The Next Apollo Project in 140 Characters
Innovators are being asked to friend Uncle Sam as the next good ideas for the government are being sought through social networks.
By Emily Badger
Anil Dash sums up the power of crowdsourcing with a simple question he put to his Twitter feed a few months back. It was time for a new cell phone, he announced. What should he get?
“Somebody I don’t even really know said, ‘Here’s a list of the most popular handsets in America ranked by how much radiation they put out,’” Dash recalled.
Now he had an info stream he hadn’t even thought to consider. And if social media could better inform his relatively small cell phone conundrum, imagine what it could do for the big-picture questions we really want to get right — the questions government answers on behalf of us all.
“We have this disconnect where, as a private citizen, I can ask for my friends’ opinions on something on Twitter or Facebook,” Dash said. “But yet, someone can be making decisions that affect all of us” — a government official, that is — “but not have that ability.”
Related:
+ http://expertlabs.org
+ http://expertlabs.org/thinktank.html (Open Source crowdsourcing web application)
+ Large list of “virtual democracy” related resources
