Since about a year I have been running somewhat regularly. I started just to have an alternative to the gym when I am onthe road, but my motivation have gotten deeper since. Running opens a door on a new and interesting path, not just for me but for all of us.

Here’s the thing: running generates data. A lot of data. Data about us. And we consume them, with ever-growing appetite.

Consider, for example, the Stramilano half marathon, which I run just Sunday. Its over five thousand participants were possibly the most technology-enhanced large group I have ever been part of. Each runner bears a number tag which incorporates a transponder; combined with the sensors scattered along the route and a precise chronometer, this enables very precise tracking of the bearers’ performance. Here is mine:

There is a lot of information in this table. Not just my final absolute- and category placement; not just my official (from start to finish) and real (from the moment when I crossed the starting line to when I crossed the finishing one) time; but all of these, plus cumulated average speed, at four different checkpoints 5, 10, 15 from start and at finish. As you can see, I had a few problems in the early stages, with a low average speed of 5’12″/km (I got stuck behind a phalanx of slower runners). Then it got better: my average speed increased to 4’30″ for the following ten kilometers, then decreased slightly again for the last six. At the start I had probably some 4,000 runners in front of me; after 5 kilometers I still had 2,500; in the last sixteen kilometers I overtook almost 800 more. My worst mistake was not try to get further towards the front of the starting grid; this cost me something like two minutes of rel time and three on official time.

But this is just half the story. Practically every athlete in there was equipped with some form of data generation and monitoring: GPS units in their pockets, accelerometers inside their shoes, heart rate monitors on their chests, chronographs on their wrists. Data were processed locally and fed back to the runners in real time; after the race they were downloaded on massive cloud computing systems and processed again to keep track of progress and programme future training. I, for one know full well that I have run 609,17 km since late July 2010. It took me 51 hours, 3 minutes and 3 seconds, at an average speed of 5’03″/km and burning 39.305 calories. I know absolutely everything.

This knowledge gives me control. The data, once processed and interpreted, make us faster. Athletes with a little experience use them to decide on competition strategies. If you run in large groups, you’ll hear beeps and alert going off at every turn, and it is not uncommon to hear remarks like “we are ten seconds late on our flight plan”. The Stramilano crowd was running amidst a cloud of computation.

Running is just an example of a general trend towards an ever-increasing computational density of our lives. We monitor, record and quantify our trips, our social and professional networks. More and more often we do the same for our physical existence, tracking metrics like weight, glucose levels, body fat. We sequence our DNA. For each of these metrics, be they social or physical, we have online services that allow us to share them with others and turn them into conversation topics (and we do it, not overly concerned with privacy). Americans talk of “quantified self”: it is a rapidly growing movement, because data allow us to explore how our bodies react to different stimuli, and adjust our behaviour accordingly. If I discover that a certain training routine improves my performance, or a certain diet lowers my body fat, I can use them to meet my goals in terms of running, or just looking good. If I quantify my body, it becomes easier to hack it.

The word “hacking” in this context is exactly right. Like the original hackers, body hackers are outsiders to the system, so they can afford to be radical. Like Tim Ferriss says: “I am neither a doctor, nor a Ph.D. I don’t have a publish-or-perish career. I can test hypotheses using the kind of self-experimentation mainstream practioners can’t condone. By challenging basic assumptions, it’s possible to stumble upon simple and unusual solutions to long-standing problems”. Spoken like a true hacker. In other words, I teach myself some knowledge, then I use a low-access technology to tinker around. When enough people do that, open innovation happens.

The Stramilano half marathon was a wake-up call: self quantification is becoming a mass phenomen. Expect a wave of open innovation, and a new generation of hackers. But this time it will be our own bodies acting as both labs — and prototypes.

Back to book presentations. Tomorrow I am going to Cagliari: I will be a guest of Eutropia and of the University’s Department of Political Sciences. I will have two exceptional discussants, hi-tech entrepreneur and former Regional President Renato Soru and sociologist Aide Esu. Eutropia’s Mauro Tuzzolino will facilitate (here on Facebook).

Wednesday, March 30th I will be in my home town, Milano, and at The Hub, that’s become my second office in town. As discussants I get the fine folks at Lo Spazio della Politica, which makes for a lively discussione.

Since I feel like being on the road to meet up with people, on Sunday I am going to run Milano’s Half Marathon with the X.Runners. My goal is to become Milano’s fastest economist — over long distances, clearly: we now know I am no sprinter.

(In the spirit of Fiamma Fumana)

After some soul searching, I decided that my contribution towards celebrating 150 years of Italian national unity would be directed towards encouraging my beloved country to be a wee bit less parochial. We boast an ancient and rich culture that grew by a continuous exchanges with other cultures and other peoples – from the Chinese explorations of the Polo family to the London studies of the Count of Cavour, in many ways the artifex of Italian unity. In the present, difficult phase we tend to be overly preoccupied by our immediate surroundings, and so we risk losing sight of the incredible wealth of cultural and human resources just across the border; not to mention those who live here with us, but we still don’t really recognize as local ones.

And so, with small group of Milanese from all over the world we decided to organize a party to celebrate the diversity of our country and our city. We called it Vuka, which means “Arise!” or “Awaken!” in the Zulu language; and we are going to throw it tomorrow, Tuesday March 22nd at 10 p.m. sharp, at Casa del Pane di Corso di Porta Venezia 63 (map). We designed it as a club night for dancing to the sound of the most cutting-edge clubs of Lagos, Karachi and Barletta; and where the Milanese of any origin are welcome and respected. Join Medhin (Milano–Asmara), Nadia (Stockholm), Dan (Johannesburg), Davide (Verona-Sydney-Osaka) and myself to dance away to the world’s beat in a space where everyone’s welcome, and our many differences of living out Milano power up the party.

You are all invited! Wherever you are from, wherever your heart is, if you are here and you are contributing your smarts and energy to our common adventure you are at home with us. To learn more (and get a feel for the music we are going to dance to) visit our Facebook page. Thanks to the African Film Festival for hosting us in its space.

These days the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list (priceless) is all the rage for two interesting contributions.

1. the first one is the extraordinary data.gov demo in earthquakes. It draws from a dataset of earthquakes, filed by intensity and location, and returns a map of earthquakes in the world over the last week. It updates dynamically, so what you’ll see changes over time: above is a screeb grab of what northern Japan looks at the time of writing, with well over 300 seismic evens over a world total of more than 400. (hat tip: Federico Bo)
2. the second one is useful to dampen our enthusiasm with a realistic assessment of real-life difficulties. Eric Sanna has published a tutorial of sorts to build a simple chart starting from a dataset of absence from work of the employees of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Italian law mandates public agencies to publish data on employee absences, and CNR obliged — but using PDF, not exactly on open format. Tinkering around, Eric went from PDF to Excel, and from Excel to chart. But that took 1h 30′; and Eric is way more data literate than the average — he actually works at ISTAT! Plus, his tutorial stops where the real elaboration begins, and the civic hacker sets off to extract some hidden knowledge from the data. For example, what could the peak in absences in August possibly mean? Conclusion: manipolating data is hard, and it will stay hard. There is a lot of work to do to make public data truly usable, and until that work gets done the potential of open data will go, at least in part, untapped.

Antonella Noya at OECD (thanks!) pointed me to their report The Changing Boundaries of Social Enterprises, in which they attempt to render the past ten years of social enterprise in developed countries. It’s been an important ten years for this sector, from all points of view: growth, legislation and finance too. From a finance perspective, an executive summary could as follows: social enterprises are undercapitalized and find it difficult to access financial instruments other than traditional loans or grants. A lot of financial innovation was thrown at the problem.

The OECD report has an impressive list: venture philantropy, “patient” loans, crowdfunding platforms à la Kickstarter, social performance assessment tools like the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices and so on. All’s well then? Yes and no. Yes, because the problem exists and is being looked into. No, because it is being addressed in a way which is a little too reminiscent of that other wave of financial innovation, the one that gave us the 2008 global meltdown.

Consider Blue Orchard. It’s a simple idea: connect institutional investors (say, pension funds) wanting to invest ethically with microlending. How does that work? It begins with some institution making microloans. Each of them creates an asset in the balance sheet of the microlending institutions. Now this microlender takes all of these assets, packages them up and uses them as collateral to back a bond (which is a derivative product, its primary being of course the microloans) which he then sells to the institutional investor. And it’s done! The latter has been enabled to invest ethically without actually having to be able to tell which microborrowers to lend to. At the same time, the microlending institution has gained extra liquidity, and can go on to make more microlending. Great!

Or is it? The process described is called securitization. One of its effects is to separate the borrower from the final lender (in this example the pension fund). Before they got securitized, home mortgages were issued by local banks, that knew borrowers personally and could assess their creditworthiness reasonably well. If they got it wrong and the borrower found it difficult to repay the debt, the bank would do its best to get him back on track, possibly restructuring her debt: after all, she was a client, and lived in the same local community as the bank. The more prosperous the community, the better things were for the bank. After securitization, all this changed: now John Smith’s mortgage is repackaged and sold to a nonlocal lender — a pension fund at best, a very aggressive hedge fund at worst. As soon as Mr. Smith starts falling behind with his payments, this investor has no reason to be understanding: it will try to maximize its immediate gain, as he has no stake in Smith and his community’s long-run prosperity. What will the pension funds that purchase Blue Orchard’s products if they find that the returns are too low? If they decide to exit fast, what will the consequences be for the microborrowers? Could they be forced to pay their debit back or lose their assets too? Could this wipe out the social benefit of the poorest of the poor investing in themselves?

Similar questions can be asked for ethical capital markets being rolled out in some countries, like ETHEX in the UK or Bolsa des Valores Sociais in Brazil. The stock market as we know it brought a fresh stream of capital to for profit enterprises, but at the price of making them focus away from long term growth and onto quarterly results. What would happen to social enterprises once their shares (yes, some do issue shares) are traded in Wall Street or London?

These are unsettling questions. But looking the other way would be much worse: we have no choice butlook fo the answers.

Let’s play a game. You think of an Italian company that’s good at deploying urban games to improve cities while having fun; and I’ll guess who ou are thinking about. Ready? Ok, my turn: if you are Italian, you are thinking about Focus, owner of CriticalCity Upload (disclosure: I serve on its advisory board).

Easy win. If you ask around to anyone in Italy who knows anything about that, the name CriticalCity is immediately mentioned: they won seven awards in Italy and abroad, recruited a community of 250 players for their playable beta, and featured on most innovation specialized media in the country, from Wired to Nòva.

Despite all the recognition, a year ago the CriticalCity group managed to lose a tender of the Puglia Region to build a game that would activate the creative community gathered around the Pugliese policies in favour of the young, and in particularly around Bollenti Spiriti,, one of the most advanced initiatives in Italy in this space. The winner was a consortium that included Consorzio Nova (supposedly they do social innovation, but the website is under construction), communication and marketing agency Tom Comunicazione, and an e-learning company, Grifo Multimedia. Not much experience in the gaming area; that they won means they had a proposal that evaluators found very convincing.

After getting over the disappointment, the CriticalCity team went to work and, in may 2010, secured a grant from a Fondazione Cariplo and that allowed to launch the current version of their game, CriticalCity Upload. Then things moved quickly:

• they launched on October 15th 2010 – five months after being awarded the grant
• in the first two month, with zero communication spending, they rallied 800 players, verified one by one (i.e. zero spambots)
• over the same period, players executed 1,516 missions
• Upload costs € 150,000 for the first year – 70% of which funded by their grant, 30% by third parties
• under the hood there is a solid gameplay engine, developed into code in collaboration with Californian early mover game company Playtime

On the other hand, the winners of the Puglia tender:

• launched their game, Firstlaif, in november 2010, a full year after winning the tender
• Firstlaif is obviously modelled after CriticalCity. Compare Firstlaif’s presentation video with CriticalCity’s (in the beta version of late 2007). Compare the concepts: Firstlaif changes the labels, but is really using the same concept. The word “ripoff” comes to mind.
• after one month, Firstlaif totalled 16 completed missions (source)
• over the same period, with communication “being limited to a banner in a local nespaper”, it attracted over one thousand registered users (source: as above). This figure chould probably be taken with a pinch of salt: at the time of taking my notes (31/12/2010, 10:45 CET+8) the whole first “community” page was occupied by users with names like pwyfvc63, ibhw1dzk, afbty6ic2f etc. These are not people, but spambots, i.e. programs that infiltrate social websites to advertise viagra, penis enhancement solutions, no-prescription drugs and all of the “worst of the Internet” repertoire. I looked at the first 100 users, and only 6 had a realistic-looking name.
• it cost the regional administration € 335,000 (source: official documents).

All in all, it is clear that the regional administration failed to choose the right people for the job. I have no reason to believe that the officials in charge are incompetent or dishonest. Rather, I think the problem is technological and legal: public authorities are locked by the law in a spceific technology to make procurement choice, and that technology is the competitive tender. It is a public procedure whereby a buyer, meaning to purchase a certain good or service, writes down and publishes the specifications of what it wants, the maximum price it is willing to pay and the criteria according to which it will assess competing proposals. At a fixed date, an expert committee compares proposals and chooses the winner. This procedure is designed to be efficient (it allows comparison of alternatives), merit-based (it operates on clear criteria for what is desirable) and impartial (all proposals follow the same procedure, and everything is out in the open).

Despite these advantages, competitive tendering is not a universal solution. Assessing public projects, especially ex ante is famously difficult. This gives rise to a structural information asymmetry, which is most severe for immaterial projects and policies: by definition, the supplier knows more on what she is selling than the purchaser, and the latter might find it difficult to figure out just how advantageous a proposal is. Here’s the thing: competitive tendering is a state-of-the-art procedure, but of the nineteenth century. It still works well for choosing supplier of well defined goods and services you can but from several suppliers competing with each other: it’s great for buying toilet paper, but sucks as a tool for making strategic decisions.

When we need to figure out who, in the world, knows a lot about something and could help us dealing with it we do a very simple thing: we ask our friends and Google. If you, like me, have a pretty good social network it is often enough to share a question on Facebook or Twitter ( “hi all, do we know a good graph theorist who understands different metrices of node centrality in a network?”) to receive some lead within minutes, or hours at the most. These leads are generally links to publications or CVs of people with that specialization. If they look promising, we can write to them and they can accept to work for us, or recommend other people with the right set of skills. And what about accountability? Well, accountability should be geared towards results, not procedure: and transparency of those results helps good suppliers or collaborators to build reputation.

Competitive belongs to the arsenal of Weberian bureaucracy, itself an extraordinary innovation that, however, is now growing obsolete. I would suggest (actually I did that in my book Wikicrazia) to rethink the organizational form of government administration: in times of dwindling resources it makes sense to equip yourself with the best available tools for making decisions. CriticalCIty Upload is obviously better than Firstlaif, and any tool that leads to choosing the latter over the former is simply not good enough.