LEADERSHIP 2.0?

Coro Center Executive Director Jeff Sosnaud and Finance and Development Director Patrick O'Heffernan met recently with Steve Wright, Director of Innovation for the Salesforce.com Foundation. Salesforce.com sells the world's most popular customer relations management service (CRM), service, used by both for-profit and non-profit organizations. Jeff and Patrick visited to discuss ideas for the Fellows Program in Public Affairs Innovation Week scheduled for February 2008. The conversation quickly turned to what is civic engagement in a Web 2.0 world – "Web 2.0" in this case standing for the combination of web-based social-networking sites, wikis and other host services which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users, and rich media sites like podcasts and RSS feeds and online video posting and editing.

Web 2.0 has impacted electoral politics, through "gotcha" videos such as the "Macaca Moment" video on YouTube and other sites that ended Senator George Allen's career, online small donor fund raising that now rivals money from lobbyists and "fat cats", and online organizations such as the environmental site, Care2.org, which enables 7.7 million people - over 2% of the U.S. population – to organize social and political campaigns on behalf of the environment.

Wright pointed out that for the daily civic engagement of citizens in their community, whether they perceive it to be their school district or the global environment, three things are important:

- data transparency: that the peoples' data are transparent and accessible -- except for some exceptions in national security and personal privacy areas --what the government does and the records it keeps should be readily available online to the citizenry

- data accessibility: that not only is the data available, but that it is in standard formats that enable any citizen to download it, analyze and use it.

- information literacy: that all citizens have basic knowledge in how to find, access and download the peoples' data.

When asked about the custom of most citizens relying on experts who understand the topic and how to read and use the data, Steve agreed that experts and their expertise are important. But he added, so is the wisdom of the crowd. If you make the peoples data available only to experts, you will miss out on the creative power of ordinary people who can bring new insights and understandings that experts, because they are focused, cannot see. He argued for a combination of the wisdom of the crowd and expertise.

If Wright is right that civic engagement in a 21^st century Web 2.0 world is trending toward a combination of the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of experts, is there a Leadership 2.0 requirement emerging and what does it mean for the qualities and skills that make up a leader?

Does a Web 2.0 world mean that a leader needs to be proficient not only with the tools of analytic thinking, research, presentation, public speaking, negotiation, but with a whole new set of tools ranging from social entrepreneurship to posting YouTube videos? How does a leader in a Web 2.0 World use the "wisdom of the crowd" while still creating a coherent vision for people to follow? How does a Web 2.0 leader foster open decision making and decentralized authority and inspire people to a common goal? And, finally, what does this mean for Coro and the skills it teaches?

The conversation at Salesforce.com's conference room that day ranged from the need to keep the leadership tools of the past because they are still necessary and still have impact, to how to add new ones that embrace an online and open source world. Wright argued that leaders need the kinds of tools Coro teaches, plus an understanding of the laws governing information, an understanding of the technologies of open source and social networking, plus how to get things done in this environment.

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