Today (January 5th at 11pm PST), Microsoft revealed the design problem for the finale of the PhizzPop Design Challenge.  Each team will be building an application to solve this problem over the next month in preparation for final delivery on March 10th at SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas. The competing teams are AKQA, Cynergy Systems, CreateThe Group, Thirteen23, Clarity Consulting, and RDVO representing the regional competitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Chicago, and Boston respectively. 

The design problem, called "Citizenship in the 21st Century," is a challenge to create an engagement spanning multiple platforms including Mobile, Web, Desktop, Media Center, Portable, and Kiosk that harnesses the power of social media and other Web 2.0 philosophies to help people get engaged and help them collect and evaluate information about relevant issues (be they social, political etc.).  Online identity, privacy, authority of online sources, and self-regulating community are all issues that will need to be addressed by the challenge.  Pulling directly from the Problem Statement: “We devote so much design energy to creating an iPod, or a BMW, why not do the same for our democracy?”  Look forward to more updates on the progress of the teams and check out their bios & information at http://designchallenge.phizzpop.com/finale.aspx .  Or read the full problem statement and guiding 'personas' below.

Problem Statement

Your firm has been selected as a finalist by a leading philanthropic foundation that focuses on citizenship and public life.  This foundation has just received a significant endowment from three leading billionaires:

·         The (now retired) founder of a large, multinational software company

·         A pioneer in the social media space

·         A retired iBanker who is focused on good government and civil society

Each has decided to invest a portion of their considerable wealth in developing an effort they call “Citizenship in the 21^st Century.” This effort is underpinned by a few beliefs, which are:

·         Technology can be a key enabler in creating a more informed populace and a more efficient, accountable and transparent democracy.

·         Design thinking can illuminate new ways to leverage technology we use today and craft experiences and interactions to better leverage all of the content and information that is available to us.

·         That the social media phenomenon is a critical factor in ensuring the success of this effort.

As one benefactor said, “We devote so much design energy to creating an iPod, or a BMW, why not do the same for our democracy?”

The endowers feel this may include online, Media Center, Portable, Mobile, Public Space / Kiosk, and the desktop and are looking for guidance in the following areas:

·         How can we use technology to help people collect, measure and evaluate information in the home, in the work place and in public environment. Where can and should these interactions occur—in a browser, on the TV, on a mobile device? Are there group or shared experience that can be enabled by technology?

·         How can we use the power of community opinion and social media to help people measure and evaluate messages? Are there ways to improve how this occurs now? (The benefactors are intrigued, inspired and troubled by things like Facebook, Technorati, Techmeme, Digg and Slashdot for example).

      ·         What role does identity and privacy need to play in this solution? Do we need to explore blowing up the conventions that surround issues around personal and private information, multiple roles or personas in identity, and the ability to be digitally and technically anonymous in some activities?

Part of your challenge is to determine which the most appropriate channels for this system are.  From the cover letter to their RFP:

Democracy requires an informed populace.  On the one hand, we as 21st century Americans have access to more sources of information in the history of our country.  On the other hand, the number of different sources of information mean that there are fewer and fewer sources of news that are recognized as authoritative.  There is no Walter Cronkite of our age.

Depending on which source of news you watch, read or listen to, you may get an entirely different understanding of an event. This alone makes it very hard for citizens of differing opinions to discuss a given topic.  How can you reach consensus if you can’t even agree on the facts?

Setting aside the challenge of competing world views, one of the other challenges of our hyper media culture is the sheer volume of content.  Sifting through all of this to glean the information you’re interested requires a significant commitment to being informed.

The news is not always sexy, or interesting, but it is critical for being a participating member of a democracy.  Design a system that creates desire for knowledge and involvement in issues, communities, events, parties or news.

We’re inspired by the enabling power and excitement we see in both digital and social media to make these issues and topics more relevant and exciting to the entire population? How can we extend this thinking into solving our challenge and sharing the successes that happen in our democracy every day? How can our efforts be a beacon and an inspiration for other democracies and emerging economies?

Assume you can aggregate content from many different sources, be it TV, radio, or print. 

The goal of the endowers is to facilitate civil, public-minded conversations in a system that self-regulates for quality and civility.  The endowers do not want an editorial board, rather, they want the community to enforce its own standards of behavior and finds the balance between free speech and unfettered channels for discourse.

Research:

You should feel free to use as much or as little of the research provided to provide additional context to your design solution.

You will be provided with a copy of Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software by Steven Johnson.  We suggest focusing on Pages 152-162 which centers on the rule system behind Slashdot.

From http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=312

• The public expresses highly favorable views of many leading corporations. Johnson & Johnson and Google have the most positive images of 23 corporations tested. At the bottom of the list: Halliburton, which is viewed favorably by fewer than half of those familiar enough with the company to give it a rating.
• Views of many corporations vary significantly among Democrats along class lines. Two-thirds of working-class Democrats have a favorable view of Wal-Mart compared with 45% of professional-class Democrats.
• Americans are worried more that businesses rather than government are snooping into their lives. About three-in-four (74%) say they are concerned that business corporations are collecting too much personal information while 58% express the same concern about the government.
• The public is losing confidence in itself. A dwindling majority (57%) say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions. Similarly, the proportion who agrees that Americans "can always find a way to solve our problems" has dropped 16 points in the past five years.
• Americans feel increasingly estranged from their government. Barely a third (34%) agree with the statement, "most elected officials care what people like me think," nearly matching the 20-year low of 33% recorded in 1994 and a 10-point drop since 2002.
• Young people continue to hold a more favorable view of government than do other Americans. At the same time, young adults express the least interest in voting and other forms of political participation.
• Interpersonal racial attitudes continue to moderate. More than eight-in-ten (83%) agree that "it's all right for blacks and whites to date," up six percentage points since 2003 and 13 points from a Pew survey conducted 10 years ago.
• Republicans are increasingly divided over the cultural impact of immigrants. Nearly seven-in-ten (68%) conservative Republicans say immigrants threaten American customs, compared with 43% of GOP moderates and liberals. Democrats have long been divided along ideological lines, but the GOP previously had not been.

http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_overview_eight.asp?cat=2&media=1

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/689/the-internets-broader-role-in-campaign-2008

From: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/590/digg-reddit-delicious  (It’s worth it to read the rest of the article)

• The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied.
• The sources user news sites draw on are strikingly different from those employed by the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.
• The three user news sites differed from one another in subtle ways. During the study weej, Reddit was the most likely to focus on political events from Washington, such as coverage of Vice President *** Cheney; Digg was particularly focused on the release of Apple's new iPhone; Del.icio.us had the most fragmented mix of stories and the least overlap with the News Index.
• On Yahoo News -- even when picking from a limited list of stories Yahoo editors had already pared down -- users' top stories only rarely matched those of the news professionals.
• While the Yahoo News list of stories that people were most likely to mail each other generally corresponded to the list of Most Recommended or Most Viewed stories, some differences emerged. Recommended stories focused more on "news you can use" such as advice from the World Health Organization to exercise one's legs during long flights; the Most Viewed stories were often breaking news, more sensational in nature, with a heavy dose of crime and celebrity; and the Most Emailed stories were more diverse, with a mix of the practical and the oddball.
• Despite claims that the Web would internationalize consumers' news diets, coverage across the three user-news sites focused more on domestic events and less on news from abroad than the mainstream media that week. Yahoo News, both on its main news page and three most popular pages, meanwhile, stood out for being decidedly more international that week.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/564/internet-news-audience  

Some early efforts:

http://legislation.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://leagueoftechnicalvoters.org/

http://transparentfederalbudget.com/

Persona 1: High-School Social Studies / Civics Teacher

Overview:  David has taught 9^th grade social studies for the last 12 years.  He likes to think he’s a good teacher – he’s incredibly dedicated to it, often getting to school before anyone else, and leaving after.  He’s truly passionate about teaching students, and thinks it shows.  He always tries to get his class interested and following current events, and in election years, even more so.  Usually he has to make it an assignment, but every once in a while the kids get really excited.

Over the last couple years, he’s run into a couple new challenges when he’s asked his students to watch or read the news, bring in their findings, and give a report on a given topic.

 First, many of his students often use the internet as a primary research source.  The reports they give are often “interesting.”  He’s had to resort to providing the students a list of ‘approved’ sites.  This may work for the assignment, but he worries about the amount of junk news out there.

The second new challenge he’s run into is the rise of kids who do their reports from cable news.  While some reporting is quite good, there is inevitably a child who does theirs exclusively from a news source that has an ideological bias.  This makes his job of teaching much harder – he has to correct facts, introduce counterpoints, and essentially do what he feels the journalist should have done.  Again, he wonders how the average person, much less his students, would get a complete understanding if they only watched this news source.

The final challenge, and the reason why he’s stopped asking about only local events, is the decline of the local news outlets.  There used to be a really great local paper, and television station.  Both, however, have been acquired and now essentially only do crime reporting.  There’s very little, if any coverage of local issues facing the community (housing costs, foreclosures, the new county development plan, etc.). 

David blogs a little, mostly to keep his sister and mother up to date on what’s going on in his life.  He’s lived with his girlfriend, Leigh, for the last 2 years.  He’s on Facebook, if nothing else, because his students kept inviting him to their page.  If nothing else, he’s gotten a chance to reconnect with people from high school and college.  He tries to make time for the news each night, but doesn’t always succeed.  He’s been woken on the couch up by Leigh more times than he can count, when he falls asleep watching the evening rebroadcast of the news.

Persona 2: Distracted College Senior

Overview:  Erica is 15 weeks from completing her college degree.  She’s in her last semester for a BA in Marketing, with a minor in Literature.  She’s really enjoyed her college career (I mean *really*, if you know what I mean), but she’s ready to get out!

She’s got four seminars this term to finish, and then she’s done.  The good news is that she’s only in class one day a week. The bad news is that there’s a ridiculous amount of reading associated with each seminar.  It’s not like the extra time balances out the reading, but it doesn’t hurt.  It also lets her do a lot of hanging out with her friends and boyfriend.

She knows she should care more about the news, but right now, she just doesn’t.  She really wanted to vote in the primary, but remembered the day after the primary.  Oops.  She felt like she had a good excuse, though, she had a big paper due the day of the primary, and she just flaked.

Recently, she’s been really focused on getting interviews lined up for her life after school.  She really wants to move to NYC, and has had some success with some of the agencies there.  Still, it takes a lot of effort to look for a job, and between the schoolwork and everything else, she never feels like she has any downtime.  She knows we’re “at risk of a recession” or some stuff, but since when does that apply to her?  I mean, after all, I’m only looking for an *entry* job.

At the end of the day, she doesn’t feel too bad about missing the primary.  She hasn’t heard any issues that got her very excited, not that she’s really listened either.  In some ways, she almost doesn’t want to know – she doesn’t want yet another demand on her time.

The one bit of ‘news’ she does read is US Weekly.  She knows she has to use the word “news” lightly in this case – she just can’t help herself.  Every time she goes to the store, there’s always a new issue waiting to tempt her at checkout.  If only George Clooney covered the news, maybe she’d care then!

Erica is on Facebook, and blogs a lot.  She’s always on IM or writing on someone’s wall via either her Macbook, or her iPhone.  The new iPhone version of Facebook makes it really easy!  She just recently joined the “Remembering Heath” group on Facebook.

Persona 3: Urban Yuppie

Overview:  Jennifer thinks her life rocks.  At least she did up until recently, when all the rules changed.

She graduated Summa *** Laude from Wharton 3 years ago with her MBA.  She joined one of the top firms on Wall Street, and has advanced quickly.  Last year, she was in the top 10% of all employees and pulled home a very, very nice bonus.

All that seems to have changed over the last couple of months.  The credit crisis and ensuing instability in the markets has made her client very nervous (well that and the double digit % losses they’ve sustained).  She watches CNBC all the time, and just recently bought a SlingBox so she can watch it on her phone during lunch. She also has a service through work that emails her with top news snippets – great reading for the subway.

She’s a voracious reader (she has to be in order to stay on top of the market), and reads the NYTimes, WSJ, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune.  Or at the very least, she scans the front page, and business page. 

She knows she should care about the election, and she does, the extent to which the policies of each candidate impact her work.  She wish she could get a better sense from experts of what that was, though.

Persona 4: Third Generation Farmer

Overview:  Fred always chuckles when he travels out of state and encounters that people are in awe of meeting an actual farmer. He long got over being uncomfortable about folks being surprised that he went to college (Iowa State University, undergrad in agriculture and a Masters in veterinary medicine) and he’s patient when he explains that farming (when you’re not one of the big conglomerates, is really just about running a small business, albeit a fairly complex one). It’s also a job that involves backbreaking work part of the year and almost mind-numbly boredom for the remainder of the year.

In the winter, Fred spends a lot of time preparing his next season. He may be an immigrant to the world of digital technology but he runs his farm like a business and subscribes to all his agricultural trades online. He’s fairly disenchanted with the political process and how electoral or policy issues get presented and discussed in the mainstream media. This perception was exacerbated by coming out of the Iowa Caucuses, an event he did not actively participate it. Fred feels stuck, it seems he has to participate in a world of extremes with no common ground. He struggles with finding channels where he can get balanced perspectives. He suspects they might exist online in various places but isn’t really sure where to start or how to find them.

Most of Fred’s information comes from local news and local newspapers. His homepage is AOL because that was the default page that popped up in his browser when the cable company came over to install his modem. He recently has been debating getting a new cell-phone and when he last stopped by his local sprint store one of the staff members asked him if he wanted a smart phone, he looked at it and really wasn’t sure what he’d use it for.

Lately Fred has been having a bit of an internal struggle with staying informed. He gets most of his information from Cable News and suspects this isn’t a great way to stay informed, he’s struggling with finding ways to connect the dots and just engage with folks.

Persona 5: Furloughed Union worker tries second career

Overview:  Thomas has spent the last 28 years of his life working in aviation maintenance and recently retired from this job when the maintenance contract for his airline was outsourced. Thomas counts himself lucky, he’s got a partial pension and when he retired he was making 28 dollars an hour. But Thomas found it very hard to find other work that paid even close to what he made in his previous jobs. After trying his hand as a real estate broker he moved away from Chicago and to Indianapolis to be closer to his elderly parents so he could care for them. His wife is a school teacher and she was able to find a temporary job working at an elementary school close to the modest home they just purchased.

Because Thomas was concerned about health insurance he took a job at a national coffee chain. He makes 12 dollars an hour and after 6 weeks on the job he was promoted to assistant manager. The job is ‘okay’ and the best benefit is the health coverage that both he and wife receive. Recently Thomas has been asked to help out with a new initiative that the coffee chain is working on, which is the introduction of touch-based ambient displays that will be used in the store. Thomas’s store is one of five across the country that will be using the displays and as such Thomas has become a digital native of sorts.

After getting a chance to fly out to the company’s headquarters in Portland to learn about the program he was given an iPhone, an HTC Tilt, and a Dell XPS Laptop. If you’d told Thomas that he’d now been sending Tweets and have a Facebook page last year he wouldn’t have know what you were talking about. Thomas is to suppose to watch and encourage how people can interact with or augment these displays in their store. To start with, the displays offer a gesture based browser that links to news and weather and allow customers to order beverages. Thomas has been asked to observe how people use the devices and this got Thomas thinking. Recently, the store held a series of ‘fireside chats’ for some visiting professors from a local university. The events were a huge success, so successful they had to turn people away. Thomas had wished they’d had a way to accommodate more people or that he could have figured out a way to share the experience outside of that one location.

Thomas feels like he’s found an interesting niche and he’s ‘getting by’. But he’s also frustrated by the challenges he’s facing and is looking for ways to connect with other people that share them. He’s pretty certain that some of the tools and technology he’s using can facilitate that but not sure how.

Persona 6: Suburban Mom who hopes the best for her kids

Overview:  Sandy is always on the run. With three children aged 10, 8 and 6 she often feels like a limo driver. Her husband, Don, frequently travels on business and she often finds herself doing everything by herself during the week when he is out of town. Before Sandy stopped working full-time she was a partner at a law firm and 4 years ago she accomplished a bit of milestone, making partner as a part-time working mother. But the accomplishment didn’t translate into a great work-life balance despite the part-time hours and a few years ago as a family the decision was made that Sandy would step out of the workforce. Sandy doesn’t miss her career but she does miss the social contact and discourse.

She’s found an outlet for that through social media and has turned into a bit of a political junkie. Last year she went to Chicago for the Daily Kos conference and recently she even had the opportunity to pen a guest editorial at the Huffington Post. She’s flirted with the idea of trying to do more writing and maybe even starting a blog. She’s recently started using face book and has been experimenting with messaging.

Sandy is very interested in the upcoming election, she hungry to find out where all the great conversations are occurring and often feels like she doesn’t know. As passionate as she is about politics she’s a bit torn as an independent, so far her experiences and the content she sees are a world of extremes, or black in white. She’s trying to figure out how she could fill a void for other people out there that are like her. “There must be people like me.” She thinks. “People that feel stuck in the middle, with nobody that represents them.” Frequently these thoughts come to Sandy as she sits in her minivan—which feels more and more like her second home, her computer time these days seems to be limited to late at night during the week after the children are asleep.