Collaboration Workshop

Comcast responding to a complaint by C.C. Chapman about his service. While watching his HDTV, the reception starting becoming very poor so Chapman quickly started expressing his anger on Twitter and “within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman’s house in Milford to fix the problem.”

“Comcast’s customer service was rated “poor” by 30% of respondents” and it had a strong hit after this video, which showed a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.  It was viewed over 1.2 million times with over 700 comments. Also, a website named ComcastmustDie.com was created for users to tell their stories of their experience and grievances with Comcast. It seems like Comcast finally got the message. With the emergence of Web 2.0 ordinary people can have their voice heard and create a terror of a public relations problem for companies. “Listening and acting upon what [customers] are hearing and being very proactive is different than waiting for a customer to pick up the phone and call us. We can nip it in the bud,”

Being Open: Traditionally, GM has been a very closed organization. Even internally, its different brands acted with a silo mentality. In the Alfred Sloan era, GM used espionage tactics to quell union uprisings and in the mid 20th century, GM was blamed for killing American public transportation in the Great American Streetcar Scandal. In the 1990’s GM was accused of killing the electric car so that it could sell its high margin SUVs and trucks.

GM has started by being very public and transparent about its production plans for the Chevy Volt. Also, GM is one of the few car companies to have higher executives and “Car Czar” Bob Lutz blog on a regular basis.

GM invited consumers to a newly built Web site that offered video clips and simple editing tools they could use to create ads for the Chevy Tahoe SUV. The site gained online fame after environmentalists hijacked the site’s tools to build and post ads on the site condemning the Tahoe as an eco-unfriendly gas-guzzler. GM didn’t take ads down, which caused even more online buzz. Some pundits said GM was being foolhardy, but the numbers proved otherwise. The Web site quickly attracted more than 620,000 visitors, two-thirds of whom went on to visit Chevy.com.

Participatory Urbanism promotes new styles and methods for individual citizens to become proactive in their involvement with their city, neighborhood, and urban self reflexivity. Examples of Participatory Urbanism include but are not limited to: providing mobile device centered hardware toolkits for non-experts to become authors of new everyday urban objects, generating individual and collective needs based dialogue tools around the desired usage of urban green spaces, or empowering citizens to collect and share air quality data measured with sensor enabled mobile devices. Our mobile devices are more than just personal communication tools . They are globally networked, speak the lingua franca of the city (SMS, Bluetooth, MMS), and are becoming the dominant urban processor.  We need to shatter our understanding of them as phones and celebrate them in their new role as measurement instruments. 

Mr. Eich launched his business online with a domain called "My toys need a name,"

He devotes a minimum of 50 hours weekly to his toy business, including about 10 hours on his blog.

"I grew up online and have been involved with social media for a long time," says Mr. Eich, who spent part of his childhood in Africa, often playing with simple wooden toys. "When I began, I had practically zero money and no tools to do a big business plan, but I knew I wanted to do this toy company. So I created a framework online and asked for people's ideas and feedback. It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that."