Standing Out From The Crowd

Everyone has been talking about how Obama’s campaign used the power of Social Networks and the Internet.  There’s also been a lot of buzz around how the same concepts and innovations could be used to improve the effectiveness of his presidency and turn it into a truly participative democracy.

The expectations around what the Transition Team will do is very high, but bit by bit they’ve been testing new concepts and ideas, showing again that they DO get what Web 2.0 is all aboutand that there’s definitely a plan to use it as a major tool for change.

First they virtually invited citizens to participate in Transition Team’s meetings with the Your Seat at the Table policy and now they are raising the stakes even more with the new Citizen’s Briefing Book initiative.

The Citizen Briefing Book is basically an online forum for citizens to send ideas and, at the same time, discuss and rate these ideas.  The best ideas (based on rates and comments) will rise to the top of the list and will be printed in the Briefing Book that President Barrack Obama gets from his experts and advisors for his analysis. (See also the technology behind it)

Both mentioned initiatives have very simple concepts and are based on examples of Social Media, CrowdSourcing and Social Bookmarking already available online in sites like Amazon, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon and several others. So the ideas may not be totally new, but the scale and possible impact to the whole society is immense.

Just as a social experiment, these efforts will certainly bring new findings on users’ behavior and crowd psychology that will help companies understand and improve their online customer experience and, above all, will represent an invaluable potential for change.

See original post at Vox Inc – Customerspective Blog