adrianLiem

Earlier this year, Lou Rosenfeld, one of the founders of Information Architecture wrote about Developing a Participation Economy. The concept, while it has its share of complexities, addresses a simple question: how can you provide incentive to encourage volunteer participation within a professional community? My stripped down bare bones interpretation of Lou’s proposition is to create a system for quantifying people-hours into a currency of sorts that can later be used to purchase people-hours from others within the community, i.e. a participation economy.

Isn’t this just bartering?

Or so I asked myself. And at first, I thought yeah it is. This is no different than the Baker baking bread and trading his bread for a horse shoe from the Blacksmith.

There is one key difference, though.

The difference is that in the Participation Economy, the workers are contributing towards a common cause. In the case of IA’s, the cause is the further development of information architecture as a profession. In this sense, it is somewhat of a closed economic system whereby the greater the participation, the greater the overall benefit for the economic community as a whole (at least in theory).

It’s an interesting idea that has been put to the test by others such as Evolt, and that also has many applications.

In a previous life, I was a school teacher (or at least on my way to becoming one). School teachers spend countless hours preparing lessons for their students, especially in the earlier years of their teaching careers.

What if there was a central repository for teachers to contribute their lesson materials, where their contributions result in a certain amount of credit, which they can they claim back to use materials contributed by other teachers?

In my life these days, I’m a web coordinator (a “web coordinator”? what’s that?). I work with a group of other like-minded web professionals directly in my office, and also informally gather once every few months with the other web designers and developers across campus. At the best of times, we collaborate to share tips and tricks, give help and advice, and work together when we share common goals. At the worst of times, three or four of us at any given moment are programming the same widget or tackling the same CSS design problem, but doing it in a vacuum not realizing we are all rebuilding the wheel.

What if we had a means to collaborate in a distributed system (one that lets us give and take on our own schedule and availability), and we had a way to create a shared pool of resources, we had a system to provide incentives to participate, and we had a way to track the different projects being developed to spot the opportunities for collaboration?

That, in my mind, is the potential of the participation economy: increased participation, increased sharing of knowledge, increased collaboration. And there are tangential benefits as well: a greater sense of community among like-minded professionals, a means to communicate, an opportunity to help newcomers to the field and for the experienced professional to gain mentoring experience.

Sounds great, hey? What’s the catch?

Well, for starters you’d need a method for deciding how much certain contributions are worth – i.e. the bottom line is you probably have to “monetize” participant contributions, and how do you go about doing that? Who’s to say what your effort is worth?

You also need the infrastructure to support this type of exchange. Of course the possibilities are endless with all the web technologies available today, but another bottom line is that someone at the end of the day will have to be setting this up.

But are those really so tough? I’ll give it some thought and get back to you!

What do you think? Let me know.

I attended the UBC e-Strategy Town Hall today, and much like last year with all of the thought-provoking questions, insightful comments, and handful of ideas, I came away with a sense of inspiration and motivation. The challenge here will be to take some of the high level thoughts and find a way to integrate these into the day to day realities of my daily work.

One step I’m taking in this regard is to note some of the ideas that popped up in my head today. I’ll start off with two of the brighter lightbulbs.

Lightbulb 1: So Long Web Surfers, Hello Feed Eaters
There will be a time in the not-so-distant future when the conventional model of visiting websites for news or any other frequently updated content will not be dominated by the current model of “searching” or “surfing”, but will instead be almost totally replaced by subscriptions to RSS or other web feeds, where we will only go to visit a website when we receive an update to the feed.

There are a couple implications of this.

One is that along with this shift in increasingly using “feeds” for keeping up-to-date, a lot of us will probably start using feed readers that will be providing enough information in the previews to help us decide whether or not we want to go through the effort of visiting the actual website.

If you’re ever used a feed reader, you’ll know that one of their greatest strengths is their quick load times and fast performance. This is largely the result of all extraneous markup being stripped out leaving the content in all its bareness.

What does this mean? It means that increasingly the decision on whether to visit my website or not will not be determined by the complete package of content, look and feel, but it will increasingly be based solely on the quality of the information. If the information itself doesn’t grab my attention and pique my interest enough to go visit the actual website, I may never go and visit that website again.

So the bottom line: Quality, engaging, and relevant content will matter more than ever.

Lightbulb #2: Specialized Service Delivery Depends on TRUST in Baseline Services
For any service-oriented team that has ambitions to build out their service offerings: Focus on building trust.

Providing a wide range of high quality services takes resources (time/money). If you’re planning on delivering high quality services, or you are planning on increasing the scope of the services you are already providing, your first task should be to build trust with your end users, which is in large part a confidence in the baseline services you provide.

Once you have established the trust for these baseline services, only then can you start looking at increasing your service offerings and expanding the scope of your business offer.

So, there you go. Two of the brighter lightbulbs that turned on in my head today. Next step is finding a way to do something with this new found light.