Organizing for America | Posts with the tag Wisdom of Crowds

Posts with the tag Wisdom of Crowds

hope Obama will implement my data feed/data visualization approach

By WDavidStephenson - Jun 22nd, 2008 at 10:53 am EDT

I'm off to NYC to speak at this year's Personal Democracy Forum. My talk (you can preview it on SlideShare), part of the forum on transparency, will focus on two of the issues Obama mentions in the technology white paper, opening government through data feeds:

" Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities. Greater access to environmental data, for example, will help citizens learn about pollution in their communities, provide information about local conditions back to government and empower people to protect themselves.
Establishing pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions."

This may not seem like a huge issue, but it is, and I hope that he will follow through on these measures when in office. The combination of data feeds and data visualization tools to help you and me -- not just the statistician priesthood -- interpret government data can not only involve us and the "wisdom of crowds" alluded to in the second bullet, but can also dramatically increase the efficiency of government internally as well (I just did a white paper on this for Don Tapscott's Gov. 2.0 project).The District of Columbia has perhaps the best program in the country for RSS feeds -- more than 200 real-time feeds on topics ranging from building permits to crime to potholes. While they haven't done a good job on the second point -- launching pilot projects to directly involve citizens in decision-making, they have reduced costs, broken down barriers between agencies, and harvested "wisdom of crowds" by giving free access to the data to all employees. In fact, a smart strategy for the Obama Administration would be to begin by rolling out the data feeds internally, experimenting with sites similar to Swivel and Many Eyes internally, and then, once familiar with the approach and its benefits, bring in the public.

Let me know what you think about the approach!

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Resources for amplifying our collective intelligence and collective wisdom

By George Pór - Jun 7th, 2008 at 1:59 pm EDT

Also listed in: Belgium for Obama | Innovation Synergy Discussion Group | Open Source Advocates for Obama

I wrote about why I think that giving our shared attention to boost our collective IQ will be helpful to win the White House. Here, in this post, I want to share some of my fave resources that I believe can help with that not so easy but vital task. They include social technologies, centers, initiatives, websites, books, articles and various social practices, designed to take collective intelligence and wisdom to scale:

"collective intelligence" in Wikipedia

social technologies for boosting collective intelligence and wisdom in groups of any size:

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Barack Obama gets it - here's proof

By Pamela from Evanston, IL - Mar 6th, 2008 at 11:49 pm EST

Here's a great article from Fortune with an interview of an executive at my company detailing campaign differences between Hillary and Obama. Barack and his team "get it". Imagine what a difference that kind of thinking will make at the helm of our country.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/29/technology/leonard_politics.fortune/index.htm?section=money_technology

Now that's change you can believe in. He's already doing it.

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