Brokerage platform wiki

During the past 15 years, the World Wide Web has created remarkable new methods for harnessing the creativity of people in groups, and in the process has created powerful business models that are reshaping our economy. As the Web has undermined old media and software companies, it has demonstrated the enormous power of a new approach, often referred to as Web In a nutshell: the secret to the success of bellwethers like Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter is that each of these sites, in its own way, has learned to harness the power of its users to add value to—no, more than that, to co-create—its offerings.

Now, a new generation has come of age with the Web, and it is committed to using its lessons of creativity and collaboration to address challenges facing our country and the world. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of issues and not enough resources to address them all, many government leaders recognize the opportunities Web technologies provide not just to help them get elected, but to help them do a better job.

By analogy, many are calling this movement Government Much like its predecessor, Web 2. For some, it is the use of social media by government agencies. For others, it is government transparency, especially as aided by government-provided data APIs. Still others think of it as the adoption of cloud computing, wikis, crowdsourcing, mobile applications, mashups, developer contests, or all of the other epiphenomena of Web as applied to the job of government.

All of these ideas seem important, but none of them seem to get to the heart of the matter. Web was not a new version of the World Wide Web; it was a renaissance after the dark ages of the dotcom bust, a rediscovery of the power hidden in the original design of the World Wide Web. Similarly, Government is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time. And in that reimagining, this is the idea that becomes clear: government is, at bottom, a mechanism for collective action.

We band together, make laws, pay taxes, and build the institutions of government to manage problems that are too large for us individually and whose solution is in our common interest.

There is a new compact on the horizon: information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation; government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset.

Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Government information and services can be provided to citizens where and when they need them. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convener and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action.

Collective action has been watered down to collective complaint. Kettl used the vending machine analogy in a very different way, to distinguish between the routine operation of government and the solution of new and extraordinary problems, but I owe him credit for the image nonetheless. What if, instead of a vending machine, we thought of government as the manager of a marketplace?

A small number of vendors have the ability to get their products into the machine, and as a result, the choices are limited, and the prices are high. A bazaar, by contrast, is a place where the community itself exchanges goods and services. But not all bazaars are created equal. Some are sorry affairs, with not much more choice than the vending machine, while others are vibrant marketplaces in which many merchants compete to provide the same goods and services, bringing an abundance of choice as well as lower prices.

In the technology world, the equivalent of a thriving bazaar is a successful platform. If you look at the history of the computer industry, the innovations that define each era are frameworks that enabled a whole ecosystem of participation from companies large and small.

The personal computer was such a platform. So was the World Wide Web. This same platform dynamic is playing out right now in the recent success of the Apple iPhone. Where platform phones have had a limited menu of applications developed by the phone vendor and a few carefully chosen partners, Apple built a framework that allowed virtually anyone to build applications for the phone, leading to an explosion of creativity, with more than 100,000 applications appearing for the phone in little more than 18 months, and more than 3,000 new ones now appearing every week.

This chapter focuses primarily on the application of platform thinking to government technology projects. For example, the Federal-Aid Highway Act ofwhich committed the United States to building an interstate highway system, was a triumph of platform thinking, a key investment in facilities that had a huge economic and social multiplier effect.

The launch of weather, communications, and positioning satellites is a similar exercise of platform strategy. When you use a car navigation system to guide you to your destination, brokerage are using an application built on the government platform, extended and enriched by massive private sector investment.

When you check the weather—on TV or on the Internet—you are using applications built using the National Weather Service or equivalent services in other countries as a platform. Until recently, the private sector had neither the resources nor the incentives to create space-based infrastructure.

Government as a platform provider created capabilities that enrich the possibilities for subsequent private sector investment. There are other areas where the appropriate role of the platform provider and the marketplace of application providers is less clear.

Health care is a contentious example. Should the government be providing health care or leaving it to the private sector? The answer is in the outcomes. If the private sector is doing a good job of providing necessary services that lead to the overall increase in the vitality of the country, government should stay out. But just as the interstate highway system increased the vitality of our transportation infrastructure, it is certainly possible that greater government involvement in health care could do the same.

At the same time, platforms always require choices, and those choices must be periodically revisited. Platforms lose their power when they fail to adapt.

Today, we need to rethink the culture of sprawl and fossil fuel use that platform choice encouraged. A platform that once seemed so generative of positive outcomes can become a dead weight over time.

Police, fire services, garbage collection: these are fundamental platform services, just like analogous services in computer operating systems. The question of Government 2. This question allows us to fruitfully extend the platform metaphor and ask: what lessons can government take from the success of computer wiki, as it tries to harness the power of technology to remake government?

Time and again, the platforms that are the most generative of new economic activity are those that are the most open. The modern era in computing began in when IBM published the specifications for a personal computer that anyone could build using off-the-shelf parts. Prior to the introduction of the PC, IBM had a stranglehold on the computer market.

It was a valuable but limited market, with very few vendors serving a small number of very big customers. After the introduction of the PC, barriers to market entry were so low that Michael Dell, a Texas college student, was able to start what became a multibillion dollar company out of his dorm room.

The market for personal computers exploded. In its early years, Microsoft triumphed by establishing the best platform for independent software developers. Over time, Microsoft began to abuse their market power as the platform provider to give advantage to their own applications. At that point, the PC software marketplace became less and less vibrant, with most of the profits accruing to a few dominant companies.

As a result, many people mistakenly take the lesson from the PC era that owning a platform is the secret of marketplace control and outsized profits. In fact, bythe PC era had run out of gas. The PC became less and less like a bazaar and more and more like a vending machine. When one vendor controls the platform, innovation suffers.

What reinvigorated the industry was a new open platform: the Internet, and more specifically, the World Wide Web. Both were radically decentralized—a set of rules for programs to cooperate and communicate, with applications provided by anyone who had a good idea and the skills to write one. Once again, barriers to marketplace entry were low, with multibillion dollar companies created out of college dorm rooms, and tens of thousands of companies competing to provide previously unimaginable new services.

The bazaar was back. We see the same dynamic playing out today in the cell phone market. Cell phone providers have traditionally operated on the vending machine model.

Apple changed the rules of the game with the iPhone developer platform. Suddenly, anyone could develop smartphone applications. The smartphone platform story is perhaps the one brokerage comforting to those inside government.

Unlike the IBM PC or the Internet, the Apple iPhone is not a completely uncontrolled Wild West. Apple actively manages the platform to encourage innovation and choice while enforcing clear rules.

Some observers believe that over time, the iPhone platform will not prove open enough, and will be superseded by other, more open platforms. The first is the extraordinary power of open standards to foster innovation.

When the barriers to entry to a market are low, entrepreneurs are free to invent platform future. When barriers are high, innovation moves elsewhere. The second is that vibrant platforms become less generative over time, usually because the platform vendor has begun to compete with its developer ecosystem.

Some readers may take the lesson to be that government plays an important role in antitrust enforcement, keeping a level playing field. Facing the crises of the day, from banking to health care, we see a story in which entrenched players have grown large and have used their resulting power to remove choice from the marketplace, extracting outsized profits not by creating value but by cornering it.

Antitrust actions against Microsoft were focused on existing brokerage models, yet the real competition for Microsoft came not from other businesses selling software, but from an entirely new class of advertising-based business models that were invented in the initially noncommercial, wide-open spaces of the World Wide Web. One of the most important ways that government can promote competition is not through after-the-fact antitrust enforcement but by encouraging more innovation.

And as has been argued here, the best way to do that is with open standards. So, for example, faced with the race by major players to dominate the emerging world of cloud computing, the government can forestall the risk of single-player dominance by throwing its weight behind open standards and interoperability in cloud computing.

Department of Defense guidance on the use of open source software by the military is a similar move that uses open standards to enhance competition. In considering how open, generative systems eventually become closed over time, losing their innovative spark in the process, there is also a lesson for government itself. Figure shows the rising share of the U. As a platform provider, when does government stop being generative, and when does it start to compete with the private sector?

When do its decisions raise barriers to marketplace entry rather than reduce them? What programs or functions that were used to bootstrap a new market are now getting in the way? The inverse proposition also appears to be true. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over beginning with a working simple system. In the s, an international standards committee got together to define the future of computer networking. It was the profoundly simple protocols of the Internet that grew richer and more complex, while the OSI protocol stack became relegated to the status of an academic reference model used to describe network architecture.

Be conservative in what you do. Be liberal in what you accept from others. What a fabulous statement of philosophy! There are now thousands of Twitter applications, precisely because the core Twitter service does so little. By thinking simple, Twitter allowed its users and an ecosystem of application developers to evolve new features and functionality. This is the essence of generativity. It can be done. The first step is getting a philosophy of simplicity into your work, understanding that designing foundations that others can build on is an important part of platform thinking.

Designing simple systems is one of the great challenges of Government It means the end of grand, feature-filled programs, and their replacement by minimal services extensible by others.

Kundra realizes that rather than having the government itself build out all of the websites and applications that use that data, providing application programming interfaces to the private sector will allow independent developers to come up with new uses for government data.

The federal government has shown itself consistently unable to keep pace with the fast-evolving power of the Internet. Wiki actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to platform that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Our approach follows the engineering principle of separating data from interaction, which is commonly used in constructing websites. Government must provide data, but we argue that websites that provide interactive access for the public can best be built by private parties. This approach is especially important given recent advances in interaction, which go far beyond merely offering data for viewing, to offer services such as advanced search, automated content analysis, cross-indexing with other data sources, and data visualization tools.

These tools are promising but it is far from obvious how best to combine them to maximize the public value of government data. Given this uncertainty, the best policy is not to hope government will choose the one best way, but to rely on private parties with their vibrant marketplace of engineering ideas to discover what works.

But even here, the goal is not just to provide greater access to wiki data, but to establish a simple framework that makes it possible for the nation—the citizens, not just the government—to create and share useful data. Amazon revolutionized the computer world in with the introduction of its cloud computing platform: the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2; the Simple Storage Service, or S3; and a series of other related services that make it possible for developers to host their applications on the same infrastructure that Amazon itself uses.

Each service has a team associated with it that takes the reliability of that service and is responsible for the innovation of that service….

In essence, they were all spending time on managing infrastructure, and that was a byproduct of the organization that we had chosen, which was very decentralized. Amazon is a bellwether example of why Robinson et al. Closely related to the idea of simplicity is the idea of designing for participation. But when a system is designed from the ground up to consist of components developed by independent developers in a government context, read countries, federal agencies, states, cities, private sector entitiesmagic happens.

The coordination is all in the design of the system itself. Rather than building complex solutions, they provided building blocks, and defined how anyone could write additional building blocks of their brokerage simply by following the same set of rules.

This allowed Unix, and then Linux, to be an operating system literally created as an assemblage of thousands of different projects. While the Linux kernel, developed by Linus Torvalds, is the best-known part of the operating system and gave its name to the entire system, it is a tiny part of the overall code.

Berners-Lee was a developer at CERN, the high energy physics lab in Switzerland, trying to figure out how to make collaboration easier between scientists. To do that, he simply wrote some code. All he needed was one other site to install his server. And it grew from there. What he defined in addition was HTTP, a protocol for web servers and clients to exchange documents, and HTML, the data format of those documents. He wrote a sample client and a sample server, both of which he put into the public domain.

The industry has been off to the races ever since. For example, in the design of the World Wide Web, it was possible to make web pages that were private and accessible only after login, but unless proactive steps were taken to hide it, any web page was visible to anyone else on the Internet. Wikipedia allowed anyone to create and edit entries in their online encyclopedia, miraculously succeeding where more carefully curated online encyclopedias had failed. YouTube provided mechanisms whereby anyone could embed their videos on any web page, without coming to the central YouTube portal.

Twitter took off because it allows anyone to follow status updates from anyone else by default—you have to take an extra step to make your updates privatein stark contrast to previous social networks that required approval. As Sunstein and Thaler wrote: A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions…. If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect. If you are a doctor and must describe the alternative treatments available to a patient, you are a choice architect.

If you design the form that new employees fill out to enroll in the company health plan, you are a choice architect. If you are a parent, describing possible educational options to your son or daughter, you are a choice architect. And of course, if you are designing a government program, you are a choice architect. The ideas of Thaler and Sunstein have great relevance to areas such as agricultural policy why are we subsidizing corn syrup when we face an obesity epidemic?

And even though none of these things is a formal specification, it is a set of design principles that guide the design of the platform we are collectively trying to build.

The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables platform, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways. Fortunately, Vivek Kundra and others in the administration understand this distinction, and are providing data for both purposes. This would be like thinking that enabling comments on a website is the beginning and end of social media!

Participation means true engagement with citizens in the business of government, and actual collaboration with citizens in the design of government programs. For example, the Open Government Brainstorming conducted by the White House is an attempt to truly engage citizens in the making of policy, not just to hear their opinions after the fact.

When anyone can write a citizen-facing application using government data, software developers have an opportunity to create new interfaces to government. Perhaps most interesting are applications and APIs that allow citizens to actually replace functions of government, in a self-service analogue to Craigslist.

For example, FixMyStreeta project developed by UK nonprofit mySociety, made it possible for citizens to report potholes, broken streetlights, graffiti, and other problems that would otherwise have had to wait on an overworked government inspector.

This concept has now been taken up widely by forward-thinking cities as well as entrepreneurial companies like SeeClickFixand there is even a standard— Open311 —for creating APIs to city services of this kind, so that third-party developers can create applications that will work not just for one city, but for every city. Taking the idea of citizen self-service even further, you can imagine government using a platform like Meetup to support citizens in self-organizing to take on major projects that the government would otherwise leave undone.

Today, there are thousands of civic-minded meetups around issues like beach, road, and waterway cleanups. How many more might there be if local governments themselves embraced the idea of harnessing and supporting citizen concerns as expressed by self-organized meetups? Instead, they pulled together machinery and manpower and hit the ground running March And after only eight days, all of the repairs were done, Pleas said. It was a shockingly quick fix to a problem that may have taken much longer if they waited for state money to funnel in….

Or at most, a collective effort to raise money. What the rebuilding of the washed-out road in Polihale State Park teaches us is that we can do more than that.

We can rediscover the spirit of public service, and apply the DIY spirit on a civic scale. Citizen self-organization is a powerful concept. And even today, volunteer fire departments play a major role in protecting many of our communities.

Traditional communities still perform barn raisings. Those of us who spend our time on the Internet celebrate Wikipedia, but most of us have forgotten how to do crowdsourcing in the physical world. The reflex exerted by government to gather new information, whether in pursuit of spreading around money for housing or planning its next steps in Afghanistan, is to convene an advisory committee of experts. A whole set of laws and regulations, such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act FACAcontrols this process.

Such panels are typically drawn from a limited group of academics and industry experts. A list of these advisors would no doubt show a familiar pattern of high-ranking universities.

Recent popular research on crowdsourcing and the wisdom of crowds suggests a totally different approach. Asking everybody for input generates better results than just asking the experts. Certainly, a single recognized expert will tend to offer better facts, predictions, or advice than a random individual. But put a few dozen random individuals together—on the right kind of task—and the facts, predictions, or advice that shake out are better than what the experts alone produce.

The reasons behind the success of crowdsourcing are still being investigated, but the key seems to be this: in a mix of right and wrong answers, the wrong ones tend to cancel each other out, leaving the right ones. On relatively uncontroversial articles, contributors are expected to discuss their differences and reach consensus.

This process is aided by a rarely cited technical trait of web pages: because they present no artificial space limitations, there can always be room for another point of view. On controversial topics, Wikipedia has over the years developed more formal mechanisms, but the impetus for change still wells up from the grassroots.

Crowdsourcing has already slipped into government procedures in low-key ways. Governments already use input from self-appointed members of the public on all kinds of things, ranging from reports of potholes to anonymous tips that put criminals behind bars. One of the key skills required of both technologists and government officials is how best to aggregate public opinion or data produced by public actions to reveal new information or patterns.

For example, cities learn a lot about neighborhoods by aggregating crime reports from residents. Some of those applications may operate on existing government data, but they can also be designed to collect new data from ordinary people, in a virtuous circle by which private sector applications like SeeClickFix increase the intelligence and responsiveness of government.

Governments are more likely to use some form of filtering than to rely on public consensus, as Wikipedia does. The combination of free debate among the public and some adult supervision from a government official makes a powerful combination, already seen in the open government brainstorming session mentioned in Lesson 3.

Finally, crowds can produce data without even realizing it—implicit data that smart programmers can collect and use to uncover whole worlds of information. In fact, smart programmers in the private sector have been doing that for years. Lesson 5 covers this trend. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin, not Tim Berners-Lee, who figured out how to turn the World Wide Web into a tool that revolutionized business.

Such stories suggest how technology advances, as each new generation stands on the shoulders of preceding giants. Fundamental technology breakthroughs are often not exploited by their creators, but by a second generation of entrepreneurs who put it to work. Sometimes they come from those who break the rules.

Yet today, Google Maps is the dominant mapping platform by most measures. How did this happen? When Google Maps was introduced, it featured a cool new AJAX Asynchronous JavaScript and XML interface that made it easy to dynamically drag and zoom the map. But there was a hidden feature as well, soon discovered by independent developers. Because JavaScript is interpreted code, it was possible to extract the underlying map coordinate data.

What did Google do? Competitors, who had long had mapping APIs but locked them up behind tightly controlled corporate developer programs, failed to seize the opportunity.

There are potent lessons here for governments opening up access to their data via APIs. Developers may use platform APIs in unexpected ways. This is a good thing. In this regard, consider an instructive counterexample to Google Maps from the government sector. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority recently attempted to stop the distribution of an iPhone app called StationStops, which provides schedule information for Metro-North trains.

After a legal battle, the MTA relented. Open data is a powerful way to enable the private sector to do just that. Open data is important not just because it is a key enabler of outside innovation. To explain, we require a brief excursion.

As the IBM PC—built from commodity off-the-shelf parts—became dominant, hardware margins declined, over time becoming razor thin. Virtually all of the greatest Internet success stories, from eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon through Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are data-driven companies.

In particular, they are companies whose databases have a special characteristic: they get better the more people use them, making it difficult for competitors to enter the market.

Once eBay or Craigslist had a critical mass of buyers and sellers, it became far more difficult for competitors to enter the market. Once Google established a virtuous circle of network effects among its AdWords advertisers, it was hard for others to achieve similar results. The Internet business ecosystem can thus be seen as a competition to establish monopolies over various classes of data. What does this have to do with Government 2. If data is indeed the coin of the realm of Internet business models, it stands to reason that companies will find advantage in taking data created at public expense, and working to take brokerage of that data for private gain.

Consider the story of Routesy, an application providing iPhone users with bus arrival data in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like StationStops in New York, it was taken down from the iPhone App Store after a legal complaint.

While Muni the San Francisco transit authority was supportive of Routesy and believed that its data was public, the contract that Muni had signed with technology provider NextBus allowed NextBus to claim copyright in the data. The San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority has now released an XML API to the NextBus data. Yet in many ways, the breakthroughs in Web have often come from exploring a far wider range of possibilities for collaboration: Just as Google has become the bellwether company of the Internet era, it is actually systems for harnessing implicit participation that offer some of the greatest opportunities for Government There are great examples to be found in health care.

We have all the data we need—generated by the interactions of our citizens with our health care system—to understand how to better align costs and outcomes. Taking this idea to its full potential, we need to get beyond transparency and, as Google did with AdWords, start building data-driven feedback loops right into the system.

The real magic is that Google uses all its data expertise to directly benefit its users by automatically providing better search results and more relevant advertisements.

The most amazing thing about Google is how dynamically the prices for its advertising are set. Every single Google search has its own automated ad auction. The price is set dynamically, matching supply and demand, seven or eight billion times a day.

Only financial markets operate at this kind of speed and scale. Currently, an outside advisory board makes recommendations to Congress on appropriate Medicare reimbursement rates.

Technology would allow us to actually manage reimbursements in much the same way as Google dynamically adjusts its algorithms to produce optimal search results and optimal ad placements. Google takes into account hundreds of factors; so too could a Medicare rate-setting algorithm.

When hospitals in Michigan instituted a simple process to prevent some of these infections, it nearly eliminated them. If Medicare reduced payments for the treatment of such infections, it would give hospitals a huge financial incentive to prevent them…. There are a handful of possible treatments for early-stage prostate cancer, and the fastest-growing are the most expensive.

But no one knows which ones work best. As a result, I do suspect that this kind of innovation will come first from the private sector, which will trounce its competition in the same way wiki Google trounced its competitors in the search advertising market.

Real-time linkage of health costs and outcomes data will lead to wholesale changes in medical practice when an innovative health care provider uses them to improve its effectiveness and lower its costs. Such a breakthrough would sooner or later be copied by less effective providers. So rather than attempting to enforce better practices through detailed regulations, a Government approach would use open government data to enable innovative private sector participants to improve their products and services.

And brokerage the extent that the government itself is a health care provider as with the Veterans Administration or medical insurer as with Medicareit can best move the ball forward by demonstrating in its own operations that it has been able to harness technology to get the job done better and more cost-effectively. But far too often, government programs are designed as though there is only one right answer, and with the assumption that the specification developed by a project team must by definition be correct.

In reality, for most projects, failure is an option. In fact, technology companies embrace failure, experimentation, and rapid iteration. This has been true long before the latest wave of technology companies. I succeeded 10,000 times in figuring out something that did not work. But even within a single company, one of the advantages of web-based business models is the ease of experimentation.

Government requires a new approach to the design of programs, not as finished products, perfected in a congressional bill, executive order, or procurement specification, but as ongoing experiments. Quite frankly, this is likely the greatest challenge in Government 2. This is all the more reason why government programs must be designed from the outset not as a fixed set of specifications, but as open-ended platforms that allow for extensibility and revision by the marketplace.

Platform wiki is an antidote to the complete specifications that currently dominate the government approach not only to IT but to programs of all kinds.

A cultural change is also required. Software and web culture not only embraces this mindset, but revels in it—you never know which idea will be the million-dollar idea. Finally, it is essential for best practices—and even brokerage code—to be shared between agencies of the federal government, between states, and between municipalities. The idea that we have to choose between government providing services to citizens and leaving everything to the private sector is a false dichotomy.

Being a platform provider means government stripped down to the essentials. First, it built a device with remarkable new features and a suite of applications that showed off their power.

A great platform provider does things that are ahead of the curve and that take time for the market to catch up to. This is a model for every government app store to follow. It is true that the sheer size and scope of the federal data sets, as well as the remoteness of many of them from the everyday lives of citizens, makes for a bigger challenge. Once again, consider health care. If the government wants buy-in for government-run health care, we need the equivalent of an iPhone for the system, something that re-envisions the market so thoroughly that every existing player needs to copy it.

Can we create a new health insurance program that uses the lessons of technology—open standards, simplicity in design, customer self-service, measurement of outcomes, and real-time response to what is learned, not to mention access via new consumer devices—to improve service and reduce costs so radically that the entire market follows? This is the true measure of Gov does it make incremental changes to the existing system, or does it constitute a revolution?

The personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the iPhone have each managed to simultaneously bring down costs while increasing consumer choice—each by orders of magnitude. They did this by demonstrating how a radically new approach to existing solutions and business models was, quite simply, orders of magnitude better than what went before. Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Edward W. Thaler and Cass R.

Christensen and Michael E. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large Our approach follows the engineering principle of separating data from interaction, which is commonly used in constructing websites.

Given this uncertainty, the best policy is not to hope government will choose the one best way, but to rely on private parties with their vibrant marketplace of engineering ideas to discover what works Service-Oriented Architecture at Amazon Each of those pieces that make up the e-commerce platform are actually separate services.

Instead, HTML documents are ordinary, human-readable text files. This idea was the reversal of one taken for granted in previous hypertext systems, that links must always be two-way—an agreement between the parties, so to speak. Anyone can put up a website and can link to any other website without permission. Blogging platforms made it even easier for any individual to create a site.

Later platforms like Facebook and Twitter are also platform of this kind of explicit participation First-generation web giants like Yahoo!

Craigslist replaced newspaper classified advertising by turning it all into a self-service business, right down to the policing of inappropriate content, having users flag postings that they find offensive. First, the PageRank algorithm that Larry Page and Sergey Brin created while still at Stanford was based on the realization that every link on the World Wide Web was a kind of vote on the value of the site being pointed to by that link.

Second, Google realized that it could provide better advertising results not by selling advertisements to the highest bidder, but by measuring and predicting user click-through rates on ads.

Google could only deliver these results by understanding that every click on a Google search result is a kind of user contribution. Since then, Google has gone on to mine user participation in many other aspects of its core business as well as in new businesses, including speech recognition, location-based services, automated translation, and much more.

Google is a master at extracting value from implicit participation. It makes use of data that its users provide simply in going about their lives on the Internet to provide them with results that quite literally could not exist without them Each year, about 100,000 people die from preventable infections they contract in a hospital.

San Francisco Mayor Wiki Newsom has done just that. You might consider his Open Data Executive Directive as a model. This might mean wiki your work as open source software, working platform other governmental bodies to standardize web services for common functions, building a common cloud computing platform, or simply sharing best practices.

Open311 is a great example of an open standard being adopted by many cities. A Peace Corps for Programmers.