The power of the crowd, revisited

Mom-and pop shops, SME's, and important corporations, receptionists, interns, middle managers, and CEOs – everyone's crowdsourcing these days and calling it so Regularise if they just ask a few friends to particpate in a mini-survey...).Here's a l ittle piece of nostalgia, THE crowdsourcing primer starring Jeff Howe:Interestingly, the power of the crowd has not translated yet into the one realm whose decisions have arguably the biggest power to impact the crowd: politics. Since Obama's domineerin g use of social media helped restore trust in the American apotheosis of commonwealth, and his emphatic election fomented expectations of all-inclusive "power-to-the-people" digital governance, most of the attempts to establish an effective crowdsourced model of policy-making have fallen flat, at least so far. Yet even though a blog is tracking the progress, it is somewhat unclear if and when the top ten ideas are actually becoming action items incorporated into national policy.What's lacking is trans parency when it matters. Crowdsourcing is no longer an exclusive noun for a few in the know, it has become a verb for the crowd. Yet the missing link between input and outcome is not an easy task given the many valid and bureaucratic restrictions the ad ministration is facing. For the time being, it is the experts who govern. If all the crowdsourced ideas remain in a soil box without visible, actionable outcome, the enthusiasm to engage in politics (that was so salient during the presidential campaign) will slowly fade. Virtually three years after Jeff Howe coined the word in his seminal article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," and, ironically, in the very week 1,300 handpicked scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other thinkers, movers, and shakers a ssembled at the TED conference in Long Beach, the point "crowdsourcing" yielded more than one million search results on Google.That's quite an accomplishment. The gang will have to wait before its ideas will make a real number in setting the national ag enda. While the new US president has issued several executive orders introducing a new level of transparency to governance (on this topic, for a divergent opinion, it is worth reading Noah Feldman's "In Defense of Secrecy" essay in the NY Nowadays Magaz ine), the mechanisms of collaborative political decision-making have yet to find a proper forum on the social web.Sure, there are dozens of open forums that aggregate input and funnel it to the decision-makers – from World Agenda to the rather lig ht-hearted advertising riff "Dear Mr. Cheers~ President" (Pepsi). And on change.gov, there were Obama's invitation during the transition to submit input for his political agenda ("share your vision") as well as Tom Daschle's video responses to people's suggestions on aid ("citizen briefing book"). The site yielded 7,875 ideas by way of crowdsourcing and then distilled them downward (through 675,943 votes) to ten ideas presented to the administration. Perhaps the most ambitious project so removed, howe ver, was MySpace and Change.org's "Ideas for America" initiative.