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Britannica loosens up (somewhat) while Wikipedia tightens the reins....
It has been three years since the notorious Nature magazine article evaluated the difference in error rates between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, and that battle still continues today. On...
View ArticleSunlight Labs launches “Apps for America” contest
Following other similar contests in DC and the UK, Sunlight Labs (an open source development team providing tools to make governments more transparent) has launched an “Apps for America” contest. If...
View ArticleUnited Nations 2.0
I had an interesting chat this morning with a colleague who is trying to get wikinomics infused into the culture and operations of the United Nations and finding it tough going so far. Like many...
View ArticleTime for participatory regulation?
Recent events have got me thinking about regulation and just how strained and ineffectual our current systems have become. It’s not just the global financial crisis, although this alone illustrates...
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Participatory regulation and anti-corruption efforts
Participatory regulation is arguably the best way to surface and defeat corruption in government and industry. I’ve highlighted a range of impressive efforts below. They range from Transparency...
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Protecting natural resources with participatory regulation
In the past, natural resource conservation came down to the capacity of an authoritative, centralized body in a geographic territory to monitor and control the exploitation of a given resource, whether...
View ArticleBorn Digital — will children grow up to regret their parent’s actions
Caught an interesting editorial in the Guardian about the propensity of new parents to post birth announcements and images of their newborns on social networking sites, often within minutes of an...
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Recovery.gov: Off to a slow start
Although recovery.gov was launched on the same day Obama signed the stimulus bill, I’ve been holding back on posting until there was a bit more substance to report on. There’s still no meat...
View ArticleStimulus Watch
There’s something else missing from recovery.gov altogether (see here): the ability for citizens to have input into which projects get funded in their jurisdictions. Stimuluswatch.org, evidently a work...
View ArticleBlog It, Earn It – Barter Based Blogging
In the fall I introduced SocialSpark, a pay-per-blog marketplace that connects bloggers with financial incentives to blog about specific brands and products. An interesting business model, although...
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Profiling the powers that be on the un-facebook
While doing some research on government transparency, I came across a new website called LittleSis. LittleSis (currently in Beta version) is a new initiative from the Sunlight Foundation (est. 2006),...
View ArticleHow’s your meal?
Participatory pricing is gaining steam in some Canadian restaurants. After successful use of the concept in some European restaurants, business owners in Canada are putting the concept to the test. For...
View ArticleWhat Do They Know? Making Freedom of Information Requests Easy
The right to make freedom of information requests is in enshrined in most democratic countries (Wikipedia says 70 countries have such legislation). But how often is that right actually invoked? My...
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The New Transparency
I was on the Agenda with Steve Paikin last Friday discussing transparency in government along with Maryantonett Flumian, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa,...
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Bringing transparency to your browser: Knowmore.org
To hold major corporations accountable for their actions, citizens need to vote with their dollars. Rewarding companies for corporate social responsibility and punishing those who partake in unethical...
View ArticleStimulus package workarounds shut down
As part of a stimulus package, every city in Los Angeles county was slated to receive $500,000 from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The problem is, many of these (especially smaller...
View ArticleCreative application contests: Engaging developers in the public sphere
Last November, Vivek Kundra, current CIO of the USA and former CTO of DC, launched Apps for Democracy, a contest designed to crowdsource the best public sector data-mashup applications from private...
View ArticleCan Wikipedia be Neutral?
As I often do in my day to day life, this past weekend I got into a rather spirited discussion about Wikipedia. At the core of the argument was the idea that asking a question like “Is Wikipedia...
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Exploring WikiChoice; Where CSR meets Collaborative Consumers
On a recent trip to the Eaton’s Centre for some exercise gear, I was overwhelmed by the giant selection of retailers and within each store, by the vast quantity of merchandise. I wandered by the Body...
View ArticleIntelligently Filtering Journalists’ (Crowd)Sources
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Mark Drapeau is an adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs of The George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is also a corporate and government...
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