Darren Sharp

I'm Social Media project leader for the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre. Mandy Salomon and I recently completed a major research project on user-led innovation. It can be found here: Today’s citizens have much greater input into the creation and dissemination of the products and services they consume as evidenced by the huge popularity of Wikipedia, Firefox and YouTube. Trends in user-generated content, peer production communities and socially networked businesses provide new frameworks for thinking strategically about knowledge production in the 21st century. The sources of innovation are shifting away from trusted sources of authority and toward distributed forms of knowledge that reside collectively in society. A number of governments (See: http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/) have begun to recognise the huge benefits of tapping into the vast pool of knowledge, insights and experience of the public and are successfully trialing forms of "citizen innovation" as a means to co-create a range of public sector services and re-invigorate the policy development cycle. The community consultation made possible by the advent of collaborative technologies offers great potential for the Australian Government to embark on new forms of citizen engagement that can lead to better policy outcomes.