Obama’s web 2.0 strategy: from campaigning to governing, part 1

Obama’s election win was a real beauty. It was a vindication of the American people (if I may so say), a shot in the arm for democracy, and it probably changed the world for the better over the course of one truly historic day. But as we all know, the tremendous goodwill and hope that Obama has summoned will evaporate if he fails to harness the same grassroots energy and organization that propelled him to the White House in the act of governing over the next four years.

As Obama has noted, there is a steep hill ahead to climb. Think of the challenges: renewing government and democracy; fixing the economy, education and health care; accelerating scientific discovery; fighting climate change and providing global security, to name a few. And he must do all of this with diminishing financial resources.

Obama needs to assemble a real A team of leaders and we’ll be hearing more about his cabinet choices today. But his only real hope in dealing with the tremendous challenges the country (world) faces will be to harness the collective ingenuity of citizens on a massive scale. In other words, he must enlist a level of participation in generating and acting on innovative solutions that has no obvious parallel in history.

Obama has already built a vast network of committed supporters. He has the inherent charisma and intelligence to lead. The questions now is how will Obama mobilize his supporters to affect real change? Will he “open source” government much the way thousands of dispersed Linux programmers converged on the Internet to develop one of the world’s leading computer operating systems? What mechanisms will he deploy to channel citizen input into policy-making? How will he engage all sectors of society in carrying out much-needed reforms in sectors such as education, health care, energy and finance?

Over the next few days and weeks I would like to offer a few Government 2.0 strategies for the Obama administration to pursue. I’ve got dozens of ideas but I would not want to spoil the fun by releasing them all at once!

So, here’s today’s first idea: Set up a series of citizen councils, organized around key policy themes, and equip users with an Ideastorm. At first these communities might look and feel a lot like Digg.com, the popular technology news aggregator. Users post policy suggestions and the community votes so that the most popular ideas rise to the top. Ideas are harvested from a broader spectrum of the population and the user-driven idea filtering process eases the burden on staff resources by harnessing “the crowd” to sift through mountains of feedback.

Dell Computer’s IdeaStorm provides a useful (albiet imperfect) template for the administration to follow. Less than a week after Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched, users had contributed over 1,300 ideas that were voted on more than 120,000 times. Many of the ideas contributed by Dell customers have already been translated into product and service innovations and customers can discuss these ideas directly with Dell’s product developers. Herein lies the critical peice. The administration will need to demonstrate that the ideas the community generates will be considered in the legislative process and acted on quickly if they receive support from democratically elected representatives. Easier said than done, of course, but there will be much more to come on this later. Stay tuned!