Up With People
The open-source revolution will change the way you do business. It will reshape the very essence of our democracy. It will empower ordinary citizens and consumers as never before. Unless, of course, it doesn’t.
Clay Tippett and Kenny Duncan maybe aren’t the first two guys people would conjure up in their imaginations when they think of how the Internet and its social-networking possibilities are changing the world. They are not goateed 20-somethings with blogs or Twitter accounts. Instead, the two men in their late 50s are longtime specialists in industrial equipment for Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Inc., the half-century-old Richmond-based company that’s the world’s largest industrial auctioneer of such things as cone crushers, articulated dump trucks and vibratory padfoot compactors.
But Tippett and Duncan found themselves going through the portal into the Digital Power to the People world two years ago when they got into an argument at a Dubai trade show about a particular loader-backhoe. After bickering at the show and on the bus trip back to their hotel about who the original manufacturer of that type of loader-backhoe was – Ford or New Holland – and various other details dredged from their memories, they thought this kind of information should be collected somewhere because guys like them aren’t going to be around forever to remember.
Dave Ritchie, one of the three brothers who founded the company, had always wanted something like that. But instead of gathering what they and others had to say in a book or even a library, the Ritchie Bros. team decided to create a “wiki” in order to collect everyone’s knowledge on industrial equipment. At first RitchieWiki was open only to employees, who wrote detailed descriptions of everything from, well, loader-backhoes to chip trailers. As of last September, the wiki is up on the Ritchie Bros. website and is open to customers and manufacturers as well, who can add their troves of information about the history and assets of various kinds of machinery.
That’s not the only way that Ritchie Bros. has tapped into the new world. Another part of the website, rbauction.com, allows potential buyers to look at the last two years of prices that people have paid for equipment sold at Ritchie auctions – an unusual move for a business that has typically relied on people not knowing that sort of information. Imagine if realtors selling houses provided prospective buyers with a complete list of what everything in the neighbourhood has sold for in the last six months. Or if car dealers provided you with a list of what people have paid for the car you’re interested in buying.
“We had always kept that data very secret. We thought that it was a competitive advantage,” says COO Bob Armstrong. And then they figured, What the heck, let’s open up the doors. The idea was that transforming the company into the go-to information bank would attract buyers. That turned out to be true.
“It’s the second-most popular feature on our site. It has helped to establish us as a central source of information,” says Armstrong. “Yes, it gave our competitors our data, but it turned out to be more of an advantage to give our customers the data than it was a drawback to give it to our competitors.” The site got five million unique visitors in 2008, and the company has seen an increase in bidders, both live and online.
What’s happening at Ritchie Bros. is just part of a seedling revolution in how businesses, governments and institutions talk to their consumers, employees and citizens – and how those groups talk to them. In the old world, the people in charge gathered information and hoarded it, dispensing it only as needed to justify a decision they were making or a limited choice they were presenting to their publics. Experts drafted policies and sent them out to the public for “feedback,” which usually resulted in only the most minor of changes (think Gateway project).
But in the era of tell-all Facebook, Wikipedia, instant news and blogs, those in charge are realizing that it’s a different world out there. People want to participate, they think they have something to say and, thanks to all the new technologies that allow them to broadcast their opinions and information, watch out – they’re going to say it. There’s barely an institution in existence that hasn’t felt the effects of that in the past five years, from Canaccord Capital (pursued by a group of Facebook-joined investors demanding the company make amends for bad advice on asset-backed commercial paper) to the RCMP (never sure when a cellphone video is going to become a piece of evidence) to Wal-Mart, the entire real estate industry, and the makers of Land Rover, which have all found themselves the target of specific blogs dedicated to exposing dubious practices.
But besides just trying to keep up, some companies and governments are trying to tap into that turbulent river of “Regular Joe” power, discovering there’s a benefit to throwing their information out to the crowd and reaping its collective wisdom. There are all kinds of names for the different parts of this movement. “Crowdsourcing” is the term businesses use for getting customers to participate in their operations, by testing software or developing applications. “Open source” is a term used more by governments and software developers to describe their initiatives to make information more available or allow large groups of people to collectively design policy or software. And “wiki” – from the Hawaiian word for “fast” and made famous by Wikipedia, the monstrously popular online encyclopedia – is becoming the generic name for any collaboratively developed body of information on a website that anyone can edit. Whatever the term or the particular practice, it’s a new form of conversation between those who have traditionally held all the information cards and those who traditionally have not.
“We’re entering a new ecosystem where the more transparent you are, the more efficient you are,” says David Eaves, a Vancouver-based freelance public-policy consultant, negotiator and open-source advocate who is part of the new generation pushing governments, in particular, to expose themselves to the new world. Eaves, also a board member of the Vision Vancouver party, has been a key driver behind Vancouver city council’s recent move to what some call “open-source government.” In May council passed a directive to staff to look at ways to release as much of the city’s enormous data collection to the public as possible, keeping security and privacy in mind. The idea is to allow anyone who wants to – a media outlet, a programming company, a passionate amateur – to develop uses for that data that city staff don’t have the time or resources to do themselves.
“Everybody outside city hall knows more, collectively, than the people inside city hall,” says Eaves. So why not use that knowledge – freeing up information for them to manipulate in creative ways and designing systems so that the city can absorb what residents have to tell them? Eaves imagines a time when Vancouverites, for example, could have an application on their iPhones that lists 10 common problems in the city – potholes, blocked grates, garbage in a lane – and any time someone passed by one of those, she could just hit a button and the location would be instantly transmitted. “All of a sudden, the city would get flooded with data.”
Those are ideas that other city governments have been tinkering with. Last fall, Washington, D.C., ran a competition called Apps for Democracy and invited participants to do whatever they wanted with random streams of city data that were put out in a form that could be easily picked up and played with. There was data on building permits, liquor licences, parking meters, crime, bike trails and a couple dozen more items. The city got 47 entries that combined data and maps to come up with different applications.
One, called Stumble Safely, mashed up the city’s crime statistics, liquor licences and maps to show which areas around city bars had the most crime, helping the inebriated to plan a safe trip back to their cars or the nearest subway station. The city shelled out $50,000 to organize the competition and give out prizes, and estimates it got $2 million worth of useful products in return. (In the obligatory Barack Obama reference required for all things progressive, the man who put together the Washington competition, that city’s chief technology officer, Vivek Kundra, is now at work in the White House developing plans to transform the federal government into a more open system.) Toronto is looking at trying to perform a similar liberation of information, while many American cities have experimented with Google partnerships, where Google develops applications for their information.
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