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Platform strategy or more specifically API strategy is a very effective starting point from which to debate the many flavors and degrees of ‘open’ that play out on the Internet.

For me, the open API debate is all about catering to the means of production.

Developers want data to be hosted by machines at some URL that they don’t have to worry about. When they are building things, they like the data output from those sources to be structured in clean formats and easy to obtain in different ways.

Give them good materials to build with and maintain low overheads.  They will build better things as a result.  Your costs go down.  Your output and your ceiling of opportunity go up.  It’s that simple really.

Of course, there are certainly many nuances.

When Mathew Ingram of GigaOm recently posed the challenge that Twitter and NYT face a similar business model issue around openness he was right to point out the difference between NYT and the Guardian’s approaches to APIs.

The New York Times has experimented with open APIs, which give outside developers access to its data for use in third-party services or features…But the traditional media player that has taken this idea the furthest is The Guardian newspaper in Britain — which launched an “open platform” project in 2010, offering all of its data to outside developers through an API. Doing this has been a core part of Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger’s concept of “open journalism.”

It’s useful to have an example of where an open API creates value.  The Guardian Facebook app is a good example both in terms of innovation with partners but also in terms of real commercial value.

The concept for the app had already been explored months before Facebook announced seamless sharing.  Michael Brunton-Spall, Lisa van Gelder and Graham Tackley built a clever app they called Social Guardian at a Hack Day.

When FB then gave us the opportunity to build something for their launch, we obviously took it.  The app was built by a 3rd party in record time, and it subsequently took off like a rocket.

As we all know, Facebook adjusted their algorithm and tempered the explosive growth, but it should be considered a success by any measure.  It was built quickly and executed well.  It cost us very little. Users adopted it very quickly.  It generated huge buzz for our brand and introduced the Guardian to a whole new audience we weren’t reaching.

It also drove dramatic traffic levels back to the Guardian web site which we then turned into advertising revenue for the business.

Martin Belam posted a detailed case study of the app here and here.

However, while we’ve pushed the envelope on openness and commercial leverage for APIs in the newspaper world, there are other API pure play businesses like NewsCred who have expressed the open API strategy for content in an even more complete form.

They are a content API warehouse. As a developer, if you are working on a digital product that could use some high quality articles or video from brand name media sources then you would be wise to browse the NewsCred catalog.

But NewsCred doesn’t allow just anyone to drop a feed of content directly into their platform. They want to curate relationships with their sources and their API customers…they make money being in the middle.

What’s the trajectory on the sliding scale of open APIs?

There was an interesting marketplace forming several years ago around similar types of businesses we’re seeing today that never completely catalyzed.  It might be instructive to look at that space with fresh eyes.

The blog, RSS feed and personal start page triple play was a perfect storm of networked information innovation in 2004 or so. Several companies including Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s company did very well executing an open platform strategy and exiting at the right moment.

Today the new blog includes context in addition to words and pictures. RSS feeds evolved into APIs. And personal start pages learned to listen to our behaviors.

The killer open strategy now would be one that can unify those forces into a self-reinforcing amplifier.

Arguably, Facebook already did that, but they’ve applied a portal-like layer to the idea creating a destination instead of an ecosystem.  They are also using personal connections as the glue that brings out the best in these 3 things.

That is only one approach to this space.  Another approach is to do one of those things really really well.

Twitter, Tumblr and WordPress are doing great on the creation side, but they need to keep an eye on open participation platforms that marry context with content. Mass market API activity is nascent but bound to explode again given how important APIs are for developers. FlipBoard and some newcomers are reinventing the old idea of automated aggregation through better packaging and smarter recommendation algorithms.

Enter the business model question.

The old saying, “if you build it they will come” doesn’t apply to participation in the same way it can sometimes work for information and entertainment.

However, active participation is possible and potentially very meaningful when the conditions for swarming exist.  If bidirectionality is the way forward for media then it seems to me that great success lies ahead if editors and advertisers can evolve their models to fuel swarming projects.

The business of publishing online has come a long way since the early days of broadcast web sites and banner ads, though the high impact story or campaign is still very elusive on the Internet.

News operations are tackling this problem by adopting cultures of participation, and brands are getting wiser to the power of direct relationships with people.

John Battelle has been exploring this trend brands are making and even goes as far as stating that “all brands are publishers“:

“Dictating a message to your audience is no longer acceptable. Consumers online expect dialogue, so pairing your brand with relevant and passion-driven topics is one of the best ways to ensure that you are engaged with key audiences.”

Now, publishing and having conversations is much better than interrupting people, but this strategy can easily become broadcast disguised as conversation if you’re not careful.

Even worse, that strategy can reinforce the dependency on the major network firehoses where people spend their time online and create a layer of context between the individual and the source instead of the direct and meaningful relationship both publishers and advertisers want to have with people.

There is another way, a better way for everyone involved.

Swarm intelligence is about simple beings following simple rules, each one acting on local information.  National Geographic published an influential feature in 2007 talking about how the swarm tactics of ants and bees have inspired new transport systems and even military tactics.

“Decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.”

The mathematical challenges inherent in this type of world view are considerable, which, of course, makes swarm intelligence projects very alluring for most alpha geeks.

Author John Robb described how this swarming approach has fueled a new kind of protest movement, recently demonstrated by the Occupy demonstrations.  He says, “Open source protest is an organizational technique.”

It’s made up of a few key ingredients, described here by mathematics professor Lee Worden(*):

• Plausible promise: An simple goal that people can get behind, that you can believably offer
• Open invitation: you don’t have to agree on everything, just on what we are doing
• Many leaders: let everyone innovate, do multiple things at once. Support anyone in a leadership role that either a) grows the movement or b) advances the movement closer to its goal. Oppose (ignore) anybody that proposes a larger, more complex agenda or those that claim ownership over the movement.
• Open source: If a new technique works, document it, use it again, and share it with everyone else. Copy everything that works.
• Spread the word of the movement as widely as possible.

It’s the antithesis of the Baby Boomer protest model which was about a collective barricade, a massive force of immovable inertia.

The open source protest conditions are not exclusive to a protest.  They are natural tendencies that draw on human emotion and our sense of purpose.  We want to belong to something and to participate in that thing, even if it’s just a small role in the overall goal.

This is precisely where media and marketing brands need to focus now.

How do you either initiate or participate in meangingful swarming activity?

We all know now that collaboration in and of itself is not interesting as an objective.  But when a project does have a purpose collaborating with people from around the world who have varying views and levels of expertise can be absolutely thrilling.  Ask anyone who contributes substantially to an open source project of any shape or size.

Just like open source protests or open source software development, swarming media activities tend to share the same principles and include the same ingredients – a widely understood purpose, simple little participatory actions that feed into the whole, a high level of openness in the system, authoritative advocates and demonstrable leadership among them at least on a part-time basis, repeatability when successes appear and efficient ways to share learnings, and strong signals to participate spreading far and wide.

There can be big successes with swarming activities in a more task-like point solution approach.  It’s the viral marketing equivilent of breaking the Billboard Top 10 list.  We experienced this in dramatic fashion at the Guardian with the MPs Expenses scandal.

Creating a more long term and sustainable solution for swarming activities that modify themselves, adjust over time, and fluctuate in intensity is a bit more complicated.

I would have trouble believing that either Jimmy Wales or Jack Dorsey had an explicit plan for turning their swarming engines into global phenomenons.  They had a lot of help and a bit of luck along the way.  That said, you can be sure they both intuitively understood the open source model and how to both lead and get out of the way at the right time.

I suspect many alpha geeks, as Tim O’Reilly calls them, will continue to find success working on various approaches to swarming tools and technologies over the next few years.  Media organizations would be wise to think more broadly about swarming strategies and specifically about how to use these techniques in the news agenda and in branding campaigns.

It would be presumptuous to say we have an answer with the n0tice platform, but its undeniably capable of serving this function for customers who want to use it for swarming projects.

For example, look at the recently launched Best Bookshops project on the Guardian which is sponsored by National Book Tokens.

Both the Guardian editors and National Book Tokens are clever to imagine an activity that encourages people to reacquaint themselves with their local bookshops.  It’s an interesting editorial proposition and a brilliantly selfless brand campaign that encourages people to do something good for themselves and local business.

They are clever to approach that campaign in a way that will fuel a collective interest in spending time at local bookshops through a swarming exercise rather than trying to push the idea on people.

It’s also interesting how many different constituents are involved in this idea.  In addition to Guardian editors and the advertiser, National Book Tokens, bookshops across the UK are collectively posting events on the Bookshops noticeboard, and people are encouraged to post photos of their experiences at their local bookshops.

There’s a shared experience at the local level that feeds a larger context with an understood purpose: local bookshops matter.  To reinforce this larger purpose the campaign offers a unified view of the swarming activity presented as a map residing on the Guardian web site.  It will continue to live there indefinitely.

Everybody wins here.  People become reacquainted with their local bookshops.  Bookshops build better ties with their community.  National Book Tokens strengthens its brand and its role with bookshops and book shoppers.  The Guardian earns money from the sponsorship and provides a great service to its readers.  And n0tice builds a stronger user base across the n0tice network.

It’s a classic case of generative media in action.

The swarming media concept may need adjusting a few times before people get it right.  But the Internet is ideally suited for it.

Sometimes I wonder, actually, is it possible that swarming activities are THE network-native format for successful campaigns?  It’s early days still, but the opportunity seems absolutely massive.

I used to spend a lot of time on the San Francisco – Sunnyvale Caltrain route.  Though my wife remembers that I complained a lot about how much time it took, I mostly only recall the enjoyable time spent blogging, listening to new podcasts and thinking hard about where the Internet was heading.

One of the themes I would keep coming back to over and over was inspired by John Hagel and John Seely Brown talking about motorcycle manufacturing in China.  It’s the idea that networks of activity can form a better whole when the nodes or the edges in the network can operate with autonomy and authority – fueled by a collective purpose rather than answering to an imposed one.  Hagel and Seely Brown call it Edge Economics.

The concepts stuck with me, and I began to value different kinds of projects happening out there across the Internet.  While it didn’t take off the way many hoped, Outside.in, for example, was groundbreaking in its ideas.  It was part of a movement toward generative media and the idea of media as a platform.

At about the same time the photosharing revolution was in full swing.  Admittedly, the Flickr concept didn’t really capture me until after the Yahoo! acquisition, and even then it wasn’t real to me until I got a phone that could publish images instantly to Flickr (the Nokia 6630, to be exact).

One of those ah-hah moments hit me after the train I was on smashed a truck at a crossing, and I captured a photo of the surprising damage done to the train.  The truck was a mile behind us by the time we actually stopped and evacuated the scene.  The driver was fine, apparently.

I was very eager to get that photo out there knowing that the Caltrain commute was going to be awful for everyone in both directions that morning.  But at that time there was no way to spread information about the incident and the photo evidence to anyone in the area unless they were already my friends.

Now, there are many twists and turns in the story of the Internet since then that have altered the way I value projects happening in both startups and elsewhere.  But the principles of empowering people and organizations at the edges, linking media platforms to activities happening at those edges, and fueling collective behaviors through useful actions have been constant, at least in my mind.

The Guardian has given me some room to explore these old ideas with some new concepts that are important to the future of journalism and the news business.  And as of this week we now have the seeds of a potentially very interesting approach to citizen journalism in the form of an open platform called n0tice.

There are 3 elements of the service, a web site for users at n0tice.com, a set of tools for partners at n0tice.org, and now finally a n0tice iPhone app that lets you see and post what’s happening near you wherever you are right now.

This idea is not new.  It’s pretty old, actually.  It is basically just an evolution of the public noticeboard or shared bulletin board.  Email tackled this idea with mailing lists back in the ’80’s.  The web made it possible for open directories to do the same.  And now that the social, local and mobile worlds have collided it is happening once again.

But rather than try to centralize the entire networked universe on a single platform to rule them all, we’ve worked very hard to put the power of this idea into people’s hands in ways that helps them in what they already do out there today using tools that they already know.

n0tice can be used as a completely invisible partner through our APIs.  There are a few ways that n0tice can be used as an open and public complement to a WordPress site, for example.  Equally, the n0tice user experience can be bent and shaped for a customer’s specific needs through the use of self-serve white label noticeboards.  People can create their own branded version of n0tice which comes free with web analytics, moderation tools, and a few sharing and viral features for getting traction quickly.

Crucially, we try to create value in the network edges by helping people make money when they spend time making n0tice work for them.  Everyone understands the classifieds model, and we’ve iterated on that idea as one of the many value engines that the n0tice platform offers.

There is still a very long way to go to realize the potential in this kind of platform, and it won’t be without challenges.  For example, we’re very aware that n0tice could be perceived as yet-another-social-media-site if we fail to demonstrate how it can be an engine for healthy community activities.  Also, the n0tice team is very small still, and if we fail to evolve the product as fast as the core users want we could lose their enthusiasm and, worse, their trust and loyalty.  Early users of the service have been unusually supportive of the effort, so far.

What we’ve accomplished so far has been really really fun and interesting to do.  We hope other people see the value in the project and help us expand the scope further and in directions we haven’t yet considered.  I think success at this stage would mean that, in order, 1) a wide range of partners use the API for a wide range of concepts, 2) the iPhone app gets some decent uptake and a healthy percentage of users are on it daily, and 3) the noticeboards on n0tice.com become active public spaces where groups are collaborating.

If any one of those things happen then we’ll be growing a generative media platform, a space where many people are benefitting from the presence and actions of the others in the network.

Now that all 3 services are live and public – n0tice.com, n0tice.org and the n0tice iPhone app – it feels like we’re already somewhere along that journey.

I have to say it… I love it when a plan comes together.

 

I had the good fortune of attending the Paley Center’s International Council in Madrid: “News at the Speed of Life: A Global Conversation on the Reinvention of Journalism”

There were some very interesting themes on where journalism is heading including views from Facebook, Google, BBC, El Pais, Zeit Online, Hearst and some groundbreaking new services like Ushahidi and Newscred.

While the diversity of approaches seemed very healthy I was struck by an apparent divide between those who view technology as a threat to journalism vs those who see it as integral to its evolution.

Some, such as the Economist, have taken the view that platforms like the iPad may finally give them the digital positioning they’ve struggled to capture, a concession that nothing else digital has yet worked as well as print has for them in the past.

While others, such as Brazil’s Abril and Digital First Media, are seeking new ways to embrace all digital platforms and create new opportunities for themselves for the future.

In other words, technology is happening TO some media companies while others are making it work FOR them.

The danger in the victimized view is that the market will eventually erode every advantage your brand has achieved over many years. New startups will replace things your core business once benefitted from doing internally, and capabilities in the dominant technology platforms will squeeze out things you’ve always done your way by offering another, perhaps even more relevant version of the same.

Andrew Rashbass’ refreshingly humble perspective from the Economist is admirable, in many ways. In true British style he sarcastically noted that their failure in the past was not inventing the iPad. That’s not something any news org would’ve had the talent or resources to do.

Equally, I couldn’t help but think that the failure to try to think big even if it amounts to preposterous ideas is precisely why many traditional journalism outfits are struggling to make digital businesses really sing.

Success is not about developing a sustainability strategy. Reducing or offsetting the rate of decline is really more of a job protection plan. The best offense may be great defense, but you still have to score.

Actually being successful is about creating a meaningful business, a relevant business, one that makes money as a natural outcome of its value to people in their lives.

Given how dramatically technology is affecting the relationship people have with information and how important information is becoming in our lives, you can’t afford to play wait and see.

It’s not enough to not say ‘no’ to change.

Fueling new ways of approaching everything about the way journalism works and the business of media itself has to be a core competency at the very least. Otherwise, market forces will continue to happen TO you until you have nothing left but an ageing mission statement that you can’t execute.

The last 9 months we used n0tice to put into practice some of the things that I’ve learned the last decade or so about development and some of the things that I always wanted to try but didn’t have the chance.

Anyone who has ever worked in a startup will recognize most of what I describe here, but I think the way the n0tice team operates also has some lessons for larger projects happening in larger groups, as well.

The n0tice team is made up of 1 lead developer (Daniel Levitt) who drives the web site and most of the new concepts, 1 community strategist (Sarah Hartley) who sets the tone and spends time working face-to-face with customers, 1 infrastructure man (Tony McCrae) who not only handles plumbing but also builds services like the API, a mobile development pair (more on them later) who are designing and writing the iOS app, an apprentice (Andre Moses) supporting our social media efforts, and a host of volunteers, occasional contract help, and a cast of supporters who help us out along the way when they can (or when we ask).

Almost everyone has a hand in at least one other major project in addition to n0tice.

We chat most mornings at 11am for about 30 minutes, not always. None of us sit together physically. We try to work together in the same space every two weeks for an afternoon, not always. There are no other meetings.

We decide what to build as individuals, though everyone shares what they’re doing so we can talk about the work and feed ideas to each other.

I like the principles of agile development, but I’ve never found it great at handling multidisciplinary activity, particularly when you are dependent on the talents of the people around you as opposed to the timeline or milestones.

So, as a result, we just let everyone work at their own pace, doing what they can do when they can do it, united on a direction of travel.

We choose release dates based on when something is ready or when it might make sense for co-dependencies to join up. In some cases, a date is a codependency, but generally we care more about what is built rather than when it’s built.

Everyone uses their favorite tools to build whatever they are building. That means we’re running multiple programming languages, but you don’t have to trade simplicity for creativity if you can loosely join separate systems through a service-like approach…even with a relatively small stack like the n0tice stack. It seems to actually make scalability easier, too.

I’m as guilty as the next person who cares about their work of micromanaging, but I think I’ve solved that problem for myself and the team and the effort by attracting individuals who are not just talented but also very very creative. We can therefore deflect any tendencies I may have to define solutions to things because we all know that I could never have a better solution to a problem than the person responsible for the problem.

They force me to stay focused on where we’re going rather than how we’re getting there.

We pay close attention to what our users say. We setup a Google Group early in the process and invited people to say whatever they want. And they do. We also spent time face-to-face with many of the beta users to ask their opinions of changes before we completed them. We know what we want to do, but we take care to marry our ideas with their desires.

The whole effort is guided by a few principles that everyone on the team can interpret individually.

Everything ultimately serves the vision: “what’s happening near you.” Observe constantly and respond quickly. Think in a network native way. Technologies and tools are there to empower people, not the other way around.

We certainly benefit from being close to the Guardian, too.

We have internal advisors looking over our shoulders like Guardian platform architect Graham Tackley, and we get bursts of insight from UX specialists like Martin Belam and Alastair Jardine. We can test ideas out on the Guardian editors, mobile teams and ad sales teams. We also get informal advice from some of the Guardian executives and some very insightful external advisors who check that we’re not being stupid.

Now, all of this is less of a method and more like a state of play.

We can be sure that the next 12 months will change around us and that users will change what n0tice means. But we’ve taken great care to make adaptation a core competency so that the core factors that got us to where we are now continue to help us do well.

That’s a principle inherent in the medium itself.  The Internet is a messy, ever-changing, human-powered, technically and creatively diverse platform that means different things to different people.  In my view, succeeding online means aligning what you’re doing with how the Internet works and the characteristics that make it meaningful and interesting and important in the world.

It feels like we’re on that journey with n0tice, so far.

Of course, all of this is a recipe for building stuff.  What we haven’t yet proven is whether or not what we’re building fully captures people’s imaginations and becomes important in their communities.

Hopefully, I’ll have a blog post like this in about 6 or 9 months time describing an approach for successfully empowering healthy community activity, too.

Today we are removing the invite-only door on n0tice.com and opening up for the world to join us. The announcement details are posted on the n0tice blog here. But I’ll use this space to share some of the thinking behind what we’re doing.

There’s a really interesting film from the mid-90’s called Smoke. Harvey Keitel plays a shopkeeper who takes a picture of the street from his shop every day for several years.

Looking at his pictures it seems that nothing changes in some ways, but the little details that do change begin to surface. It turns out that the characters that pass through his shop are loosely connected and that their personal stories actually impact each other profoundly.

It’s a great reminder to look around and to be part of what’s happening right in front of us, something that is increasingly difficult when the network follows us everywhere we go – it’s always with us right in our pockets.

While the temptation to escape reality and spend more time in digital land is increasingly challenging, the network can unify and amplify things in meaningful ways when the digital and physical worlds come together for a purpose.

The catalysts for this symbiotic effect include things like festivals, protests, art, sports, debates, gatherings, etc. All of these things can be planned, promoted and chronicled digitally while the real experiences are shared with real people in real places physically.

The digital and physical experiences reinforce each other and make a stronger experience possible together than either the digital or physical experience operating without the other.

Can you imagine a protest without twitter or youtube today?

Photo By sierragoddess

With headphones on and eyes locked to a screen we are missing both the beauty and the danger that coexist around us. But perhaps by unifying the things happening around us with the power of the network our lives will be more meaningful, not less.

And maybe as a result we will become more interested in participating in what’s happening around us with more commitment and enthusiasm, too.

It’s this idea and many other inspirations that set the stage for us to build n0tice:

We applied some ideas from a fun little game developed by Tom Taylor and Tom Armitage called noticings – a game about learning to look at the world around you. It was also inspired by aspects of the street art movement – an attempt to wake people up, and an attempt to have conversations in, about and because of public spaces.

Of course, we’ve learned a lot from Twitter, Foursquare and many other successful platforms, too. We’ve witnessed incredible innovation over the last 3 years or so, and n0tice is benefitting from those advances. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.

But we’re also hopeful that n0tice can play an important new role in your world, helping you to become part of your surroundings.

Take a moment every day to notice what’s happening near you. Look closer. Listen carefully. Get to know the stories that you didn’t notice before.

Help others notice what’s happening nearby, too. Post photos. Report what you notice.

If there’s one thing we hope n0tice can do it’s that it may encourage us to be better participants and keen observers in the world.  By using the power of the digital network to amplify what’s important and interesting in the world around us perhaps the concept of a community will be more meaningful to everyone.

The n0tice team decided that we should join the SOPA protest.  We’ll be self-censoring the web site on January 18 and blocking our own users from participating.

The full explanation of why we are participating is on the n0tice blog, but here are a few of the excerpts:

We believe the role of law and politics in an open environment like the Internet should not be to create weapons for fighting bad behavior but rather to set boundaries and to mediate acceptable behavior.

Capitalism is an adaptive system, and the TV and music industries will find other ways, perhaps better ways to make money and fund creative works.  There are many models and success stories appearing everywhere including within their own businesses that will help them transition to more network-friendly, digitally sophisticated business models.

They don’t need and shouldn’t have the power to take down an entire web site because of a copyright claim.

Inasmuch as the initial concept for these bills questioned the state of protections for people and businesses on open networks, we are in agreement. We want laws that protect people from harm. We want politicians to raise awareness of threats to civility.

The solution to those problems, as we see it, is about supporting open spaces, protecting open spaces and collectively reinforcing positive behaviors.

I don’t consider myself a very political person.  I take a lot of time to decide what I think about stuff, and I find it difficult seeing any issue through totally black and white lenses.

But I’m conscious that the Internet is going through some difficult growing pains right now, and this issue may reinforce a way of thinking that threatens the founding principles that have made the Internet such a positive force in the world.

Of course, there’s no doubt that the team agreed to support this protest out of self-interest.  The bills are a direct threat to what n0tice and the many services like us are all about.

Plus, sometimes taking sides has other effects.  It’s character-building for a startup like n0tice.  It helps us and our users to understand what our brand means, what really matters to us, who we want to associate with, and why we’re here.

We all felt that this is one of those moments when we could do something very small to help with something very big.  I can’t imagine a better way to frame the n0tice culture.

It wasn’t until we stumbled onto the name n0tice.com that I started paying closer attention to noticeboards.

You probably see them around you, too, now and again, and you probably read 1 or 2 things that catch your eye.  But you probably don’t think much about them.

It’s because you don’t have to.  They just work.  Like magic.  Everyone just knows what they’re for and how to use them.

In the 1980’s and 90’s the dial-up online bulletin board systems or BBS’s made the noticeboard concept come alive in the digital space based on what technology was available at the time.  Email enabled mailing lists that acted like noticeboards.  And, of course, the web and Netscape made browsable noticeboards possible in digital space, such as Craigslist.
But few models for community noticeboards have taken off in a social-local-mobile world, so far.

Now, I don’t count Facebook because I don’t think most people in a local community know each other well enough personally to connect on Facebook, nor do they intend to.  Location can be a great starting point for social activity in ways that your known contacts can’t provide.

We may or may not have the answer to the new digital noticeboard with n0tice, but I think we’ve made something pretty fun in that space.

The past month we’ve been inviting people to join us on the platform, as we release new features and experiment with this theme.

The release today is a big one for us.  We’ve added the ability to create your own n0ticeboard.

You can customize branding, look and feel, and subdomain.  We’ll also give you options to customize the content using some filters like following people, tags and locations, though that feature is still being developed.  The read API (RSS/JSON) will be exposed soon, too.

What started as a hack day project became a prototype which was rebuilt as a real community platform that you can see today.

We’re keeping it somewhat limited to invite-only access still or ‘Private Beta’ status.

Two people have been intimately involved in launching n0tice – Daniel Levitt and Sarah Hartley.  Daniel has worked with the Guardian’s Open Platform in the past developing both the Recipe Search and the WordPress Plugin.  Sarah is an experienced community strategist having launched the Guardian Local project and several other hyperlocal initiatives over the years.

We’ve also benefitted from the contributions of several others such as Tony McCrae who setup the backend systems, Andrew Travers who tightened the user experience, the prototype testers notably Nigel Barlow and Will Perrin, and the members of the n0tice Google Group who share their ideas with us.

These people have all shaped it into something very powerful.  In many ways they’ve created a new kind of social platform, or a really really old one reinvented for the new world.

If we can make citizen journalism possible in more contexts for more communities then I think we will have done a good thing.  If we can also make citizen journalism a financially sustainable activity then we will have done a great thing.

As we go along we are increasingly unsure of what happens next.  Participants are starting to determine what we do more and more.  So, if you want this platform to do something, please get in early and share your thoughts with us.

I think one of the most challenging conceptual blocks facing anyone whose business or interest touches the Internet in some way is the notion that the network itself is the playing field that matters, not any single node within it.

People used to obsess over making the perfect web site. Many are doing the same now with mobile apps.

Crafting the perfect product is an interesting and worthwhile pursuit, but the Internet typically rewards platforms over point solutions.

This might be the line that defines one generation vs the next.

The network natives are busy igniting activity, connecting and collecting things. They see plumbing and grid solutions to grow cities where most people are still building houses.

The really good developers have the ability to generate network activity, to fuel new data by manipulating the way people move around the Internet. They build services for the Internet and expand on data from other platforms.

Simon Willison has demonstrated this in the past with things like Wildlifenearyou, and he’s doing it again with lanyrd.com.  Aaron Straup Cope uses Flickr data and maps platforms to generate new lens through which to see our world:

“We should start to think about how we interpret data the same way that people design patterns for textiles and work with it the way they might approach a bolt of fabric to fashion any number of different objects – from a bag to a dress to a wall-hanging – out of it.”

Daniel Levitt and Tony McCrae are both looking at the world in similar ways as we build the n0tice platform for local community activity.

I’m not just talking about getting hyperdistribution to explode virally across the network.  An interesting network-native startup called Path is demonstrating how to exchange private experiences only amongst people who know eachother via the Internet.

If you’re interested in this stuff, you have to read Steve Yegge’s internal memo about Google’s challenges in the face of platform plays at Amazon and Facebook. A clearer window into what makes the big dotcoms tick has perhaps never been published before.

“A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.”

I don’t know when John Gage or whoever it was at Sun came up with the slogan “the network is the computer”, but it’s probably about 25 years since that statement catalyzed a group of people who were on a shared journey to turn the Internet into a mainstream thing.

Yet there are still too many people focused on creating, producing, delivering, and shipping things meant to be purchased and consumed. The production-consumption model still dominates the way people think.

That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that so many traditional institutions and companies and organizations repeatedly get blindsided by new ways of working that undermine everything they stand for.

We’re witnessing a recurring disruption in a very basic anthropological tendency to harness power by controlling information. The scale at which the network is able to break down towers of information power can be comprehensive, swift and seemingly violent.

It really shouldn’t surprise people anymore when this happens. Yet it does.

The network is a market that doesn’t respect secrecy, supply and demand, or many of the other traditional value levers that people have depended on for centuries.

The network respects a connected, service-like approach to the world. How can you tell if network-native thinking has changed the way you see things?

• Instead of caring about how much value you will get from your customers in exchange for your goods, you care about how much value you create for your customers with your services
• You want to help other people succeed knowing that you will benefit from their success
• You simultaneously seek ways to embed what you do into other things and to embed strengths of what others do into your things
• You view those who do the same thing as you as partners rather than competition
• You view those who take more than they give as threats
• Nothing you do is ever done

Being network-native means that the network is where conception and design happens, where manufacturing and production happens, where delivery happens, where feedback and research happens. It means that everything that you can do is done openly on the network with and amongst customers, suppliers, partners and competition.

Of course, even if you want to change the way you operate to be more network-native it’s certainly no easy task. Even the most innovative companies in the world struggle to change their core processes…look no further than the dotcom king – Google.

Amazon is a shining light in this respect. Again, as Steve Yegge notes:

“Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.”

What kind of people do you have? What is your greatest asset? Ok, now turn all that into a platform. Simple, right? 😉

There have been some incredible innovations in journalism over the past few years, particularly around fast-paced, microchunked news creation and distribution. Some might even argue the native format for news in a networked world has been discovered in the form of the Live Blog.

However, increasing the speed and reducing the size of the information bits that hit us does not inherently make us smarter.

The big, heavy, complicated issues that shape our world and our place in it can surely be discussed in native formats for the networked world, too.

What’s the best way to make stories with longer arcs that run parallel to the fast-paced news agenda more accessible to people? Issues like education reform, globalisation, ethics in biotechnology, energy security, poverty, pandemics, etc.

In the coming weeks and months we’re going to see journalist/anthropologist Joris Luyendijk openly exploring the world of finance via the Guardian. He’ll publish interviews and insights online and in print in an attempt to make this otherwise opaque industry more accessible and maybe even entertaining to everyone who is not inside the finance industry.

The tools at his disposal initially will include the many reporting capabilities available via the Guardian digital platform. The output will initially be text, data and multimedia, but he’s also interested in seeing how we could use all of his work to serve people in an ongoing way.

In the past people have turned long form journalism into books for posterity. But maybe there’s another way.

I’m guessing most people would answer ‘Wikipedia’ if asked where to find an accessible view into a complex issue. That would be an excellent answer. Most big topic pages in Wikipedia include a lot of depth including historical background, philosophical positions and good footnotes.

But the Wikipedia page is at best just one entry point on the journey toward understanding more complicated issues.

Many others now including innovative media organisations are exploring new approaches to breaking open long topics for the rest of us and showing some real success with it.

ProPublica’s analysis of educational accessibility in the United States, The Opportunity Gap, is a wonderful approach to bridging the gap between huge volumes of data and real human issues in the education system. The Economist hosts interactive debates with experts, and the New York Times is making some wonderful interactive news projects come to life. The new poll format employed after Osama bin Laden’s death to help people identify what that event meant to them was brilliant.

What these examples point to is a format that fuels better conversation rather than better packaging.

I think we can go much further still.

Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga argued in the 1930’s that play is more important to culture than we typically recognize. He was famous for saying, “Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing.”

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded a program called iCivics after she retired in 2006 designed to raise understanding and engagement in democracy. The organisation partnered with a game developer Filament Games to create several web-based games and teaching materials.

While some may argue that edutainment fails on both accounts – you don’t learn, and you don’t have fun – the ability to communicate complex issues through some form of play can be very powerful.

There are many applicable lessons about how the world really works to be learned from spending time with the Sims, Civilization, World of Warcraft and newer games like Eve online.

The world’s most successful board game ever made was an attempt to explain the economic theories of Henry George – Monopoly. In fact, an early variant of the game was actually called “The Fascinating Game of Finance.”

After listening to Joris and what he’s trying to do it’s easy to see that the player roles, game mechanics and environments for an imaginative new game are right at his fingertips. He will be talking to asset managers, brokers, lobbyists, analysts, CEOs, investors, academics and many others. They will tell him how the real game of finance works today.

Now, we don’t know how to make a good game, and we don’t even have a conception of whether we should try to create a single game or a collection of games. For example, might it make some sense to develop simple card games like Crunch – “the game for utter bankers”?

How do you keep score? What kinds of achievements will work? What’s the relationship with real world data? How does distribution work?

Also, what kinds of costs are we talking about? There are some fascinating approaches to funding and licensing games via Kickstarter, such as the NASA-backed multi-player online game. Should we use a similar model?

The first step is to initiate the discussion, set the stage for the right things to happen.

Joris will lead the way on his blog and start explaining what the real game of finance looks like and how it works.

Our hope is that we can create the environment for a real game to develop backed off what Joris finds in his research.

If you’re interested in coming along on this journey with us, please follow Joris on twitter @JLbankingblog and check in on his banking blog on the Guardian.