With Philips we tried to crows source ideas and questions for sustainability research. This powerpoint details how we evaluated the first steps.

1. Bamboostones
evaluating the experiment
February 2010

2. Hold on!
• Before you look at the following slides, take a
few moments and try to answer the following
question
When was your last visit to Bamboostones?
• Don’t click to the next slide yet. Just think
about it.

3. And what is your answer to this
question?
Why don’t you think it’s worthwhile coming
back more often?
(maybe you can write it down, so that you can read
it back later)

4. Topics
• Bamboostones: the purpose of the
experiment
• Where are we now?
• What’s happened in the meanwhile?
• What are our options?
• Discussion

5. The purpose of the experiment*
Develop a web-tool that helps Philips…
a) To invite new members
b) To help network members jointly create an on-line ‘book’ that
subsequently gets physically published…
a. along a structure of themes already known at the beginning
(these themes need to be managed by ‘theme owners’ who have
special roles in the application – see scenario for theme driver
below)
b. unstructured, establishing connections between contributions
that people make (e.g. facilitated by tag clouds)
c) To share content (movies, presentations, reports), to enable
other people to add content, to help the network identify
common themes among the contributions and to help the
emerging network rank content (in terms of quality-of-
contribution)
* Source: the briefing

6. Additional purposes
• One central idea for Bamboostones was to
‘ask questions’
• Bamboostones was to be co-owned by the
founding partners
• The idea of the website was to become the
‘home’ of ‘the movement’
• Another intention became to store the archive
of what had been achieved and created

7. Topics
• Bamboostones: the purpose of the
experiment
• Where are we now?
– Let’s update from the statistics point of view
– And in relation to the original objectives
• What’s happened in the meanwhile?
• What are our options?
• Discussion

8. In the beginning, it seemed to work…
67
103
123
142 146 148 150
35
62
79
93 96 101 107
188
309
385
489
524
560
599
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
1/May 1/Jun 1/Jul 1/Aug 1/Sep 1/Oct 1/Nov
members
contributions
member logins

9. …then activity levels stabilized…
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1/May 1/Jun 1/Jul 1/Aug 1/Sep 1/Oct 1/Nov
invitations
times 'plussed'
total 'plusses'
presentations
movies
big thoughts

10. …and fell still.
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1/May 1/Jun 1/Jul 1/Aug 1/Sep 1/Oct 1/Nov 1/Dec 1/Jan 1/Feb
invitations
times 'plussed'
total 'plusses'
presentations
movies
big thoughts

11. The # of visitors is in decline
0
215
116
139 141
160
122
107
Jun 1, 2009 -
Jun 30, 2009
Jul 1, 2009 -
Jul 31, 2009
Aug 1, 2009 -
Aug 31, 2009
Sep 1, 2009 -
Sep 30, 2009
Oct 1, 2009 -
Oct 31, 2009
Nov 1, 2009 -
Nov 30, 2009
Dec 1, 2009 -
Dec 31, 2009
Jan 1, 2010 -
Jan 31, 2010
Visitors
Visitors

12. What may be causing the decline? 1/2
Statistics & appearance
• The original enthusiasm was high
– Where did that go? Why did it not continue after September?
• The website does not appear to be dynamic
– A proposal for improvements has not been decided on
• There is little change in the content
– The latest contributions are from months ago
– Why come back if there is nothing to learn?
• There’s no energy – it’s static

13. What may be causing the decline? 2/2
Purpose & return-on-investment
• The website ‘promised’ people they were
contributing to a ‘book’ or ‘publication’
– There has been no progress towards realizing this
promise to date
• There is no activity on determining ‘themes’
• There are no explicit questions asked
– There is no visible response on answers given
• There is no perception of people joining a
movement or expanding a network
• There is no perception of the founding partners
being active

14. Topics
• Bamboostones: the purpose of the
experiment
• Where are we now?
• What’s happened in the meanwhile?
– co-do.net was built
– What is that?
• What are our options?
• Discussion

15. co-do =
• ‘the way’ (‘do’, like in judo or taekwondo)
of ‘together’ (‘co’)
• Jointly working on real things
• With people like yourself

16. Screenshot from test environment

17. Screenshot from test environment

18. • An environment for you to connect with
others
• Get inspired by them and in turn give them
inspiration
What does co-do provide?

19. Screenshot from test environment

20. Screenshot from test environment

21. • An environment for you to connect with
others
• Get inspired by them and in turn give them
inspiration
• A community to collaboratively drive an
innovation agenda with
What does co-do provide?

22. Screenshot from test environment

23. Screenshot from test environment

24. • An environment for you to connect with others
• Get inspired by them and in turn give them
inspiration
• A community to collaboratively drive an
innovation agenda with
• A resource for working on new solutions
together with others
What does co-do provide?

25. Screenshot from test environment

26. Screenshot from test environment

27. Screenshot from test environment

28. • An environment for you to connect with others
• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration
• A community to collaboratively drive an innovation
agenda with
• A resource for working on new solutions together with
others
• Enabling each member to enjoy their contributions
What does co-do provide?

29. Screenshot from test environment

30. • An environment for you to connect with others
• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration
• A community to collaboratively drive an innovation
agenda with
• A resource for working on new solutions together with
others
• Enabling each member to enjoy his/her contributions
• Connected from your desktop
What does co-do provide?

31. Desktop-widget

32. Can I test it?
• We have given everyone in bamboostones a
free preliminary membership of co-do
– Your username/password is identical
– Simply use it to log in
• To test the widget, go to
http://simpleconceptstudio.com/uwidget/
and download it from there

33. How are they different?
bamboostones co-do
Basic functionalities (register, upload
embed codes, ‘plus contributions’)  
Updates everywhere make the application
(appear to be more) dynamic 
Tagging is part of the navigation, so access
to interrelated content is easier 
Other people are visibly present &
accessible in the application 
Application enables people to team up

People can share more types of content:
toolkits, inspirational content, challenges 
Members have permanent access through
a widget 

34. What is the status of the two?
• Stichting Bamboostones was put in place at
the end of last year
• Stichting Bamboostones promotes social
innovation
• Stichting Bamboostones supports both
bamboostones.net & co-do.net
– But is in practice not doing much right now

35. Topics
• Bamboostones: the purpose of the
experiment
• Where are we now?
• What’s happened in the meanwhile?
• What are our options?
• Discussion

36. What can we do?
• Option 1: nothing  just wait and see
• Option 2: something  implement the changes proposed by
Karlijn, Markus & CJ (see addendum)
• Option 3: try to do better
– Raise the level of activity, also from the core team
– Get the founding partners actively on board
– Involve more founding partners (ICSE, Van Abbe, …)
– Get more people to join bamboostones
• Option 4: learn & improve (costly)  study co-do and
implement (improved) features from co-do on BBS
• Option 5: migrate (less costly)  give BBS members free
membership of co-do & wrap-up the bamboostones content
(in an e-publication?)

37. Related cost
Option Indicative cost
1. Do nothing 0 € (but may destroy potential value
of the tool)
2. Do something (i.e. implement
the already proposed
improvements)
5.000 € < Cost ≤ 10.000 € (depends
on the required applications)
3. Try to do better ? €  mainly effort (+ Google
adwords campaign?)
4. Learn & improve ≤ 15.000 € (co-do.net cost 33.000 €
out of pocket)
5. Migrate ≤ 5.000 € (cost of e-book based on
current BBS content only + migration
cost)

38. Topics
• Bamboostones: the purpose of the
experiment
• Where are we now?
• What’s happened in the meanwhile?
• What are our options?
• Discussion

39. Discussion
• What do we actually want?
– If it’s ‘a movement’, how do we get that going?
– How do we keep it going?
– If it’s ‘content’: how do we make it?
– How do we get other people to read it? How do we track if
reading it served a purpose?
• What can we afford?
– If we can’t afford what we want, can we get others to share the
cost?
• Founding partners?
• Other ‘sponsors’? (potentially new partners?)
• In another way…?

40. Addendum: improvement
suggestions for Bamboostones
KvdN, ML, CJM

41. Taking a longer term perspective
• We should ask ourselves: where is
Bamboostones going?
• Let’s assume it develops in line with innovation
for sustainable development at Philips Research
– It’s 1st phase was dedicated to starting an open
innovation platform with partners
– The 2nd phase is about making connections
– The 3rd phase would be… (we could think about this
now, in order to anticipate new functionalities better)

42. What does that imply? 1/2
• We should ‘wrap up’ phase 1 of Bamboostones
• Improve content-wise
– Introduce the innovation framework for sustainable development
in a more complete way
– Put all videos together
– Do something with the transition tracks
• Improve the emotional appeal
– Make the visual identity more lively
• Take the co-do visualization as starting point
– Introduce animations
– Make it more colorful
– Show number of visitors & participants

43. What does that imply? 2/2
• We should start a ‘phase 2’, focused on enabling
connections
– Introduce a ‘Bamboostones passport’
• Give people a public profile page
• With their interests
– Make a community page
• Google maps: networking around the globe
• Help people make connections, identify themes, collaborate
– Improve the positive feedback loop between
contributors and people thinking about them
– Activities: Event calendar
– E-book: give people a format to read info

44. Additional improvement opportunities
• There is no balancing between old and new
contributions
– The older ones, who had a longer time before new
ones came, have higher scores
• It’s possibly quite ‘hoogdrempelig’
– Does ‘big thought’ sound too difficult? Does it raise
the bar too much?

45. Recommendations
1. Wrap up phase 1 of Bamboostones
2. Implement improvements to start phase 2
– Move ‘beyond content’ (make the site
emotionally more appealing)
– Start enabling networking (help people
connect to each other)
3. Give Bamboostones an active role in the
preparation of Connection Day
– See next slide

46. Addendum: two more slights
with web statistics

47. Whereas the # of views is stable
(could this be ‘search bots’?)
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
1/Jan 2/Jan 3/Jan 4/Jan 5/Jan 6/Jan 7/Jan 8/Jan 9/Jan 10/Jan
Total views
Total views

48. How about new visitors?
• Bamboostones has 50% less new visitors than
benchmarked webites (source: Google
Analytics)