Expanding participation
There are examples of the private sector utilising web 2.0 to great effect, for example, Goldcorp (see box 4), and ideas of how it could be used on a national scale for universal public services are now beginning to be explored.
There are many examples of web 2.0 being used to influence policy decisions. For example, in the months before President Obama took office in the United States, he launched an online citizen’s briefing book which allowed people to submit policy ideas, comment and vote on submissions. Cologne in Germany has used web 2.0 technologies to lead participatory budgeting initiatives where citizens vote on local spending priorities. Using consumer knowledge and innovation has led to ‘data mash-ups’ that combine one or more different sources of data to create even more useful information and applications. In the United States these data mash-ups are being used to design crime maps which show levels and types of crime on neighbourhood maps.
Central to using web 2.0 in this way is enabling mass public participation and innovation to flourish. There is a huge potential to drive down development costs by empowering lots of people to vet, refine and test lots of ideas at the same time before committing resources to the development of ideas most likely to be successful.
Box 4: Goldcorp
An executive at the Goldcorp mining company questioned the fundamental assumption that giving away a company’s proprietary data would profoundly damage the firm’s value. Instead of continuing to invest in costly exploration funded by the company, he opened up a previously frustrating search for gold deposits to ‘virtual prospectors’ by making all of the proprietary data available online. With a financial reward as an incentive, the initiative attracted not just geologists but computer scientists, students and military strategists all proposing methods for finding the gold. The result was that 80 per cent of newly identified targets yielded substantial quantities of gold, and around two to three years of exploration time, funded solely by the company, was saved.
