The Backlog

This list is meant as a thought-starter. The spreadsheet version also has a column of Scrum-style "point" values for each item, which total to 721. You might want to try a fun exercise: counting up the points you've already completed.

1. Hire a new employee via a social media encounter.

2. Fire an employee for a Twitter indiscretion.

3. Release an interesting internal dataset to the public.

4. Release a significant piece of code to the open source community.

5. Make a list of companies that might disrupt yours by using the Internet.

6. Make a list of companies that you could disrupt by using the Internet.

7. Brainstorm a highly automated business model that lets you do what you currently do with 10% as many employees.

8. Identify a professional employee role that can be converted into an amateur prosumer role.

9. Run an online innovation jam.

10. Set up and run a prediction market experiment for a month.

11. Persuade your marketing department to modify your company's website logo in an interesting way for a PR opportunity.

12. Create a useful ebook and associated microsite for your customers and get to 1,000 downloads using only word-of-mouth techniques.

13. Spin up a Hadoop cluster and run an experimental Map Reduce job on some large internal dataset.

14. Pilot a "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) program with a subset of your employees.

15. Run an online meeting involving at least 2 times as many people as your largest conference room can hold.

16. Convert a conference room into a Maker studio equipped appropriately for your industry.

17. Mine your email servers to produce a map of the internal social graph of employees.

18. Run a contest to discover the best personal blogs written by your employees and award prizes to the top three by popular vote.

19. Create a Y-Combinator-style incubator program within your company with funds amounting to at least 0.1% of revenue.

20. Get a post on your company blog onto the front page of a major aggregator such as Hacker News or Slashdot.

21. Get a tweet from your official corporate account retweeted at least 100 times in 24 hours.

22. Announce and enforce company-wide interface standards that let anyone access any newly created dataset.

23. Instrument a critical business process and display real-time analytics on large hallway screens everywhere in the company.

24. Estimate the number of people actually using their offices or cubicles at any given time in your facilities.

25. Mine the calendars of your staff to compute the average number of four-hour "maker time" chunks your typical employee has available in a week.