K Street Cafe

Amid Deadly Storms, Alabama Power Kept Customers Informed Through Twitter (Ragan)
In the days following tornadoes in central Alabama, a power company was tweeting updates and reassurances.

How Crowdsourcing Is Improving Global Communities (Mashable)
There are many examples of how entrepreneurs and philanthropists are using crowdsourcing techniques to improve local and global communities in real, substantive ways.

Ethical Quandary for Social Sites (The New York Times)
Social media companies are in a difficult position: how do they accommodate the growing use for political purposes while appearing neutral, but also maintain the practices and policies that made these services popular in the first place?

#Quakebook: Crowdsourced Japan Charity Book (The Atlantic)
One blogger has taken a unique approach to raise money for the Japan Red Cross by launching a solo effort to collect prose, photos and illustrations into a self-published book, dubbed #Quakebook.

5 Early Recommendation Technologies That Could Shake Up Their Niches (ReadWriteWeb)
As people look more to the internet for cues on what to purchase, five new start ups find ways to make online recommendations for everyone.

Crowdsourced Smearbusting (Tech President)
A new Web site, Smearbusters.org, take the phenomenon of crowdsourcing to fight smears associated with Senator Obama’s campaign.

Fast, Cheap and Sustainable: Ex-Pentagon Geek Plots Disaster Relief 2.0 (Wired)
A former Pentagon official is leading the drive to include social media and Web 2.0 techniques in post-crisis situations.

In 2006, with less money and less name recognition than his opponent for Senate, incumbent Orrin Hatch, Pete Ashdown took an innovative approach to his campaign website. Harking back to a tradition of elected representatives being delegates of their constitutents will (rather than trustees), Ashdown included a wiki on his website where voters could edit and develop his campaign platform. This collaborative process, made easy by the web, foreshadowed a growing practice of letting large groups of citizens to collaborate on developing political messages and policy platforms.

But why should we let the crowd do this? According to James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, large groups of people are simply smarter than small groups and individuals, on average. For example, Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, in The Spiral of Silence, shows that long before asking people in surveys “who they will vote for” can effectively predict an upcoming election, asking them “who they think will win” will get the prediction right.

On Thursday, October 16, 2008, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm at 1225 I (Eye) Street, NW, 3rd Floor, the Internet Advocacy Roundtable focuses on crowdsourcing message and policy platforms with a panel of speakers who have managed crowdsourcing programs and developed new software to make these programs more effective.

Speakers include Brian Young, who has been working with the TruthFightsBack.com project, which relies on citizens to help identify smears in the current presidential campaign; Michael Yaki, who crowdsourced language and ideas for the 2008 Democratics Party platform; and David Stern, co-founder of MixedInk, a startup that has created an online collaborative writing tool that allows large groups to weave their ideas together democratically to express a collective viewpoint.

The exciting thing about crowdsourcing’s impact on politics and governance is that it creates new opportunities to further democratize the process. As alluded to above, these tools allow elected officials to more effectively represent the will of their constituents, or as Edmund Burke wrote in the 1770’s, they can be delegates. This is in sharp contrast to elected officials who see themselves as trustees of their constituents. Trustees do what they think is best for their constituents, even if that is in opposition to their will. Delegates work to reflect their constituents’ will; a far more democratic approach.