John Speck is a partner and the Web 2.0 consultant at New Commons, a Providence-based think tank. He also writes The Bucket Blog, a site that chronicles and analyzes life in Pawtucket. Speck ran the marketing firm Real Advertising until he merged its operations with New Commons in January.
PBN: What is New Commons? What do you do there?
SPECK: New Commons is a think tank/consultancy – we’re sort of a different kind of think tank. Most think tank-type consultancies generate huge reports that they write about your organization, and then they go away and leave you with the report and the report typically just goes on a shelf. We are more interested in becoming engaged in projects that have an implementation phase.
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We say: think, link, do. We want to find new ideas, fresh thinking, and be out on the cutting edge of what’s going on in the areas that we service – and they tend to be community- or organizationally related. We help organizations develop strategic initiatives, start themselves, merge themselves, et cetera – things along those lines.
We do everything – we do corporations, trade associations – we do a bunch of stuff with trade associations – government agencies and nonprofits.
PBN: Can you give me an example of a project you’ve worked on recently?
SPECK: The Creative Providence project was a good one. That pulls together many of our streams. For example, it’s run by a government agency, but it draws together many many nonprofits. It’s an occasional network – that is, it’s not a permanent network like a trade association or a company or organization or government that are permanent. This is just a network that’s pulled together around a specific purpose.
And as the report itself and the other consultant said, he was sort of overwhelmed by the response he got from Providence – that is, so many people were involved. I mean, at the individual going to a meeting [level], we’re estimating somewhere in the range of 350 to 400 people went to a meeting of some type. There were two large workshops, there were six smaller workshops – more like charrettes – there was a big lecture that kicked it all off, there were a series of focus groups – I mean, it was a very extensive process, and there was huge amounts of community influence.
My work on that particular project was limited. The project was contracted and started before I had joined up. But even back then, before I merged with them, I was already working with them and advising some of their clients on different kinds of Web issues. So to answer the question of sort of what do I do here at New Commons, my thing is all about communications.
PBN: You’ve thought a let about Web 2.0, social media – where that came from and where it’s going. What’s your thinking on that these days?
SPECK: Web 2.0 technology – or, really, just sort of the Web – if it’s open to regular people to publish their own ideas, it’s akin to the invention of the printing press. That is, it takes something that was important to society but only available to a very few people, and it makes it available that widely. Many people say the printing press caused the Reformation and many, many wars and turmoil in Europe. Many other people say that Web 2.0 and this new user-generated content medium is going to have similar upheavals in our society and in our economy.
PBN: When you look around, which organizations do you see making good use of Web 2.0?
SPECK: Well, certainly the Intellipedia project at the CIA is a real game-changer, I think, inside government [or] outside government. Intellipedia project is basically Wikipedia for the intelligence community. It is open to intelligence people, but it is behind very, very secure firewalls. But still, an open collaboration space, like a wiki, that manages important enterprise information has the potential to threaten highly siloed organizations, and if ever there were a highly siloed organization, it’s got to be the CIA. And yet this project has succeeded fabulously, because the benefits of open collaboration far exceed the risks to hierarchy and bureaucracy and so forth. So the CIA is getting more actionable information, better information, faster, and it’s better vetted, more eyes are seeing it, and it’s proved – we can only know so much about the CIA, but it’s proved very effective to them. Certainly, by the statistics that they generate in terms of the numbers of users and the numbers of edits, it’s something that’s growing, and wikis only grow when they are useful.
When the Mumbai bombings happened last year, the Intellipedia page was pushing out information about it literally within minutes of the first reports of the bombings, and by the end of the first day they had compiled much, much of the information of what had actually happened – even though the crisis was actually still ongoing, and went for a few days. But they were almost analyzing it in real time, which is really amazing turn of events.
PBN: You’re doing lots of this Web 2.0 work in your professional life, but you’re also using it personally. Could you talk about that?
SPECK: Three and a half years ago, I wanted to write stories, things I thought about Pawtucket. There was no other blog, so I started The Bucket Blog just to write stories about Pawtucket to tell these stories that nobody else would tell. The point of Web 2.0, if we have this decentralized publishing space where anybody can put out their thoughts, that means that people should be putting out information about right what’s in front of them. What was in front of me was Pawtucket, and so I started writing about Pawtucket, and the blog has grown. I now have another person who writes with me on it, and you know, I’m getting about 1,500 visitors a week now.
I’ve actually sort of expanded my advocacy and community organizing work – I’ve started a wiki called PawtucketNow.org, which is just to be a community-oriented wiki. There’s a group called Wiki Spot. If you go to DavisWiki.org, there’s a fantastic wiki about the city of Davis, Calif., and it’s just packed with information. Imagine if there were a Wikipedia, a whole book of Wikipedia, about Providence or about your city that would have all kinds of deeply detailed information that only residents could provide – that’s what we’re trying to do in Pawtucket. It’s very small, it’s growing – slowly – but we continue to push forward in Pawtucket, we think there’s a future up there. •
