Swarm Creativity Blog

In a public vote at the town hall meeting on May 4, 2015, the Swiss town of Duernten (population 7000) decided to return $250,000 to a worker, who had not filled out his tax declaration since 1995 due to dyslexia. In successively higher tax bills the tax authorities had overcharged Ernst Suter by $280,000, forcing him to sell land to pay taxes on money he had never made. As a worker in a butcher’s shop Suter made about 60,000 a year, which, by Swiss standards, is a fairly low salary. Based on information from the town administration, the tax office of the canton of Zurich had second guessed Suter’s income at about 300,000 per year, and sent him tax bills accordingly, which Suter always paid, nearly forcing him into bankruptcy more than once. Only when Suter ran totally dry, did the branch of the town government that has the task to collect late payments (called “Betreibungsamt”, office of payment enforcement in Switzerland) pass on the case to a custodian, who brought the whole traged...

When I was in Chile in August 2012 at the invitation of good friend Cristobal Garcia , " Do Future Andes 2012  " a great movie about the future of Swarmcreativity and COINs in Chile was produced . Besides the discussion of the benefits of creative swarms I also find the Chilean nature stunningly beautiful.

Recently I had an interview with journalist Christian Luescher for the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. There we spoke about what one could do to be a more efficient networker, both in the online and in the real world. He invited me to write a short article (in German). Here is an extract from the article, listing the things one might do  to Be an Efficient Online Networker E-mail Sending many small e-mails is better than sending a few long ones Responding quickly is good The more quickly people respond to you, the better they like you Personal networks Bridge structural holes for business success Build embeddedness for personal happiness Group networks Oscillating betweeness is an indicator of creativity The more balanced the contribution index, the better is team performance The more people start developing their own lingo, the more innovative they are The faster average response time, the bigger team happiness Facebook networks Many friends is good ...

We have now opened registration for our cool new CoolPeople application . CoolPeople finds influencers, trendsetters, and creators, and even measures their success. This can be done for example for "nanotechnology entrepreneurs in India", but also for "John Smith". It even finds the attributes of the people related to "John Smith". The picture below shows the CoolPeople network about the topic "Swarm Creativity" as a cybermap social network picture. The next picture shows the CoolPeople list view of the CoolPeople query "US President" If you want to see even more before pre-registering, try a dynamic preview: click on the "Condor" picture here which will bring up a dynamic cybermap about "swarm creativity".

Today (Aug 9, 2008) was again streetparade in Zurich, arguably the second largest Techno party in the world (the largest seems to be the Love Parade in Dortmund), with over 800,000 participants. This has now been happening every year since it was started by math student Marek Krynski in 1992. A huge swarm, and hugely creative. About 30 love mobiles, huge trucks as mobile dancing platforms, and hundreds of thousands of people dressed up (or down) as creatively and sexy as possible. I have always been wondering: why are people participating in such huge numbers? My answer is: emotional energy. The street party is a unique way of combining collectivism and individualism, the feeling of being part of a huge swarm, while still showing off as a unique individual. The techno rave gives a rythm to the swarm, increasing the we-feeling immensely.

I was in Iceland this week, giving the keynote speech at the annual international conference of the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC) in Reykjavik June 13, 2008. A v ideo of my keynote is available online ( thanks, Luc! ), it gives a nice overview of the state of the art of swarmcreativity and coolhunting concepts.

Waiting for my hair to be cut at the hairdresser today, I was reading an article in a German science magazine about happiness. The article was relying heavily on the world database of happiness , a research project at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The researchers found that the Danes and Swiss are the happiest people, while people in Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are the least happy. Out of 95 nations assessed, the US, one of the wealthiest countries, only ranks 17th by happiness. Why? While the per capita income in the US is even higher than that of Switzerland, the income is far less evenly distributed. With per capita income slightly below the US, Switzerland is still one of the wealthiest nations in per head income. The big difference to the US is that the income is more evenly distributed, and that Switzerland and Denmark take much better care of their underprivileged citizens. Switzerland even has some sort of negative income tax, where, if somebody has an inc...

I discovered this Wired article about Crowdsourcing in Kai Fischbach’s new blog Open Business Models . It describes how professional photographers selling their pictures on the Web for $150 per shot are put out of business by Web sites like iStockphoto . Millions of amateur photographers are putting up their photos there for $1 per picture. The same has become true for videos, where companies can get video clips from Web sites like iFilm at a fraction of the price it costs to produce such a video. The other two examples in the article, the innocentive marketplace who is outsourcing chemical and pharmaceutical research to individual researchers, and P&G’s connect&develop program sending out technology entrepreneurs on a global hunt for new product ideas are well-known examples of highly successful collaborative innovation also. Recently I stumbled into another great example, when I was speaking at the 125 year anniversary of Telekom Austria in Vienna. Besides eating...

Today’s New York Times has an article on the growing attractiveness of Atlanta, Portland, Oregon, Charlotte, Denver, and Austin for the young and restless generation. With an overall aging population, the group of the 25 to 35 year olds becomes a shrinking minority, courted by cities because studies show that once people are over 35, they are much less likely to move and relocate again. According to one of the marketers for Atlanta …”had the chamber tried to advertise Atlanta, they might have screwed it up —because they [the youngs] are much more trusting of their own network than they are of any marketing campaign." In studies, the most attractive factors for such cities were the low cost of living, an airport hub for easy travel, and a diverse and open culture. But what really makes an open and diverse culture remains a mystery. In surveys the young and restless like downtown living, good public transportation, and lots of entertainment options. The point is, however, that cit...

Researcher Saurab Sinha at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is trying to decode the genes governing social behavior in honey bees. Sinha and colleagues are trying to find the social gene which lets bees change roles in the hive based on social pressure. Adult bees start by working as nurses of young bees, and will turn into foragers for nectar and pollen when they get older. However, if the hive has a need, some young bees will turn into foragers prematurely. The job transition involves changing thousands of genes in the honey bee's brain, turning some genes off, and others on. Saurab Sinha and colleagues hope to use the bee gene sequences they discovered as a model of socially triggered role changes in human brains.

Recently I was spending a few days in Paris with my children. We were the classical tourists, climbing the Eiffel tower, visiting the chateau de Versailles, and admiring Mona Lisa in the Louvre. We were staying in a middle class hotel in Montmartre. In the evenings, we were coolhunting for good restaurants. To find good value for money, we were applying different strategies. One evening, we were just following the tourist streams. We were ending up on top of Montmartre, near the cathedral of Sacre Coeur. This is the place were all the artists are, selling their paintings, and offering to draw on-the-spot portraits of the tourists. The place is also chock full with tourist restaurants. We ended up in one of them. The food was ok – it is hard to get really bad food in Paris – but the price was not cheap, 70 Euros, for a decent meal for three. The next day we decided to follow the recommendation of our hotel owner, and eat in his favorite. The restaurant Basilic offered excellent food, at...

Recently I read an excellent article in the Swiss Newspaper NZZ about Oh Yeon Ho, one of the pioneers of citizen journalism. He founded Ohmy-News as an Internet Journal in South Korea, in competition to the three large, well-established daily newspapers in South Korea. In the meantime Ohmy-News is a huge power in South Korea's media landscape, with up to 780,000 readers per article. Oh Yeon Ho is leading the largest editorial staff of any newspaper, numbering 44,000 guerrilla reporters. He has no control over his reporters, they all operate in self-organization, and headlines bubble up in swarm creativity. But he still needs the human experts, to check the factual correctness of the submitted articles. Oh yes, and by the way, with a staff of 80 paid employees, Ohmy-News has also been profitable since 2003, with 80% of revenue coming from ads, and 20% through selling news to other Web sites. Ohmy-News citizen reporters get $3 per published article, while a top story gets $20. Inspi...

Today's NYT talks about how Facebook - the online diary and meeting site for teens and students - had to turn off its feed feature as soon as it was made available. Like an RSS reader, the new Facebook feature basically allowed a user to be informed about any change that one of the other Facebook users made to her/his home page. While it seems that today's teens have no problems giving up privacy and sharing intimate detail of their private lives online, this one obviously was too much. What the new feature did, was tell every virtual move of the Facebook page owner to anybody subscribed to his/her page. Well, the good thing is that the new feature proved really usefully in organizing a communal protest against it - it was fully transparent to everybody who joined the campaign against the new feature, this was an avalanche of protest breaking loose in full public view. Facebook's operators took the criticism very well. Their solution was to give control back to the users...

During my visit in Ghana we planned a big tour to see more of the country. So it was really unfortunate when the 4 wheel drive vehicle of my friends broke down. The gearshift in our car suddenly stopped working. The only gear still working was the reverse. Fortunately this happened not too far from home, so I drove home backwards! My friend then called one of her Ghanaian friends for help. About two hours later he came by Trotro, bringing along a mobile car mechanic. Quickly, the mechanic located the broken part, and took it out. Him and the friend of my friend then disappeared by Trotro to a street market, where they got a generic spare part and temporarily fixed our car. The next day, we drove to the used car parts market in Accra, trying to find a replacement part. For more specialized goods there are various dedicated markets outside the main Makola market, such as a huge market dedicated to only selling used car parts. Booths staffed by independent entrepreneurs display heaps of...

While there are supermarkets in Western style in Accra where the tourist or expat from the Northern hemisphere can buy almost everything, this is not where Ghanese people shop for their food and other daily necessities. Rather, they go to the Makola market, which I found yet another amazing example of self-organization and swarm creativity. The Makola market is not only at the heart of Accra, it literally is THE heart of Accra. Located in the middle of the town, it is the place for 90% of Accra’s inhabitants to buy all their goods for daily life. Other than submarines and aircraft carriers, there is very little that can not be bought at Makola market. There is no central control, each booth is operated by its owner. At the top of the range are the established stores, where a room facing the street has been converted into a market stand. At the other range of the spectrum, little vendors display their wares on a blanket on the sidewalk. Heaps of shoes, staples of fresh and dried fish, l...

When I was already back in Switzerland, I heard that one of my Ghanaian friends had just had a very bad car accident with a Trotro. While driving with her passenger car to the farm where she was the manager, she had collided with a reckless Trotro driver. While she was only slightly injured, the Trotro had been irreparably damaged, and the entire busload of passengers had been seriously hurt. I guess this is the the drawback of self-organization, in that each Trotro driver wants to maximize income for himself by driving as rapidly as possible. On the balance between public good and optimizing his own gain, this driver tried to tip the scale too much towards himself, with very bad consequences for himself and his passengers.

On a hot and steamy Thursday morning last July I went with my Ghanaian friend to the “37” Trotro hub in Accra, to learn more about how the Trotro system operates. The Trotro hub is a huge walled-in place of dusty mud, overcrowded with people, little buses, and taxis. Like ants coming and going to their hive on ant roads, hundreds of Trotros enter in a never-ending stream the huge place, while at the exit a similar flow of vans streams out. Inside the place, the little buses seem to cover every inch. What is not taken up by Trotros is plastered with little booths where street vendors sell drinks, dried fruits, pastries, sunglasses, newspapers, mobile phone cards and all the others things travelers might need. Besides the Trotros and the sales booths passengers squeeze by, always ready to jump to the side when a Trotro inches by to its destination, whatever that might be. In a bird’s eye view, the entire station looks like the proverbial anthill, with Trotros, sales booths, and passenger...

The husband of my friend, Ghanaian by birth, had recently started an oil palm tree plantation. On about 100 hectares of land he had planted 16,000 palm trees, complemented by a pig barn, a duck pond, and goats and chickens. Of course he could not do all this work by himself, but he needed lots of help. To take care of his farm, he initially hired about 50 workers. The most labor-intensive part was tending to the palm trees. He had recruited a group of about 25 workers from nearby villages to take care of the trees. Their task was to remove the weed around the trees, bring out fertilizer, and chase away pests such as tree-eating insects and rodents. At the last workday of the first month, he paid each worker his agreed on monthly salary, cash in the hand, as is the custom in Ghana. On the next working day, he was in for a really bad surprise. Out of his 25 workers, only 4 showed up. They reported that the others would not want to come. They had currently enough money to get by for anoth...

For the last 5 years a group of friends and I have been working on getting computers to schools in Africa. So far we have shipped a few hundred used computers from Switzerland to Kenya and equipped a school in Nigeria. Now we would like to extend our project to Ghana. The goal of our project is to create learning/innovation communities between Ghanaian middle school students and Western middle school students, age group 14-16 years (at this age the Ghanaians should already master English sufficiently to communicate with their counterparts). Towards that goal, we are currently working to set up Internet-enabled computer rooms at rural schools, away from Accra. The main problem is to make our project sustainable & maintainable by locals. The idea is to ship a classroom of computers to a school, and identify a local who can operate the computer room as an Internet cafe half the time for profit, and provide it the other half of the time for free to the students. We just got 20 compu...

In summer 2006 I was visiting an old friend in Ghana. There I encountered amazing examples of swarm creativity and self-organization entirely outside of the realm of the Internet. It already began when I was picked up at the airport of Accra by my friend and her husband. When we drove back to their house I noticed that the streets were filled with small vans of all types, ages, and makes, starting and stopping at odd locations, and picking up groups of people at every corner of the street. When I asked my friends about these vans, I learned that these minivans, called “Trotros”, were the public transportation system of Accra, providing fast, efficient, and cheap transportation in this city of 2 million inhabitants. The most amazing thing about the Trotros, though, is that each van is owned and managed by its driver, without central coordination. More on later posts