While only federal agencies can post a challenge, the site is free and open to the public who are encouraged to support, discuss, and propose a submission to a challenge. Participants are also able to vote on submissions, and share information about challenges online.

The GSA has defined a challenge as “any problem in search of a creative or innovative solution”. The types of Challenges submitted vary considerably, ranging from suggestions, logo creation, video, game and mobile application production to proof of concept, project design, or complete products. Often prizes, both monetary and non-monetary, will be given for the best submission. It is through this structure of challenges and prizes that the government is looking to engage the public for innovative and competitive solutions for the key problems of the 21^st century.

Some of the many participating federal agencies include:

• NASA
• FEMA
• U.S. Air force
• U.S. Army
• U.S. Department of Education
• U.S. Department of Energy
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Challenge.gov is another great example of the collaboration innovation in open government that the Obama Administration is pioneering. When Thomas Jefferson discussed a participatory democracy where governments and citizens collaborate to solve major problems, did he envision crowd sourcing and contests? Maybe not, but I think he would have approved.

To underscore the importance of student crisis mapping, Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator publicly stated that the student led crisis map during the earthquakes in Haiti “was the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available to the humanitarian community.”

SIPA has been ahead of the curve when it comes to crisis mapping and was very involved with Ushahidi during disasters in Chile and Pakistan over the last year.  After their Chile initiative ended, the core members of the Ushahidi-Chile @ SIPA team met with Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi, to discuss lessons learned.  It was at this meeting that Meier first began to discuss the initial U4U idea with the SIPA team to gain their input and support.

In the early stages of planning, the model for U4U was a team of students from universities around the world who are trained and ready to become crisis mappers the moment a disaster strikes.  Teams from different universities would rotate as first responders and take on all mapping activities during the first 48 hours of a crisis.  After the initial response, the university team would pass responsibility to either local or UN organizations.

“How it was originally presented to the SIPA team is much different that it is now,” says Jaclyn Carlsen, SIPA Student and Co-Director of the SIPA New Media Task Force, which leads crisis mapping at SIPA.

For starters, U4U’s focus will primarily be universities in developing countries instead of the original model with schools from around the world as first responders.  U4U will bring students from developing countries to the U.S. to be trained on Ushahidi and related platforms.  These students will also work with peacebuilding experts from USIP to identify specific ways to use information collection and crowd sourcing technologies in their home countries.

Further, the scope of U4U will be broader than disaster response alone.  While the original model was centered on disasters, U4U as it exists now will encompass a range of issues.  Its management has been consulting widely with international and community based organizations about how the tools can be used and the issues surrounding them.

“It goes to show how Ushahidi was first used primarily in disasters but they are realizing that this tool is so versatile. It can be for conflict resolution; it can be used for peacemaking.  I think that’s why it became more holistic,” reflects Sawako Sonoyama, the other Co-Director of the SIPA New Media Task Force.

Carlsen agrees that U4U has taken on “much more of a peace tone than a disaster tone.”  This is very likely due to U4U’s partnership with USIP who is providing funding for the initiative.

Despite its evolution, U4U’s focus remains on the students.  Carlsen believes it is logical for Ushahidi to want students to adopt its platform.

“These issues are very relevant to developing countries right now.  I think they recognize that and that’s why they are trying to draw students to learn these different skills and the different systems around it,” she says.

Sonoyama also pointed out the unique position that students are in. “Even during midterms, graduate students are able to briefly put school on the backburner in order to prioritize their time for crisis mapping.  However, people working full-time are less able to put their professional obligations on hold.  Graduate school is a huge new space to mobilize for humanitarian response.”

However, on U4U’s shift from U.S. universities to their developing country counterparts, Carlsen strongly believes, “SIPA students have skills and experience to contribute to this program.”

“We have an institutionalized crisis mapping initiative at SIPA and participated in two deployments.  We have some lessons learned to share with U4U,” Sonoyama continued.

And they are right.  During the Chile initiative, the Ushahidi-Chile @ SIPA team trained almost 200 volunteers and mapped 1215 incidents.  Several members of the team, including Sonoyama, also traveled to Chile to implement the platform on the ground.

Rather, these SIPA crisis mapping leaders would like to see U4U work more with both developed and developing country students.  Carlsen advocates for all students to be empowered to use crisis mapping tools.

“What I’d like to see from the U4U side is students going back to whatever institutions they’re from and setting up systems before disasters happen, before elections happen, instead of outside organizations coming in and calling the shots,” she says.

At the end of the day, the U4U initiative is wise to capitalize on students for their passion, dedication and willingness to learn new tools.  However, it seems that by turning its focus toward developing country universities, it might lose out on the knowledge and experience of students at schools like SIPA and Tufts whose initial work inspired the initiative’s creation.

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has recently committed to donating $1 million to public schools through the online charity DonorsChoose.org.  Bing gives users two options.  They can simply click to donate $1 to any school Bing chooses.  However, if users set their homepage to Bing, they get a voucher they can use to donate $5 to the school of their choosing through DonorsChoose.org.

Wal-Mart’s crowdsourced giving strategy is somewhat different.  The company plans to donate $1.5 million to the communities who receive the highest number of votes (in the form of “Likes” on Facebook) on the Wal-Mart Fighting Hunger Together website.  The community that receives the most votes will get $1 million while the next five runners up will each receive $100,000.

Both campaigns certainly raise brand visibility but give consumers different types of influence over giving.  When someone sets Bing as his or her home page, he or she chooses a specific school to donate to and knows that school is going to get $5.  When someone votes for his or her community on Wal-Mart’s site, there is a high likelihood the community will get no money.  However, the $1 million one community gets from Wal-Mart has the potential to do more good that $5 will do for one school.

So which is better?  You decide!

“Cooperation turned us into specialists: I’ll do this job, you do that one. Specialization gave us incentives to innovate. Innovation led to yet more specialization and more ways of combining different specialized skills. Human intelligence became collective and cumulative to an extent that no other species can rival. The key human invention, therefore, was exchange—the ability to trade ideas and efforts.” – Matt Ridley

This concept of exchange and collaborative consumption is, among other things, exactly what the founders of MakeSense are striving for. Within the next week, they plan to launch the alpha version of their web application designed specifically to connect social entrepreneurs to the masses.

According to co-founder (and “co-backpacker”) Christian Vanizette, MakeSense is a web application that “features challenges of social entrepreneurs — design, investment, business, technology — so that the crowd can take them up and, well…MakeSense.”

In recent years social business has boomed in popularity, with organizations such as Grameen Bank and Kiva focusing on microlending to entrepreneurs across the world. The concept of a social business is that it is a non-loss, non-dividend, cause-driven company with the goal of addressing a social need. The purpose of investments made into the business is purely to achieve the social objectives through the operation of the enterprise, with no personal monetary gain intended by the investors of the company. Oftentimes, objectives revolve around nutrition for malnourished children, providing housing for the poor, bringing education or health care to marginalized people, giving safe drinking water, encouraging sustainability, introducing renewable energy sources, etc. through the use of a business model. Because of this cause-driven focus, the success of the social business is measured by the positive impact upon people or the environment rather than on the profits made in a given time frame.

But what of those who aren’t business savvy but want to get involved in these social ventures? To Vanizette and his team, it only made sense to connect the skills and talents of people across the world to the skills and talents of others across the world, and the way they saw this to be best done was through the development of a new web app.

“I start this project because I’ve read the book of Professor Yunus and then I wanted to get involve with Social Entrepreneurs to work with them because I was fed up of the non-sense of working in big companies,” Vanizette, originally from Tahiti, commented.

He added that despite the emails he sent out to entrepreneurs and despite the challenges they were facing in their businesses, he was getting little response. Realizing that there could be a more efficient way to connect, he and his co-backpacker Romain Raguin took their web app mock-up, laptops, camera, and a change of clothes and began their journey to meet social entrepreneurs in person to see what could be done. Specifically, they inquired about the utility of an application and idea such as MakeSense.

Throughout their travels to India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries, they discovered more and more the need for this connector application. Much was being done around the world for social good but these social enterprises, in isolation, were hitting snags. In an effort to solve their problems through a combination of crowdsourcing and microlending, MakeSense returned to Paris, France and began working tirelessly on the web application. In the meantime, they sought to promote the work of these entrepreneurs to the skillful and talented masses through the means of video posts, Twitter, real-time updates on Facebook, and attending conferences revolving around technology, innovation, and social good.

“I feel like the role of social media is now the role of media,” Vanizette remarked. “My awareness on social issues is only possible because of these medias.” He stated that he no longer watches TV to become aware of news — common among our generation — but that we now have access to our “tailor made TV” and that we can even go beyond just watching; we can create content, upload it, and retweet it. “The next frontier will be to find an easy process that allows for people to not only like and learn things online but to also act offline,” the MakeSense co-founder said. He seeks to do this by giving people the chance to find opportunities on the MakeSense application and then to go out to the “offline world” and to make a positive impact.

The alpha version is scheduled to launch soon and will be just that: an alpha version. Vanizette admits that it will be “crappy, just like how the first version of Facebook was pretty crappy,” but will continue to work on it to make it the best it can possibly be in serving the needs of these communities. For now though, the team is just excited that steps are being taken to encourage collaborative generation.

“It will work like a conversation happening in a coffee shop in New York, let’s say,” Vanizette said in explaining the application. “You tell me, ‘Hey, Christian, I’m wondering what I can do to help a social entrepreneur but without donating money. Have you got any ideas of what I can do from New York involving my passion for fashion?’ And let’s say that I respond, “Sure! I know a girl in India doing fantastic fashion accessories in a responsible manner and she’s actually looking for people to help her reach a new market. I’m sure these products will be of interest to New Yorkers. Here’s her contact; don’t hesitate to write her!’” He continued to explain with a smile, “It will be the same process but on the web. Only, imagine that our app is the coffee place and that ‘Christian’ is a web page detailing the efforts of the specific entrepreneurs.”

In a recent report, Jonathan Rowson, Steve Broome, and Alasdair Jones state that “defining ‘communities’ solely based in geographic terms has major limitations.” Their report argues that this way of viewing our communities often fails to “deliver key social capital improvements” and that a new approach needs to be done that is “based on an understanding of the importance of social networks…such an approach has the potential to bring about significant improvements in efforts…to support the development of resilient and empowered communities.”

Christian Vanizette and the start-up team of MakeSense are more than aware of this need to connect and combine forces. Furthermore, they are aware that the best way to do this in our global society is to utilize the power of the web and of social media.

“Our goal is to shake up people so that they move [themselves] in solving the challenges of Social Entrepreneurs,” Vanizette explained, his passion coming out. “Our goal is to make people use their minds and creativity for problems that are worth solving — little challenges by little challenges — to make the world a better place.”

The MakeSense application was due to come out today on Monday, November 15th but will be held off for a few more days. “It’s done,” Vanizette assured, “but we’re just waiting for a few more entrepreneurs to input their needs.” No entrepreneur left behind. He joked at one point during the process, “It’s okay. If Chris Hughes can be late in launching Jumo, we certainly can be excused for a few days delay as well!”

MakeSense has presented at various global conferences, including most recently The i7 Summit.

Web Director Kate Sands Adams considers the IRC online strategies surrounding the earthquake in Haiti last winter to be among its biggest successes.  The IRC was able to raise an extraordinary amount of money in a short time as well as contribute to increased media coverage of the disaster.

Furthermore, the IRC raised $10,000 on the Facebook Causes application.  This is especially impressive because, according to the Washington Post, fewer than 50 of the approximately 179,000 groups using Causes have been able to raise this amount. The organization also has frequent smaller scale success like when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof retweeted an IRC tweet, which exponentially expanded the tweet’s reach.

Do not be fooled into thinking these successes are due to luck or public concern during disasters alone.  The IRC’s successful fundraising and advocacy are the result of strategic planning and careful analysis of past online trends.

According to Adams, the organization used to keep a relatively low profile in all aspects of its work.  However, in 2006, the IRC underwent a major rebranding campaign to raise its visibility.  Adams says that external communications have been ramping up ever since and the web has become especially important as a marketing tool to reach new audiences.  Although the IRC has a solid core of long-term supporters, the organization knows the importance of reaching new people.

Ruth Fertig, Online Community Builder at the IRC, adds that cultivating new audiences is a primary goal of the social media strategy as well.  The IRC hopes to turn people who follow the organization on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube into activists, donors, volunteers and sometimes even employees.

Another important goal is to raise unrestricted funds, which the organization can allocate wherever they are most needed.  According to Adams, this type of funding is crucial for sustaining the IRC’s ongoing work as well as responding quickly and effectively during emergencies.

In order to achieve its goals, the IRC has made a priority of tracking its successes. In evaluating advocacy campaigns, the IRC looks at how different types of content drive users to sign petitions or write to leaders.  In terms of fundraising, the IRC monitors criteria like the number of individual online donors, donation amounts and repeat donations.  On the social media platforms, a successful post or tweet is one that many users share or one that sparks conversation via comments or wall posts on Facebook.  Here, a challenge is to pinpoint exactly what it is about a particular post or tweet that makes it go viral.

As a result of tracking trends, Adams, Fertig and the other members of the web team at the IRC have amassed a collection of best practices for engaging potential activists and donors.  Fertig emphasized that forming best practices is key.  It saves her time and allows her to do her job better

Adams has found an important practice is to react quickly to website analytics data. During their efforts surrounding the earthquake in Haiti, the IRC found that it was extremely effective to rapidly post new content, photos and video from the ground.  It allowed them to communicate the urgency of the situation and inspire people to help.

The IRC has found that maximizing use of multimedia in general is very effective.  Analysis of IRC website traffic shows that most people tend to click on pictures and video and will stay on a page longer if it utilizes multimedia.

Another lesson is to listen to users and let their needs drive content.  Fertig describes social media platforms as “places for a two way conversation.”  As the IRC’s Online Community Builder, she spends a large portion of her time listening to and monitoring what the IRC’s online community is saying in addition to putting out their own content. She adds that asking questions on social media platforms is a great way to engage people and spark conversations.

Fertig also reaches out to bloggers and generally encourages others to be the IRC’s “megaphone.”  She has found that messages are more effective in the community if “they take the cause upon themselves.”  In response to the many requests for support they receive from individuals hoping to hold awareness or fundraising events, the IRC recently launched iRESCUE.  This “Do-It-Yourself Fundraising” site gives people the resources they need to spread the word to family and friends.

Similarly, through its research, the IRC has found that people are moved by individual stories as well as what is happening on the ground.  The IRC’s Blog, Voices from the Field, was created to give the IRC’s field staff a place to write about their experiences and share their pictures and videos.  Adams says that it is the place where her colleagues in the field “take center stage.”

However, because staff in the field are busy with a variety of lifesaving tasks, they have less capacity to contribute content, photos or video to the blog.  To address the challenge, the team now has four information officers around the world who work closely with field staff and the external communications team to share that important perspective from the ground.

In addition to listening to their audience, Adams finds it important for the IRC to “talk to them in a language they understand.”  Although most of the IRC online community is well informed about a variety of issues, web content producers must use everyday vocabulary and refrain from being overly technical.

The IRC’s web strategy can set an example for other international nonprofits seeking to enter the Web 2.0 world.  Learning from best practices and listening to target audiences can help a small team reach big goals.

Radiohead rocked the music industry in 2007 when they released their In Rainbows album. As a digital download, the fans could order it for whatever price they wanted, starting at £1.

This was their firs step as an independent band after finishing their contract with EMI, but it also marked the route they were about to follow as pioneer artists into this new, digital and hyper connected world.

Last year, they embraced crowdsourcing.

They created a concert DVD featuring fan footage from their gig in Prague on August 23rd, 2009. The band provided the audio material, but they kept the different shots made with cellphones and other digital devices from their fans. More than 50 fans collaborated in the experiment, while the curation and final edit of the videos were made by the band.

The DVD is available as a download, and the videos are posted on You Tube under a Creative Commons licence. Soon, the material will be launched in Blue Ray format.

It is true that, so far, the band still functions as a highly hierarchical, vertical network. Meaning that the band leader, Thom Yorke, and the rest of the musicians, are the ones responsible for creating their music. Still, they are using the internet and mobile technology, to incorporate a large portion of their fans in the creation of their art. It is clear that as a band, they are interested in a conversation with their followers. They are asking for an active public. This approach will not only affect their art, but also may increase their audience, taking advantage of their weak links connections.

Imagine the viral power of a tweet or a Facebook update like this: I just contributed to the new Radiohead’s DVD, check it out here.

With the DVD crowdsourcing they are:
-Taking advantage of the talents of their fans.
-Lowering production costs
-Engaging their fans
-Amplifying their audience.

The idea was that if you combined geotagged images with the capabilities of what we see on a Flickr where Users can mark upon and comment within images, you could have a pretty amazing crowd sourcing opportunity. To jog your memory, here’s an example of people commenting within images.

This is a screenshot of an image on Flickr that viewers have written comments upon. Each “box” with the thin border around it is where a User has attached a comment to.

So, in our hypothetical you can have the layout of photos as seen in the Mt. Hood exampel with the additional information we see here. This all comes in very handy. Think earthquake, think hundreds of uploaded pictures that are geotagged so we know exactly where we looking at, and then think crowdsourcing information onto them so rescue workers can look at the images and know immediately what might be under the rubble.

But none of that is what this is about. What this is about is an article I came across in ReadWriteWeb that’s pretty amazing. It’s a review of two iPhone applications that allow you to point your 3GS iPhone at something and/or in a direction, and if you’re in camera mode, Wikipedia information about what your pointing out will appear on your screen.

As RWW explains:

Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone’s GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you’re looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you’re looking at that’s written up in Wikipedia.

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