effective. It has traction.
And I think it will continue to have traction because actually it's obvious the gap it fills.
It enables you to grow your workforce with aligned incentives.
You reward people when it works.
So this stuff is pretty obvious to us.
Like the idea that prizes enable you to gather new intellectual property.
And actually we're starting, you know, if you believe some advocates and proponents of it,
you think that these types of prize-based systems are absolutely the answer.
But simply they work because you get a collection of people.
They contribute ideas.
Someone moderates it in a closed way so the intellectual property stays safe so you can use it.
And then it gets ranked and the prizes are rewarded.
So this is like the most obvious interpretation of crowdsourcing.
And it's been pretty successful.
You know, the closest to the Longitude Prize I think that we've had in recent history is the Netflix Prize.
In 2006, Netflix announced that if they could find people that would improve their algorithm
for actually recommending which video you'd like,
by just 10% they give you a million dollars.
And actually it was won with 20 minutes to spare in 2009.
And it had been won by combining heaps of people's different ideas together.
Even things around your emotion and how your memory works on different days.
So this stuff will continue.
So I could stop this talk here and say great, prizes are the answer.
We can all stop worrying about alternatives.
Let's just run heaps of prizes.
But I think that's kind of the early version.
It's 1.0 of crowdsourcing.
There's much more interesting stuff coming.
So to highlight that point, I'd love to show you a video where it's actually an advert from 1997 for Microsoft Incarta.
So I think you should remember it was certainly for sale as a CD here.
New collages and over 5,000 links embedded to websites. When you're hungry for information, who are you going to call?
Microsoft Incarta 97 Encyclopedia Deluxe.
Hold the fri-
Okay, hold the fries.
So this guy thought he had the solution.
He's looking pretty smug about it.
Microsoft thought they had the solution.
They bought materials, intellectual property from Encyclopedias.
They were convinced they had it sussed.
They were convinced that no one else would offer a better Encyclopedia out there.
But we all know that something different came on the scene.
And actually, something else came on the scene that contributed to them closing Encarter in 2009.
And that was Wikipedia.
So last year, Wikipedia had its 10 billionth edit.
10 billion edits by people that basically were not remunerated in this traditional approach.
There's no prize-based system in Wikipedia.
This is the stuff that gets me really excited.
It's open systems.
It's network collaboration rather than traditional prize-based closed systems.
And they look distinctly different to the prize-based systems.
There's clever design in there.
There's a huge community you can tap into.
People move in and out of the community.
We'll talk about the incentives to participate a little later.
But you can see it's completely different.
The systems basically have to run where ideas run.
They sort of revolve around this system.
They're thrown out by people if they don't like them.
It's a self-moderated system.
It feels and looks completely different to the hierarchy we saw before.
It no longer is that sort of triangle, the pyramidal structure.
It's more like a network.
And networks are interesting.
When you're designing systems,
networks are more interesting than pyramids
because they enable kind of Darwinistic emergent stuff to grow.
They enable nodes to fall away, nodes to regrow.
And that stuff is completely different.
It's a different approach.
Less Newtonian sort of dictatorial efficiency
and more adaptability, emergence, Darwinistic thinking.
So that kind of leads you to the question,
is Wikipedia just a complete freak?
150,000 English-speaking editors,
is it just a one-off or is this an unstoppable trend?
And probably the best way to answer that question,
one of the places we turn to when thinking about it,
the gentleman that invented the most famous triangular framework
in human history on humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow.
He created the hierarchy of needs,
which, whether we like it or not, we all subscribe to.
This is the stuff that gets us going.
And there's been awful examples where we've had to focus
at the bottom of the pyramid again
around safety and physiological security.
But actually, the fact that we're all sat in this room
is testament to the fact that you guys are shooting up the pyramid.
You're on your way up.
And if you look at those needs,
what keeps us all happy, sense of belonging,
sense of esteem, self-actualization,
the question is, are we finding new ways to actually meet those?
Now, if we were sat in this room 30 years ago,
we probably would have said,
the way to get your sense of esteem,
your sense of belonging was the American dream.
It's like 2.4 kids, 2.4 homes, 2.4 cars, whatever.
It's materialism.
But it's radically changed recently.
The global financial crisis,
which you guys I learned this week called GFC,
which it took me ages to figure out what you were talking about,
but I now understand, and it's a big issue.
So that's changed, I think, the way that we actually seek
belonging and esteem and self-actualization.
You guys have had experiences towards the tail end of this year
and it's incredibly difficult for certainly me to understand
how complex and painful the process was.
But if I look at the sort of web-based communities
that are growing around topics like this,
you can see it's triggered changes.
So the question is, how's all of this stuff changing
what Maslow knew that we all wanted to achieve?
And I think it's changing all three.
So, you know, belonging is kind of an interesting one or esteem.
There's examples all around Australian society
at the moment that show us that you guys are changing
an interpretation of belonging and esteem.
This is a start-up, actually.
It started over down in Sydney,
it's got 40 car brands now,
and basically you can rent out your own car to people for the day.
So it's more about access than ownership.
That's a big change in that pyramid.
We no longer need to own everything.
Another interpretation of that that I think is doing incredibly
is the garage sale.
Again, this one started in Bondi in Sydney
in the 1613 sales up there
where people are literally just selling stuff they don't really need.
In London, we've got this explosion of storage companies.
They're everywhere.
I mean, what a wonderful way of showing people
that they've got too much more than they need.
That materialism is kind of shifting.
So it's more about access, we understand that,
and we're finding new ways to signal belonging.
This is an interesting way of signaling belonging.
As of last week, 20 million people
had favorited Barack Obama's Facebook page.
That's 3% of the users of Facebook.
It's unbelievable.
People are using it as a way of showing what they belong to.
It's kind of an emergent tribalism.
It's a different way of showing.
So you guys, you know, you can see this,
100,000 people have liked Julia Gillard's page.
That's true.
I don't know what that means.
That's 1%, by the way, of Australia's 10 million Facebook users
rather than 3% of the world's,
which is interesting in itself.
That's probably an important statistic if you're a politician.
I think pretty hard about what that means.
That being said, there are causes
that are motivating huge numbers of Australians.
So 2% of Australia's 22 million people
have actually participated in Get Up,
which you guys know more about than me,
but seems a wonderful campaign
for actually turning into action.
It's a way of demonstrating new esteem,
new belonging, and potentially self-actualization.
So I was trying to think through a way
of showing how this desire to learn
or participate is changing.
And Google Trends for you guys is a really fun tool to do it.
So every time you put a search thread into Google,
you make Google smarter.
You make it cleverer.
You're doing all the work for them.
They just need to run the numbers and predict.
And if you do Google Trends on two searches in Australia,
so this is just search of Australia,
I thought the internet, people often search for discounts.
And people often also search for how to do stuff.
And if you look at that change,
I think it symbolizes this inflection we're seeing
of how people are finding new ways to self-actualize.
So this blue flat line you see is discounts.
It's people searching for discounts.
It's practically unchanged.
Look at the green line, which is people searching
how to do stuff on the internet.
It's hugely changing.
This is us finding new ways to actually meet Maslow's needs.
An example which inspires me...
Not expires me, that would be hideous.
Inspires me is a lady called Lauren Luke.
She's a 27-year-old single mum up north in the UK.
She was passionate about makeup
and she started putting how-to videos online.
To date, she's had 108 million views.
108 million views.
She's in partnership with her own makeup line.
She self-actualized and it became incredibly valuable.
I love this.
What you can't see here is within a day of the wedding,
Kate Middleton Royal Wedding Day makeup look.
I'm assuming that's Kate's makeup she's showing.
But the number of views speaks for itself,
20,000 within 40 hours.
She's so fast to react and people love her because she's honest.
So another way of actually looking at Maslow's hierarchy
is thinking about these needs.
I'm happy to send any of you this framework.
It's a framework by a guy called Karim Lakhani
at Harvard Business School.
He'd plotted out all of the needs
against extrinsic motivations, money.
I think crowdsourcing usually operates here.
That's why I'm less excited about it
because there's all of this other space
that probably creates more drive towards Maslow's needs.
I'm excited about that stuff.
I think we see it everywhere,
separate but I think important example.
Khalid Said is 28-year-old.
He was allegedly murdered by police in June of 2010.
It didn't make any noise.
A really amazing guy called Koneem,
who actually works at Google,
set up a Facebook page,
it had half a million likes,
and it basically triggered the day of rage
on January 25th at Terea Square in Egypt.
It triggered the start of a revolution.
I think actually he does a better job of explaining
why this is different
and why this meets this new participation economy
that I was talking about before,
so I'll let you listen to him.
We announced on the page the locations.
They shut down Facebook.
But I had a backup plan.
I used Google groups to send a mass mail campaign
to all these people in order to tell them
here are the locations
and please spread it among your friends
and everyone knew eventually.
So definitely technology played a great role here.
It helped keeping people informed.
It helped making all of us collaborate.
I call this Revolution 2.0.
Revolution 2.0, I say that our revolution is like Wikipedia.
Everyone is contributing content.
You don't know the names of the people
contributing the content.
This is exactly what happened.
Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same.
Everyone was contributing small pieces, bits and pieces.
We drew this whole picture.
We drew this whole picture of a revolution.
And that picture, no one is the hero in that picture.
So when he talks about drawing a picture,
he talks about creating the playing field with technology
that enables these emergent behaviors.
If you look at the January 25th
or the uprising on Twitter, the noise,
you see this is acutely true.
Whereas in the past, you would have had this pyramidal shape.
For some reason, the red's not projecting well,
but the ones that look black are actually Egyptian language.
The ones here that are in blue,
you can see here would be English language.
So you can see him, and he's probably recognized
as one of the most influential characters here.
He didn't own the influence in any way.
So it's exactly what we're talking about.
It reminds us completely of this sort of network-based approach.
It reminds us completely that actually the pyramid
that was in Paris transitioned,
and this Darwinistic view has replaced it.
So my view, and that's kind of the first half
of what I'd love to share with you,
is that this participation,
more than just doing it for cash,
more than doing it just for the obvious extrinsic motivators,
is here to stay.
And it's going to grow, if anything.
So then the question for me at IDEO
and the question for all of us at IDEO
was actually, what does it mean?
What does it mean for IDEO?
So we're a global innovation company,
and we help our clients grow.
We help them grow through creating new brands,
services, business models, products,
interaction design websites.
Stuff as important as it's ever been.
But this participation had the opportunity,
potentially, to make it better.
It's disruptive, but it could potentially
make IDEOs offer better.
If you look at the stuff that IDEO really believes in,
the first thing is we believe passionately in diversity.
I never work in a team at IDEO
with people with the same skill set as me.
Thank goodness it would be boring.
It's eclectic.
The teams are eclectic.
We also believe passionately in going to extremes.
So if I'm interested in what's happening
in a sort of market around credit,
I don't just fixate on the people,
your average customer today,
because I know that they're not the customer of the future.
It's the guys at the extremes that migrate across.
They become the mass market.
So we look to them.
And the final thing that we do is we passionately believe
in designing systems.
The days of being able to just differentiate
around form of an object are long gone.
It gets copied.
People fall into the trap of saying Apple's a success
because their laptops are beautiful.
They are.
But their service, their brand, their retail,
the fact they opened up developer tools to developers,
they were beautiful as well.
It created a system.
So we designed systems for our clients.
And when you take all of those three things together,
it was our belief actually that
harnessing the wisdom of crowds,
or what we would prefer to say,
collaborating with crowds
would offer huge value to IDEO.
And we did what we always do.
We kind of build stuff to be able to think it through,
and we prototyped.
So in this case, we prototyped OpenIDEO
by creating a Facebook page
called Big Conversations
just to see whether people would be interested
in talking with us.
Historically, brands are a monologue.
They just talk to their consumers,
their clients.
We wanted to see whether we had permission to have a dialogue.
And we learned we did.
So we started designing OpenIDEO.
So one of the ladies that designed it with me is here,
Hian.
She's here today.
So I'm going to be working through
a sort of physical version of OpenIDEO.
I'll talk a little more about that at the end.
But I'd love just to share with you
what we've created
and actually why I hope
it fits with IDEO's brand.
Because there's no perfect website to anything.
You can only have the best possible solution
for your community.
So when you guys are collaborating,
your solution needs to look
very different to IDEO's,
which needs to look different to my personal one.
It's all different. It's based on the community.
So hopefully when you think about
what's precious to IDEO,
you'll see why we designed OpenIDEO
as we have.
For a while now,
IDEO designers have been keen to put the best bits
of the creative process online
and invite everyone to join in.
OpenIDEO is a global community
that will draw on your optimism,
inspiration, ideas,
and opinions to solve problems together
for the collective social good.
Each challenge starts
with a big question.
Something to get all of us thinking.
Next comes the inspiration phase
in which we all post inspiring things
that we've seen out there
that might help us solve the big question.
The more visual the posts, the better.
Images, videos, and stories
will all help to get everyone going.
After inspiring one another,
it's time to flex our creative muscles
in the concepting phase.
How would you solve this problem?
Post your solution and show everyone
how you plan to make it a reality.
If someone else's idea sparks
something for you, you can build on it.
OpenIDEO was designed
with this way of working in mind.
This is where you get to collaborate
with other people and where the magic
really happens.
Once concepts are fully formed,
they're put through the evaluation phase.
This process is exactly as it sounds.
You rate and comment on the concepts
that you believe will best solve the problem.
According to the given criteria.
The concepts that rise to the top
in the evaluation phase win
with the winning idea
being available for development
by the challenge sponsor.
Your participation in each phase
plus how much you've collaborated with others
all add up to your design quotient
or DQ for short
which you can choose to publicize
or keep private.
It offers you feedback and recognition
and because we're all good at different parts
of the creative process,
we'll all have slightly different DQs.
Just like in all good brainstorming
sessions, we're going for quantity
as well as quality.
The more you add, collaborate
and critique in any phase, the bigger
DQ you'll rack up.
The DQ will become a badge of honor
for community members over time.
In a nutshell, we've created
an open online tool that takes you
through the creative process.
It's highly visual, collaborative,
generates feedback and most importantly
it's fun to use.
Open IDEO offers its community inspiration
and recognition.
The site will be as good as its input
and we're looking forward to seeing
what it becomes.
Open IDEO, an open platform
for innovation where we create better
together.
I think it's self-explanatory
so I thought what we could perhaps close out with
I've kind of
included everything in the participation
economy.
I thought I'd maybe take you through the
train of questions
that I ask people when they're interested
in operating this space.
I do it fairly systematically
because we really know never
to start with, for example, technology.
Let's whizz through the 10 questions
I ask every client
if they're interested in open innovation
or collaboration and I'll tweet out
the final slide which will actually be
all of these listed out in case
they inspire any of your own thinking.
And actually part of what
I'll do is I'll reference the challenge
we've just run with the Queensland Government
and then the Ideas Festival which hopefully
some of you guys participated in
was actually I think it's a wonderful
example. We got engagement
around this challenge that we kind of
haven't seen before. So we had
617
concepts submitted over the last 8 weeks
and the quality has been unbelievably
good. We've just spent 2 days
in a workshop sort of helping flesh
them out before they go up onto the site
for sort of continued collaboration
and we were absolutely inspired
by the quality.
So let's go through what we've learnt
and the 10 questions and then let's have
some questions and answers. So the first
thing that we've learnt is you have to
take unbelievable care
with the question that you ask
your community.
If you haven't got a good idea of what
you want to learn, don't even
start because all you'll get back is
noise. The only certainty is if you ask
a bad question, you're going to get a bad
answer.
If you actually decide
to design whole systems
you have to allow more
time. So understand
what touch points you want
designed if it is design you're doing.
Understand what the playing
field is to help people
understand that. So when we set
a question, we know
we've learnt it's got to be inspiring, it's got to be
short and it's got to be a real sort of call
to action.
But the question is not static.
20 years ago we could ask a question
and it would remain unchanged.
We know now that actually questions are
completely dynamic.
They change.
So we know that actually the media coverage
around open idea kind of changes the
feel of what the question is.
That's completely out of our control which is
the question. The terms and conditions,
the evaluation criteria,
the partners, but also the initial
contributions to the site completely
change the question.
And one of the things we learnt actually we designed
early on was we learnt that we could feature
inspiration to help direct the community.
So when we see something we love we
feature it.
Otherwise actually people get anchored
by the most recent contribution.
So the first thing to do
is really understand the question
we're asking.
The next thing we always
ask ourselves is actually who's
well equipped to answer it.
If I've got one set of questions
I might choose to,
and it's a chemistry based question,
open idea wouldn't necessarily be the right
community.
If I've got a question that requires deep
knowledge or alternatively
requires people
with a specific skill set
in a specific part of the world
we need to make sure they're in your community.
So ask yourself who can answer
your big question.
And then go to where they are.
Our community
managers, we have Mina Kadri
who's here today, spend a lot of time
helping bring new community into
challenges to make sure the quality stays
high. It's really important to us.
And our community has grown
we're up to just under 16,000
users from 178
countries. I actually said in a presentation
about two weeks ago that it was from 200
countries and they're only 195.
So I'm slightly embarrassed about that still
but Google Analytics presents it as
countries and territories. So that was
awful.
But yeah, we have
178 countries.
There's 195. We're continuously
looking for more coverage because
we value diversity. That's important
to us. And we see that
affect the contributions. I was inspired
by this on our recent Australian
Queensland food challenge.
This guy that you see up here
Ayan Tupan, photographed with
us at an event in London not so long ago.
He's one of the biggest sort of contributors
and he was contributing
builds around surf culture
and he lives in Latvia.
So inspiring
that you give people access they never had
before. Historically the access
was you just had to go to a good design school etc.
Now we all have
access. We can all self-actualise.
So the next question
is how you
going to motivate people? Money's fine.
I'm probably
not personally excited by crowd
sourcing using financial
rewards so much because I think it makes
so many other motivations you see
up here difficult.
You can see the motivations here.
So money is the ultimate
extrinsic motivator. It often
collapses a lot of the other stuff.
I get more excited about all of these.
So when we designed OpenIDO
we made it more community-based
solution rather than a market-based
solution which you can imagine.
So actually people
contribute I think to OpenIDO for knowledge.
They contribute for
recognition. You can see the design question
this is my one here where actually we tell
people about their participation in the site
and they can choose to reveal it or not.
We find virtually everyone reveals it
which I think is insightful. It's interesting
we can learn from that.
But the other thing that we learn is people start
to import these into the real world.
We see job applications with DQ.
We see blogs with people's DQ.
It's so inspiring to see it just spill out
and we encourage it. We actually
give an embed code so people can do that
themselves. The next question
you guys need to ask if you're interested
in open innovation is
what's the process you're going to run?
And the more complex
the process the more careful you have to be.
So this is kind of a representation
of IDO's
process. We set a challenge
we look for inspiration, we synthesize
it, we then come up with ideas
we prototype it often in a sort
of feedback loop here and then we evaluate
and launch. Not all of
those are really well suited to sort
of having everyone participate initially.
So we focused on inspiration
concepting and evaluation.
Stuff that the crowd are
well suited to help with
that they can feel like they're adding real value
with.
And you can see the other question
of course is do you want your system to be
open or closed? We've already talked about
that. So when you look at open IDO
you understand why we have inspiration
concepting and evaluation
effectively with applause here.
It makes sense you can see the logic behind
that decision. We also
value collaboration
I talked about that earlier. We have diverse
people working together
so we want them to collaborate and we
build these network maps to show people what it
means but you have to design for collaboration.
You can't just wait
for it to happen. Crowd
funding systems tough to
foster collaboration. That's not a bad
thing but you just have to be mindful
of it. So we deliberately
designed for different
units of engagement
around collaboration, applauding something
or commenting on something
takes hardly any time. It's kind of our
acquisition into the site
and then deeper relationships around building
on or new content and celebrating
collaboration here.
All really important ways to drive
collaboration.
This is a good example actually just to show
you. So this guy lives in Washington
a guy called Sina Moseyeb. He's one of
our lead users. He always
contributes amazing stuff. This was actually on
the food production challenge
for the Queensland challenge again.
He contributed the idea of an iPhone app
to help connect and inform
to give you an idea around the sort
of collaboration. So this was his work you see
here. This is his iPhone app.
He's designed it to pretty
good level of granularity. It's lovely
to see. And you can also
see down on the right here built on
this. So these are all other
concepts where people have taken his
and migrated them into
their own content. You can
see how our network diagrams form
now. And then finally you can see
the other type of collaboration which is
commenting. And it's
pretty unbelievable the richness
of people's contributions.
We actually learnt a huge amount from it
initially. We didn't really
kind of celebrate comments. We
didn't expect it to evolve but we
reacted pretty quickly. We even
now allow things like applauding comments
because we saw people having conversation
threads in the comments. A behaviour
we didn't expect.
And then final
for just to share
maintain a drum beat
if you're going to grow a community.
Don't think. There's no free lunch.
A lot of people turn to this stuff because
they think it's cheap or it's easy. It's
hard work. Just catch up with our community
manager Mina who lives in New Zealand
works a lot of time just making sure
there's a drum beat if you want to learn more
about that. It's incredibly difficult
to give you an idea. This is an open idea.
You can see actually Mina tweeted
I just grabbed this not so long
ago. You can see just tweeting a huge
amount to keep the buzz going.
And actually
making sure that people continue to stay interested
with what's happening.
Also if you guys are using open systems
collaboration remember
there is a whole world outside the platform
and celebrate it. If you think
that you're going to control a community
your history. They'll reject it.
So we celebrate all of the
interesting emergent stuff we see and
most of it we have no control over.
So one example would be Yammer groups.
So these are
pretty heavy users that have celebrated their
own conversation groups that we
kind of participate in but we had nothing
to do with. Another I find
inspiring which makes sense
given there's no online or offline
really anymore. It's all blended.
It's people actually meet on Twitter
fans of OpenIDO and actually
go to restaurants and meet. They have what they call
Tweet Ups. They've had them in New York
Washington San Francisco
people that have never met together
but knew they had a common interest
in social good through this platform.
Again we choose
not to go. The traditional approach
is to grab hold of it and do
sound bites with everyone, video it.
We choose not to go because we want
these emergent things to flourish.
And then the final couple
is actually celebrate the journey
as well as the destination.
So a lot of for example
crowdsourcing sites you just
celebrate the thing that pops out the other end.
Think about the journey
and what it means. Think about the engagement
it has the potential to create.
We regularly post blogs where
we celebrate just the small steps.
It can be incredibly
impactful.
And finally most, you know, final two
most importantly show
impact. Our community
is uniting around wanting positive impact
so we have to show it where we can.
We have a team in Ghana at the moment
actually prototyping
inacra the solution
of a toilet that was actually developed on the site.
We'll celebrate that almost more
than getting a new challenge. It's unbelievably
important. And we've been celebrating
impact actually over the last
48 hours in workshops to refine
a lot of the concepts
from the Queensland challenge.
It's so exciting
to see kind of in this case local
farmers, politicians,
entrepreneurs, students
get together around a common aim
to build out these ideas
and turn them into quick
actionable steps rather than just
theorizing and trying to change the world
all at once from the macro
level.
And the final one I wanted to share is kind of
a heart warming story
for me and also a great learning
story. So if you
have worked in traditional website type
businesses, you're taught
to hate lurkers.
So a lurker is someone that basically
watches from the sidelines of the site,
doesn't want to commit, probably isn't
actually, you know, traditionally you would
say that interested in the site.
One thing happened at the end of last year
that completely changed my perspective
of whether lurkers
are important. And it was a Christmas
card we got from a lady called
Bernadette Kwame in Malaysia.
I looked at her profile, she'd never
contributed to the site. She'd registered
but she'd not even applauded
something.
And the lurker said, lurker, not interested.
How do we convert her? And she sent this
hand drawn Christmas card.
And the effort she put into this told
me that she was actually
engaged in the topic and reminded
me that actually the lurkers sometimes
have a lot of the power
and actually kind of
take a lot of the value
in a positive way.
So those are the questions I ask but you can
see there's some systematic order
and it's interesting how little technology
features in it. Technology
is an enabler. The real question is
what do you want to achieve and who's
able of achieving it.
So thank you very much. These are my details.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Fantastic.
Can I just ask one question?
Where does this leave
the notion of
intellectual property? The collaborative
world of innovation is very
different from the idea of the inventor,
the idea and the profit that comes from
the idea. This blows it away completely,
doesn't it? I don't think it
necessarily blows it away. I think it just
redefines where value lives. I think
we, through
a lot of the last 100 years
have placed a lot of value in ideas
and one of the things that we've learned
is actually ideas given technology
are almost commoditized now.
I've started a couple of businesses and
with both of them, people have consistently
said to me afterwards, oh, I had that
idea. I had that idea.
Everyone has access to all ideas and
if you believe that's true, then you know
the value is in execution.
And if the value is in execution,
I'm optimistic that it doesn't matter
if some of the sort of traditional
defensive intellectual property collapses
away. And I think we see, particularly
in the software industry, which is a leading
indicator of this, open
source, being a fascinating example
of the value is about creating ecosystems
and also creative commons
as an example where
you kind of see people learning
moving up Maslow's hierarchy
in a positive way without collapsing
the system. There's exceptions
to the rules, but I think
it's kind of a net positive that we move
away from that defensive thinking.
Okay. I want to take some questions
or comments from the floor
because there must surely be
some feedback.
Do we have someone with a microphone
at all? Or will
people just yell from...
We do have microphones on the side.
I was thinking the music industry is a classic
industry, isn't it, that's moved from that old
paradigm of the big organization
signing up the individual
artist to now basically
the artist establishing their own
website, getting their music out there
having control really over
their own destiny and the audience and the
participants being involved in that process.
For example, the music industry was
productized, so the value was in the
CD, but the smart companies
have realized that actually you can't
contain piracy, you have to work with it
so you look for adjacent values. A lot of the
money's moved to live events, which you'd
expect. A lot of the money's moved
to systems
like you have here, I think, X Factor and you also
have... Do you have Australian Idol
or something similar? So if you think about
that model, they've taken the most expensive
bit of the music industry
as artists and repertoire, like searching
for talent, and they've totally
democratized it. They've even gone further,
they get all of us to pay
by voting
to say what we want to buy. So they've
turned a cost to a revenue
extraordinary model. So we see
I find it inspiring the music
industry actually, and I think publishing will follow
many of the things we've seen
in terms of the evolution. So anyway, I'm
excited to.
Tom, you
pointed out how you actually
benefit by tying all the ends
together
to finally get a result.
That's the way I read your message.
People come up with the idea
and you share it right through
to a product or
success, whichever way you like to believe it.
So I want to ask
this question.
To the Hawke government many years
ago, I put up
an idea that
there ought to be
a department of ideas
as part of the federal
government.
Now the purpose of it was it would register
all the ideas, no matter
whether it's an invention or whatever, which is
along the lines of what you're saying.
And the idea being
that the person
would get the recognition
of having it in the register
and if ultimately
others want to take it up, they're able
to link up with that person.
And if it ultimately
is developed, well then there's a
protection there. And this is where the government
came in, that the government
would give protection.
So you could see that whether it's an invention
or some other way.
So people get rewards
in different ways.
Some people might make money, but
the ideas could be better
government. Doesn't matter, it doesn't have
to be an invention.
But the
registration of the idea
leads to recognition.
And that means that there's a good chance
the idea can be adopted
because others will build on it
as exactly as what you said there.
And ultimately the success
will come from the adoption of the idea,
whether it's an invention or whatever.
What's your comment?
It sounds like
you were way ahead of us
in terms of the philosophy.
I like two things
in what you said. The first is
the traditional pattern approach we just talked
about. It's the idea that you can kind of
rein-fence intellectual property.
And a lot of the incentives are actually
not to, you have what you call submarine
patterns, where people hide their ideas.
It's unbelievable. They're hiding their
ideas in case someone else uses it
so that they can, it's kind of like piracy to
me. It's just, it's a shocking
approach. So what I liked
in your interpretation, your evolution
of the idea of traditional patterns is you did
two things. You give some recognition
without promising the world
because if you promise the world to inventors
nothing ever happens because they have
over-inflated ideas of how much an idea is
worth. And secondly, what I
loved about what you were saying, which still
doesn't happen enough, is you create an open
market where you're actually sharing
ideas so they're accessible.
Now we don't have enough of that either.
Like if you look at the pattern
offices globally there,
I'm sure you've looked at patterns in the past.
They're unbelievably sort of
long complex things. It's an inaccessible
system to date. So
I think if we all kind of shared
more ideas and we're open about
more ideas, similar to what you see in open
source now with software, the world
will be better placed. So kind of applaud you
for thinking about it before I certainly do.
The head of the curve, well done.
Hello. I was just interested about
how you've set this up as an online
forum obviously.
But they say, well, people
say that there's a loss of conversation
and the art of conversation. I was
just wondering if you see a
social loss to these conversations
being made online.
It's a great question. I don't think
they're better or worse. I just think they're
different and I think we have to accept it.
We're actually,
I think our ability to
converse has been constrained
by technology because technology
hasn't really understood it or been
adapted fully to it. But I think we see
that changing. So a couple of stories
just to bring that to life. I
met someone at AT&T not so long
ago, whose daughter was a 12-year-old
in the States and he said
her phone bill over a year,
sorry, over a month, was
one minute of voice calls
and 6,000 text messages.
So we just have to
accept that people
using these technologies are finding new
ways to communicate.
People did it with the telegraph. We found
ways of actually shortening speech
so that the telegraph was a useful tool.
The same is happening with the internet.
It's different, not necessarily better
or worse. And I kind of celebrate
that. The thing that scares me
is how many clients I meet
who stop their staff using
Facebook, using Twitter,
using basically all the tools
that enable you to build these muscles
to operate in this new economy.
So I don't necessarily
think it's better or worse.
I just think it's perhaps an evolution
of conversation and I'm excited
by new technology
actually facilitating it in exciting
new ways. Like video Skype
is an unbelievable enabler
of the sort of beneficial eye contact
that you're perhaps sort of inferring
to. So it's exciting
to watch it evolve. There's lots of
potential for it to improve
further.
Okay, the gentleman up the back.
Talking about the evaluation
phase, in the phases that you were,
you had up on the presentation before.
What is your feeling with regard
to whether it should be a democratic
evaluation phase or not? Like whether
you should be recognising that somebody with a deep
strength in a field or somebody
who is a newcomer in amateur in the
field should have the same amount of say
when it comes to evaluating ideas.
It's an absolutely cracking question.
We wrestled with this loads.
And the answer I think is
it depends entirely
on the question that you've
asked. So if you're asking people
to evaluate a polymers
ability to stay solid
at 15,000 Kelvin
I think I probably wouldn't use
the wisdom of the crowd. Whereas
you know, if you can
and I think actually there's more potential to use
the wisdom of the crowd, if you smartly
shape the evaluation criteria.
So one of the things we learnt
early on is that actually
people have a disproportionate bias
to beautifully presented
stuff. It's kind of a risk
in the system. So you could have a good idea
badly presented, a bad idea
beautifully presented and people have
a natural sort of cognitive bias
to the latter. So one of the things we've
tried to do is enable
fully free form evaluation
questions so that we can
help shape people's thinking. So
it'd be great if you actually
participated on the site when we switch
to evaluation which will happen very
shortly in a couple of weeks for the Queenston
Challenge and you'll see that we list
out a series. Firstly we don't ask everyone
to evaluate everything. We're reducing
the number to evaluate because it would
just be too much work and then we're asking
people to evaluate against specific
criteria that we've thought quite
long and hard about just to make sure that
we're kind of judging
for the right reasons rather than
the aesthetics or the stuff that might
matter less. Does that answer
your question?
So is OpenIDO an open platform?
Like if we have a website that
we actually want to generate ideas from
and have collaborators, we can obviously set up
our own system but if we want to hook into your user
base, is there any facility for that? Do
you have an open API or is there any method of
actually linking into what you've got?
Yes, so
API is basically the ability
to plug other sites into OpenIDO
so it enables you to smooth transitions
between the two but actually
it means a heap of different stuff
and we're developing versions of it.
So we're starting initially, the kind of low
hanging fruit for us, is to enable
people to pull a feed
of all of the data that comes from OpenIDO
so they can be creative about it.
We see some lovely data visualizations
or early interpretations
of this. The next
level of complexity I think you're
referring to is actually when we sort of
deep root
an API where for example
people could drop
their own challenge into OpenIDO
I'm excited about
the potential of that.
We just have a kind of duty to our community
to be very careful about how we do it.
So what you will see is that
as we move to
explore new APIs, we'll do it
in a really sensitive way and we'll make sure
we learn as quickly as we can but I find
it quite hard to imagine a system
where we enable everyone to throw
anything at the community because
they just get overwhelmed.
Does that make sense?
Hello.
Are you the next Mark Zuckerberg
or are you a demon?
I just definitely know he's far clever
than me.
Well I'm just saying, I think
there's amazing potential to
shape and create and I was just
blown away by just some of the demonstrations
that you had on the Queensland
situation about food
and I just think that
it's incredible if you can
why we use the word
the Zuckerberg thing is if
you grow from small
to very huge to take
this concept to the world
then that's
fascinating power in and of itself.
I think it's
interesting because
a slight difference
is I'm excited about these systems
in which the power
doesn't reside with any individual
whereas I think Facebook's
an incredibly smart system
they probably exercise a huge degree of control
so we probably
would define what we're doing more
as about defining the playing field
and we enable the community
not just to self-select
their roles on the team but also
at times to change the rules of the game
so we probably don't exercise
the level of control.
I actually think they're both
net positives
and we don't know where to go, I hope we go
a little way to the direction
you're describing.
Thank you for your presentation today Tom.
I'm just interested in
the political fallout
or the sense that
if we keep going to
crowdsourcing and the notion of
a political position
are we heading to a future where
rather than the old paradigm
of the radicals
and the conservatives we're going to have
whatever a particular group of people
have decided this is the way we do it
now because this is what the community wants
rather than the politicians
having a sense of this is what I stand for
and this is where I'm going.
I think
it's basically a great question
I wrestle with this and I don't think
again there's a right or wrong answer
it's particularly prevalent in the media
industry and actually the overlaps
with politics enormously
because of the power of media in politics
and I think actually
we're kind of at the moment an inflection
point which is quite healthy
where we have a bit of both
the question is
opinions or ideas
so let's reframe that
content like news
I think is completely commoditized
the value is in curation
is in the way you present ideas
it's actually
the way you package the ideas
and it's the way you execute the ideas
if you believe fundamentally
that's the case which I do
which is why I kind of applaud the Huffington Post
I applaud the New York Times
I applaud all of it
I applaud politicians
I'm excited about the transparency
that this has the potential to create
and the fact that actually
it kind of brings everyone
to a critical mass of knowledge
potentially whereby people are judged
better and potentially
the world is more meritocratic
so I see some scary scenarios
where you get kind of radicalism
fostered
online you know we've seen
potentially elements of that with Al Qaeda
where people can sort of self select themselves
into groups and they never see anything else
but I think it's kind of happened through human history
through human history we've been constrained
by the Dunbar number which is the people
in a social network who we can remember
effectively which is like 120 or 150 people
if you were born into a radical group
at that time
like the certain religious groups
that we've seen in the states
all around the world
where they bring kids up through that
and it's the same experience so
I think a lot of the challenges
and the threats
of people behaving immorally
or behaving sort of
for non altruistic reasons
exist in both systems
and I think it's kind of all of our jobs
now we have greater access
to make sure we keep those in check
as best we can
I think we're going to have to wrap this
because we're right on the knocker
and I know there's plenty more questions
but will you please join me
in giving a hand to Tom Boone
This is Big Ideas from the ABC
