Yesterday I shared some insights from Elliot Katzman on the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0 from a business and investment perspective. User generated content was one theme and here is a great success story on a global scale. The Little League baseball program serves 7500 leagues with 200,000 teams who all have a chance to compete in the world’s largest sports event from a participant perspective, the Little League Baseball World Series. There are approximately 100 employees but they coordinate the activities of over 1,000,000 volunteers in over 100 countries. This is a connection and collaboration challenge of grand proportions. In the past much was done in a manual manner with many hand written roosters passed into the central office to be re-transcribed, recorded, and monitored.

Now these teams and the central office are connected online through an application developed by MyTeam, now part of the Active Network. Every team needs an information officer to retain their charter. The volunteer information officers collect team data and input it into the online system. The resulting database does not have to be reworked by central office and is available for those who need the information. When there is a change in schedule at the local levels, coaches can do much of the much of the coordination online and through an auto phone call and response system. As an aside, this system was created by brute force programming when it was developed in Web 1.0 times but would be much easier and less costly to develop now.

I was a soccer coach for eight years for my daughter’s team and can appreciate the time savings here. Little League volunteers also write game summaries and provide photos for much richer documentation for the participants. I used to send such stuff to the local paper and know how much it was appreciated. In the age of Flickr and YouTube the awareness, interest, and opportunities for such user-generated content have greatly expanded.

A common means of communication using user-generated content has greatly improved the lives of the central office, the league volunteers, and the children themselves. This type of coordination puts responsibilities and greater sense of participation into the field and with the users. Many companies could benefit from following the example set by the Little League. It is very consistent with the insurance company example I offered a few weeks ago. Think of this application in any franchise business or any one with a large network of regional offices. The system is also used in other sports and more information can be found at the Active Network site.