Located not far from Vancouver, with a live feed of the Olympic into our office (you nailed it CTV!), we’ve felt real comradery with team Canada this last week. Our team’s thighs much less muscular than bobsleighers or even female figure skaters, so why do we feel this kinship with Team Canada? It’s more than our passports (or most of them – we’re not all true north), it’s a bit of a love affair with an abnormal, competitive life.

10 Ways team Chaordix is just like team Canada:

1. Daily people tell you you’re insane and obsessed
2. You’re scored on a performance of minutes and seconds. No one asks if your product was having an off day.
3. You hope for fair judging. As if the market were a meritocracy!
4. You see people around town wearing your shirts
5. When camera’s turn on you are all driven, all dedicated, but humbly grateful too
6. Whoever picks your outfit on race day (VC pitch), you worry it makes you look like you’re trying to hard.
7. To make it to the finish line, you consider taking cash from people you’ve rallied against- competitors or uh…McDonalds
8. Some days you crash and consider quitting but you don’t. So do your team mates.
9. You care A LOT about gear and about what’s for lunch
10. When retired you’ll do one of two things – coach the next up and comers - or go “odd” maybe herding sheep on an island
11. (For bonus points – of course you go for those) You miss seeing your family more, but are profoundly motivated to make them proud.

GO CANADA GO!

We’re cheering for us.

Team Chaordix

Ok, so mobile is just one of the many moving parts at play in how Chaordix’s views future of crowdsourcing, but we share Google’s belief that over the next few years mobile will be bigger than desktop. I had the chance to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and as always, had my crowdsourcing hat on the whole week. Here are two trends in mobile and my thoughts on how we might see them intersect with crowdsourcing:

Interconnectivity – the biggest word of the conference. Everything working together, to help mobile users minimize their efforts. The idea is to have all of your groups and social networks all aggregated to one place – so when I’m on my mobile and look someone up, I see all of their information in one place. On the flip side, I can pull information about one thing, from several different sources. Think of it as RSS for all of the different modes of communication and communities. How this helps crowdsourcing: If a crowdsourcer is juiced on an area, they have the opportunity to broaden their footprint, without a significant increase in time spent. For example, a developer can join several crowdsourcing sites and get information on projects he is interested in – all in one place.

Apps – At Mobile World Congress, one hall was dedicated entirely to apps. While there are still plenty of fun (possibly useless) apps, developers are focusing on apps that make lives easier. For example, apps aggregating real time data and spitting out practical info for people – like Traffic information. Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road and it’s 100% powered by users. How this helps crowdsourcing: Mass adoption. Crowdsourcing apps that people can use everyday and almost become invaluable (I’m heavily reliant on Yelp.com when travelling, for example) really help define what crowdsourcing is. While most people understand the idea of crowdsourcing through examples of American Idol and iStockPhoto, the more they use it on a daily basis, the more likely they are to embrace the value of it.

Figuring out how crowdsourcing fits in to trends in different industries is a good way to understand how we can continue innovating. It is hard work, but we’re excited about all of the ways we can enrich the user experience for people using the Chaordix platform.

A while back, I had the chance to sit in on a phone call with Karin von Hippel and two members of her team, Justine and Guy about what role crowdsourcing and mobile can play in the development of post-conflict reconstruction projects. The concepts and ideas they talk about are pretty mind-blowing. Obviously, I’m a novice and really can only tell you that I know there’s a lot I don’t know, but here’s what got me excited about how crowdsourcing might be able to help post-conflict development:

Personalize it. The idea of living in a conflict zone doesn’t seem real to us (or at least, not me!). With crowdsourcing, there’s the opportunity to make it very personal. If people sent out pictures and told their stories, it would help us understand what it is like. It also engages the community there to try and protect their victims and to empower their heroes.

Understand the real requirements of the community. One of the problems with the current aid system is that by the time a proposal is submitted, funding is approved and aid is sent, it is often a couple of years late. A possible solution to this is getting real time data on what challenges aid should be addressing. Where’s the money supposed to get to and are those needs shifting? Another solution is to cut through the noise. Are the people talking the loudest not representative of what the average person needs?

Verify the information we currently have. Aggregate security information or potentially get information on suicide bomb attacks from bystanders. On a practical level, crowdsourcing and mobile can be used for gathering information as basic as, “How many sick people do you have?” or “How much food do you have for the coming year?” Imagine how this would change the look of foreign aid as we work with people to address specific needs.

This is a new frontier for crowdsourcing in many ways. Courageous discovery is required to bring value to open development. It is important to realize that we’ll need to try things and then slowly adjust as we figure out what’s working and what isn’t. We know the current system needs to be fixed and while we don’t have all of the answers, we can take steps in the right direction. It would be great to hear thoughts on how to improve strategies from a variety of people – in true crowdsourcing fashion.

Photo by: The US Army …on Flickr!

We called our crowdsourcing platform Chaordix as a salute to Dee Hock, the founder/creator and former CEO of the VISA credit card association. He coined the term to describe the dynamic tension he’d set up in Visa: encourage as much competition and initiative as possible throughout the organization — “chaos” — while building in mechanisms for cooperation — “order.”

When we talk about crowdsourcing, we consider the same principles that Hock considered when creating what would become VISA. These principles are the foundation for any chaordic organization:

• What if ownership was in the form of irrevocable right of participation, rather than stock: rights that could not be rated, traded, bought, or sold but only acquired through application or acceptance of membership?
• What if it were self organizing, with participants having the right to self organize at any time, for any reason, at any scale, with irrevocable rights of participation in governance at any greater scale?
• What if power and function were distributive, with no power vested in or function performed by any part that could reasonably exercised by any more peripheral part?
• What if governance was distributive, with no individual, institution, or combination of either or both, particularly management, able to dominate deliberations or control decisions at any scale?
• What if it could seamlessly blend cooperation and competition, with all parts free to compete in unique, independent ways, yet able to yield self interests and cooperate when necessary to the good of the whole?
• What if it were infinitely malleable, yet extremely durable, with all parts capable of constant, self generated, modification of form or function without sacrificing its essential purpose, nature, or embodied principle, thus releasing human ingenuity and spirit?

Instead of trying to enforce cooperation by restricting what the members can do, the Visa bylaws encourage them to compete and innovate as much as possible. “Members are free to create, price, market, and service their own products under the Visa name,” he says. “At the same time, in a narrow band of activity essential to the success of the whole, they engage in the most intense cooperation.” This harmonious blend of cooperation and competition is what allowed the system to expand worldwide in the face of different currencies, languages, legal codes, customs, cultures, and political philosophies.

It’s a shift and one that is easier for some industries over others, but Dee Hock’s message is inspiring. Instead of looking to crowdsourcing as something that is taking away power, look to it as something that is enabling innovation – a complex balance of collaboration and competition bringing us new ideas.

To read more, pick up Dee Hock’s book, Birth of the Chaordic Age

I attended the Gov2.0 online conference this morning and listened to 5 success stories on open government. I was really impressed with the quality of speakers and feel pretty inspired by all of the initiatives around web2.0, social media and the government. Jeff Nigbur, summarized this shift in thinking well during his presentation of the Utah.gov site, “Rather than having the media be our enemy, the social media portal has allowed them to be our friend.”

Here are 3 things we enjoyed from O’Reilly online gov2.0 conference this morning:

1. Unicef’s Merrick Schaeffer talked about the Malawi SMS campaign to fight malnutrition some of his tips were: always work with Open Source, follow agile principals, partner on every project, & develop local capacity. More info about what Unicef is up to can be found at www.unicefinnovation.org

2. Michelle Viotti talked about Nasa’s Be a Martian program around the citizen mapping of Mars. NASA has several crowdsourcing initiatives on the go including one with our friends over at Top Coder – an experimental programming competition to develop algorithms which would help NASA’s flight surgeons make better decisions on what might be included in the medical supplies kit of future long-term human space missions.

3. Melissa Jordan talked about the Bay Area BART and how a small investment led to increased traffic and more fan interactions. bart.gov shares data to let third parties build useful apps for Bart riders. She also taught us that “cupcaking” means constantly kissing and being all over someone in public places in cool-kid speak.

People we now follow on Twitter

I appreciated the comments and tweets from the following people during the conference. I suggest checking out

@unimps –  UNICEF developer focused on mobile phone /SMS development

@GEOpdx –  Geospatial Professional, Community Building Partner, Metro GeoGeek, Government 2.0, Father and Husband

@cheeky_geeky – Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo. Voted class pessimist (1993).

@laurelatoreilly –  Editor at O’Reilly Media focusing on various topics, including Microsoft and Gov 2.0. Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo 2010.

And @OReillyMedia, of course! By the way, O’Reilly Media tweeted this, “Thank you #gov20 online folks: Get 40% off with the discount code 4cast on print books and 50% off ebooks from oreilly.com” and you should take advantage of the offer. This was a free conference and we hope to see more of the same, but everybody’s gotta make a living, so buy a book.