The only type in common with both companies and all the mixtures was fenugreek.

That discovery sent EU investigators in pursuit of fenugreek seeds back down the European food chain, in a rapid-fire search that deployed personnel from eight countries’ food agencies as well as the ECDC, World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. They drafted a detailed 4-page questionnaire that fed data into Excel spreadsheets and a relational database. They crunched (and crunched and crunched) the numbers, and this is what emerged:

All of the seeds came from a single shipment that left a port in Egypt almost 2 years earlier, on Nov. 24, 2009.

Interesting to note that following the E. coli outbreak in Europe, it all started with desktop tools (Excel) being used to collect data for the government investigation. Quoting directly from the European Food Safety Authority report (PDF) itself they used combination of tools:

Data on single parts of the food supply chain were gathered using spreadsheets (MS Excel) for each company. A relational database (HSQLDB version 2.2.4) was used to manage the data/information from the tracing. Additional processing was done using the statistical package SAS version 9.2.

Of course, you do wonder if the investigation could have happened even more quickly or even that the issue could have been pre-empted if Government 2.0 principles (open data, crowdsourcing) and technologies (Web 2.0) had been applied?

Despite this level of traceability, authorities are still concerned that this outbreak is actually not finished, because they couldn't trace every seed or batch that might be infected. Maybe there is still a necessary role for crowdsourcing in this instance that a traditional approach just can't scale to resolve?

Professor Braithwaite says he doesn't oppose the system outright but he says the Government needs to give a much better explanation of how it would operate.

JEFFREY BRAITHWAITE: Is the data really reflecting performance of hospitals and services or is it a reflection of the different idiosyncrasies within the system and the complications within the system?

So it really does require a lot of smart thinking to present data in an effective way.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: Do you suspect that when all is said and done a system of this nature simply might not be worth the money?

JEFFREY BRAITHWAITE: Well that's the big $64 question. No-one really knows.

You set up an authority, you hire staff, you have a lot of activity within the health system to gather data in accordance with the information system's requirements. You get a lot of people not only gathering the data but using it.

Do you get commensurate benefits in terms of health systems improvement? No-one really knows.

I wasn't particularly impressed by the MySchool effort and I wasn't impressed by the MyHosptials site when I heard about it late last year. However, lets not get confused about actionable and useful open data with publishing meaningless facts and figures, that are only likely to distort management priorities. I'm still waiting for a genuine Government 2.0 approach and innovative thinking in the public sector to be applied to this particular problem. And its not like there aren't models they can copy. I wonder what's stopping them?

As an awesome example of a game-based science crowdsourcing project, the Foldit project in itself deserves special mention. They demonstrated that humans still have the edge on pure computing crunching power when it comes to solving complex problems.

However, I'm particularly interested what the project also reveals about the dynamic of involving 'normal' human players in this problem solving. Andrew McAfee provides an excellent summary:

1. We are particularly strong at spatial reasoning, or literally seeing solutions.
2. We have intuition. 
3. We have great adaptivity - McAfee notes that "technologies like wikis are a big step forward in facilitating collaboration within geographically dispersed groups." 
4. While collaborating, we exercise a high degree of self-organization (incidentally, we've since this before in immersive gaming - transitory leadership). 
5. We love competition.

This is all particularly relevant when we think about why and how we should apply Social Business Design thinking to problems faced by organisations.

Hopefully I won't be accused of being a troll, because I'm not hiding behind anonymity here on this blog. However, I can't find any way to sugar coat this: I found this book both disappointing and frustrating.

Disappointing because my expectations had been built up by the promotion surrounding the author and this book. Frustrating because the critical thinking I was expecting lacked clarity and depth.

This doesn't mean there aren't some interesting ideas in the book. Certainly, we should explore issues such as how the Internet affects our ability to be creative (and earn a living from being creative), and how it changes how we think and behave. But I'm simply not convinced by the author's arguments (or rather, the way they are articulated in this book). Also, while the main thrust of Lanier's manifesto is focused on the impact of information technology on dumbing down and control of how we create and exchange meaning, I think he fails to address another important aspect of people and culture, being relationships.

If anything I formed the impression that far from being unhappy with the digital world, the author is simply disappointed with the industrial revolution that is taking place online. He says on many occasions that he isn't anti-Web - in fact his concluding argument attempts to demonstrate that point - but his nostalgia for the past is obvious. His problem then is perhaps that the Web has suddenly been invaded by the Proles*. And perhaps that is the core of the warning in this book that you will need to answer for yourself - has 1984 come to pass or is this just another conspiracy novel?

BTW Compared to the book, Lanier's essay on Digital Maoism is worth reading.

*Yes, the irony of linking to Wikipedia is noted :-)