MacroWikinomics
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MacroWikinomics

New Solutions for a Connected Planet

Don Tapscott

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eBook - ePub

MacroWikinomics

New Solutions for a Connected Planet

Don Tapscott

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About This Book

The era of the monolithic, self-contained, inwardly focused corporation is over. In Wikinomics Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams showed how the internet is changing the way the very smartest business managers think about structures and strategies in the 21st century. Now, in MacroWikinomics, they demonstrate how this revolution in thinking is spreading outwards to other sectors - from education and scientific institutions, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy.

MacroWikinomics is a groundbreaking and definitive look at achieving success for a new century, a new media, a new generation and a new economy.

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Year
2010
ISBN
9780857892768

1. REBOOTING THE WORLD
On Sunday, January 17, a full five days after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, a text message sent from a cell phone in Port-au-Prince was translated from Creole into English and posted on an interactive crisis mapping site that was being closely monitored by emergency responders. The text was a cry for help from a survivor and it appeared to have been sent from beneath the rubble of one of Haiti’s largest supermarkets. By that time, the odds of finding survivors had diminished sharply and many in the emergency relief community were giving up hope. The situation on the ground was dire indeed: without access to food or water some tens of thousands had already perished beneath the immense piles of concrete strewn across the city. But the text message posted online suggested a miracle: could the person who sent it still be alive? Was it possible they made it through the excruciatingly long wait for help? An American search-and-rescue team raced to the scene to find out. Many hours later, after having cut through several feet of concrete, the rescuers had a horrible realization: the body being pulled from the rubble was that of a child. The small, frail frame of a seven-year-old girl emerged from the supermarket wreckage, deeply shaken and barely alive. The little girl, overwhelmed with relief and emotion, recounted her terrifying experience to her astonished family. She had managed to survive on a small ration of leathery fruit snacks, and a whole lot of hope.
It was a glimmer of light in an otherwise tragic story. Indeed, few people will soon forget the horrendous damage inflicted by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010, causing more human misery and economic damage than any earthquake on record. In a mere forty-five seconds of seismic contortions, an astonishing 15 percent of the nation’s population—1.5 million people—was rendered homeless. Tens of thousands were dead, and hundreds of thousands more were injured. Any semblance of the usual infrastructure emergency crews depend on (roads, hospitals, water, sanitation, electrical power, and communication networks) was obliterated. Vast regions of the 250-year-old city utterly toppled.
The ruthless and indiscriminate wrath of nature’s forces, however, was just a prelude to the real misery. Circumstances on the ground made life astonishingly difficult for first responders. The sea- and airports were congested and there were too few trucks to transport supplies and no safe place to store them. No one—not the army, the government, or the aid community—had a clear picture of the full scale of the catastrophe unfolding around them. There was confusion about precisely which supplies had been received, and in what quantities. There was also a lack of coordination among aid agencies and other entities about which people and areas to prioritize and how to overcome this logistical nightmare. This initial lack of coordination, in turn, left Haiti’s earthquake victims (already among the poorest people in the world) utterly destitute, without food, water, or clothing, separated from their loved ones, and many in desperate need of medical attention. Yet, out of the rubble, and in the face of tremendous suffering, came a powerful story of how an ad hoc team of volunteers from around the world came together to concoct an information management solution that far surpassed anything the official crisis response team had mustered, including the world’s largest emergency relief organizations, the U.S. State Department, and even the U.S. Army.
At the heart of the volunteer effort was a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi whose crisis-mapping site allows users to submit eyewitness accounts or other relevant information in a disaster situation via e-mail, text, or Twitter—and then visualize the frequency and distribution of these events on a map. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, first came up with the idea in 2008 when violence erupted in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed election. After hearing many disturbing reports of rape, looting, and murder from friends and family across the country, she suspected that the government and the official news agencies were grossly underreporting the violence. The proof came when her own vivid reporting on her blog Kenyan Pundit triggered a flood of e-mails and texts from hundreds of Kenyans who had witnessed or experienced violence first-hand. The volume of reports soon overwhelmed Okolloh’s ability to authenticate and document them using her blog, so she sketched out the basic parameters of an Internet mapping solution, and with the help of some fellow Kenyan technology whizzes, built the Ushahidi platform over a long weekend. Within hours of its launch, the site was collecting user-generated cell phone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths and plotting them on a map, using the information supplied by informants. For the first time, interested parties could see at a glance which areas of the country were experiencing trouble. Indeed, the site collected more testimony with greater speed and broader reach than the media or the local officials, except in Ushahidi’s case there was a big difference: Okolloh didn’t have government grants, official mandates, formal command structures, or elaborate communication protocols; just a loose group of committed individuals under effective grassroots leadership harnessing rudimentary open-source technologies to help those in need.
When disaster struck Haiti two years later, Ushahidi’s director of crisis mapping, Patrick Meier, sprang into action. Meier had been enjoying a quiet evening watching the news at his home in Boston. It was 7:00 p.m. when he first learned about the earthquake. By 7:20, he’d contacted a colleague in Atlanta. By 7:40, the two were setting up a dedicated site for Haiti on the Ushahidi platform. By 8:00, they were gathering intelligence from everywhere, in a global effort to crowdsource assistance for Haiti.
Since the majority of incoming text messages were in Creole, they needed a translation service. And since most reports lacked sufficient location details, they needed a way to quickly identify the GPS coordinates so that incidents could be mapped as accurately as possible. So Meier reached out to dozens of Haitian communities for help, including the large diaspora in Boston. Soon hundreds of volunteers around the world were using Ushahidi-Haiti to translate, categorize, and geo-locate urgent life-and-death text messages in real-time. Many of the volunteers spent weeks on end on their laptops in a dimly lit school basement in Boston that Meier converted into a makeshift situation room. Although located some 1,640 miles from the scene, the volunteer crisis mappers used Skype to relay critical information about the location of potential survivors to search-and-rescue teams on the ground in Port-au-Prince. They responded to requests from the World Food Program and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the middle of the night. And to better link calls with specific GPS coordinates, they even got direct access to DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution satellite imagery and to the U.S. Army’s video footage from military drones. By the time Meier’s group had honed their process, text messages were being translated into English and posted online just minutes after they left a mobile phone in Haiti. And as a result of their dedication, Ushahidi’s crisis mappers found themselves center stage in an urgent effort to save lives during one of the largest relief operations in history.
“If a relief worker from the Red Cross has a field office in the neighborhood of Delmas,” says Meier, “they could subscribe to Ushahidi to receive information on all reports originating from their immediate vicinity by specifying a radius.” Not only were responders able to specify their geographic area of interest, but they could also select the type of alert, say collapsed buildings, medical emergencies, food shortages, or looting. Now as the focus shifts from crisis relief to rebuilding in the years to come, Meier thinks Ushahidi’s crisis-mapping tools could just as readily be used by Haitians to hold crisis-relief organizations, private contractors, and the local government accountable for higher standards than have been the norm during the many years of failed efforts to lift the impoverished Caribbean nation out of poverty. Indeed, this everyone-as-informant mapping heralds some pretty profound changes as the wiki world revolutionizes the work of humanitarians, journalists, and soldiers who provide aid and assistance in some of the most unforgiving circumstances imaginable.
In the old crisis management paradigm, big institutions and aid workers parachute into a crisis, assess the situation, and dispense aid with the limited information they have. Most aid organizations don’t have good systems for sharing information, and certainly don’t like ceding turf or marching to the beat of another organization’s drum. The resulting fragmentation leads to poor decision making, redundancy, and confusion, and often to wasted money and wasted opportunities.1 To make matters worse, the end recipients of disaster relief are almost always treated as helpless victims and passive consumers of other people’s charity. This makes for perversely compelling television drama (so-called disaster porn temporarily boosted CNN’s ratings by 95 percent), but it fails miserably in delivering results. Indeed, a report produced by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies following the international community’s response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami highlighted the need for better coordination as well as victim participation in future disaster relief efforts to help ensure that the needs and interests of disaster victims are not sidestepped in the rush to implement solutions.2
The new paradigm for humanitarian efforts turns much of the conventional wisdom upside down. Rather than sit idly waiting for help, victims supply on-the-ground data using cell phones or whatever communication channels are available to them. Rather than simply donate money, a self-organized network of volunteers triages this data, translating and authenticating text messages and plotting incidents on interactive mapping displays that help aid workers target their response. And rather than just forge ahead with narrow institutional priorities, new communication channels like Ushahidi enable the whole emergency relief ecosystem to operate like a coherent entity. Sure, a lot could go wrong with this distributed model. People could get the address wrong or exaggerate their situation. But as data accumulates, interactive crisis maps can quickly reveal emerging patterns and vital information in an emergency situation: How many miles inland did the tsunami kill? Which roadways are passable and where are the closest temporary emergency wards? Are the incidents of violence and looting broadly dispersed or concentrated around certain neighborhoods?
Given an open platform and a complement of simple tools, it turns out ordinary people can create effective new information services that are speedier and more resilient than traditional bureaucratic channels. Yes, one can argue that tales of heroic volunteer efforts are not particularly unusual. Disaster situations do tend to bring out humanity’s finer traits. What is remarkable is that the Ushahidi-Haiti project might have taken a government agency with loads of money a year or more to execute. Yet, thanks to social innovators like Okolloh and Meier, the crisis-mapping community rallied to pull it together in a matter of days with absolutely no cost to the taxpayer.
Indeed, the story of how Ushahidi got started, and where it’s gone since, reveals a great deal about a powerful new form of economic and social innovation that is sweeping across all sectors—one where people with drive, passion, and expertise take advantage of new Web-based tools to get more involved in making the world more prosperous, just, and sustainable. Okolloh created Ushahidi in crisis; it never crossed her mind to patent or monopolize it. Knowing that computers are out of reach for most Kenyans, Okolloh made sure Ushahidi could work on cell phones.3 And in the absence of venture capital backing, Okolloh used open-source software and allowed others to reuse her tools for new projects. To date, the versatile platform has been used in Africa to report medicine shortages; in Gaza to track incidents of violence; and in India and Mexico to monitor elections. The Washington Post even partnered with Ushahidi in 2010 to map road blockages and the location of available snow blowers during the infamous Snowmageddon, D.C.’s largest snowfall in nearly a century.
With every new application, Ushahidi is quietly empowering millions of ordinary individuals to play a larger role in everything from democratic decision making to crisis management to protecting public health. In doing so, Ushahidi highlights a profound contrast between a set of deeply troubled and stalled institutions that revolve around industrial age thinking and hierarchical organizational designs versus a new set of bottom-up institutions that are being built on principles such as openness, collaboration, and the sharing of data and intellectual property. This new model of collaboration and social production goes way beyond disaster relief efforts to affect the modus operandi of virtually every institution in society, including government, education, health care, science, finance, and international diplomacy. These industrial age institutions brought us mass production of goods, mass media like newspapers, radio, and television, mass education and learning for everyone, mass marketing and mass democracy and government in which elected officials produced and distributed laws and services. As a mode of production the industrial economy was infinitely superior to what came before it (the agrarian craft society), dramatically advancing wealth, prosperity, and the standard of living for many. But this was a centralized, one-way, one-size-fits-all mass model controlled by the powerful owners of production and society.
Now because of the new Web the old industrial models are all being turned on their heads. There is now a new engine of innovation and wealth creation and a powerful new force that radically drops collaboration costs and as such enables communities to collaborate on shared concerns, endeavors, and challenges. Greater openness in innovation and science, for example, is creating more economic opportunity for citizens and businesses that learn how to tap into global innovation webs. In the fight against climate change, ordinary people are forging a mass movement to bring greater consumer awareness and a sense of community to making ordinary household and business decisions that can reduce our carbon footprints. In education, leading universities are breaking down their ivory towers and building a global network for higher learning—a rich tapestry of world-class educational resources that every aspiring student on the planet can use and return to throughout his or her lifetime. Innovators across the public sector are harnessing the Web to generate more productive and equitable services, bolster public trust and legitimacy, and unlock new possibilities to co-innovate solutions to local, national, and global challenges. Put it all together and it becomes increasingly clear that we can rethink and rebuild many industries and sectors of society on a profoundly new, open, networked model. Indeed, for the first time in history, people everywhere can participate fully in achieving this new future.
In our previous book, Wikinomics (Portfolio 2006), we called this new force “mass collaboration” and argued that it was reaching a tipping point where social networking was becoming a new mode of social production that would forever change the way products and services are designed, manufactured, and marketed on a global basis. But, in the four years since penning the idea, it’s clear that wikinomics has gone beyond a business or a technology trend to become a more encompassing societal shift. It’s a bit like going from micro- to macroeconomics. In which case, wikinomics, defined as the art and science of mass collaboration in business, becomes macrowikinomics: the application of wikinomics and its core principles to society and all of its institutions. Just as millions have contributed to Wikipedia—and thousands still make ongoing contributions to large-scale collaborations like Linux and the human genome project—there is now a historic opportunity to marshal human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence on a mass scale to reevaluate and reposition many of our institutions for the coming decades and for future generations. After all, the potential for new models of collaboration does not end with the production of software, media, entertainment, and culture. Why not open-source government, education, science, the production of energy, and even health care? As we will discover in later chapters, these are not idle fantasies, but real opportunities that the new world of macrowikinomics makes possible.
A TURNING POINT IN HISTORY
When the economy crashed in 2008, it cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars. Faced with a historic market meltdown, the worst recession in three generations, plus government guarantees that exceed the cost of every war the United States has ever fought, American taxpayers are understandably furious. It is pretty much the same story around the world. Many people are reviving calls for updated regulations, more government intervention, and even the breakup or nationalization of the big banks. In the meantime, the lingering effects of the financial meltdown threaten to engulf not just companies but entire countries in a sovereign debt crisis. In early 2010, Greece appeared unable to make good on its debt payments to worldwide bondholders. The fear about state defaults quickly spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland in a fiscal domino effect that jeopardizes all sixteen nations sharing the euro as a common currency. Governments everywhere are awash with unprecedented and potentially unsustainable debt. The United States looms largest, with Congress contemplating a budget that by 2020 would nearly double America’s national debt, to $22 trillion—twice the size of the U.S. economy.4 Clearly we need to rethink the old approaches to governing the global economy. But rebuilding public finances and restoring long-term confidence in the financial services industry in the United States and other nations will require more than government intervention and new rules; it’s becoming clearer that what’s needed is a new modus operandi based on new business principles like transparency, integrity, and collaboration.
The financial system is not the only institution that’s in desperate need of a makeover. The sparkling possibilities described above contrast sharply with the precipitous decline of the industrial economy as a whole. Many of the institutions that have served us well for decades—even centuries—seem frozen and unable to move forward. Sure, the industrial economy brought us three centuries of unprecedented productivity, knowledge accumulation, and innovation that resulted in undreamt-of wealth and prosperity. But that prosperity has come at a cost to society and the planet. And it is clear that the wealth and security enjoyed in advanced economies may not be sustainable as billions of citizens in emerging markets aspire to join the global middle class. If we continue on a business-as-usual path, today’s global instability will surely increase. Indeed, we believe the world has reached a critical turning point: reboot all the old models, approaches, and structures or risk institutional paralysis or even collapse. It’s a question of stagnation versus renewal. Atrophy versus renaissance. Society has at its disposal the most powerful platform ever for bringing together the people, skills, and knowledge we need to solve many of the issues plaguing the world. And if this book shows anything, it’s that good things happen when we, as individuals and as organizations, seize the opportunity to contribute our ideas, our passion, and our creativity. The question is whether the world is ready to truly embrace the social and economic innovations that this collaboration could unleash.
This may sound like a fairly radical perspective, but it’s one that mainstream voices increasingly endorse. None other than Time magazine recently saw fit to ring the alarm bells over the trouble it sees on the horizon. In a special feature on the ten ideas that will define the next ten years, Christopher Hayes asserts that it is twilight time for the elites. He says, “In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society—whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media—has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruin...

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