ideas for america

With nearly 8,000 ideas and more than 600,000 votes, the Ideas for Change In America competition of Change.org made evident a widespread interest in the power of technology to enable citizen-centered policy change. We’ve been watching with great interest here on Social Citizens as thousands of ideas have funneled into Change.org since early November.

But with yesterday’s announcement of the top ten ideas and a lively panel discussion at the National Press Club, I’ve been focused on what it means as this new era of participatory democracy takes hold - perhaps even more so than on the ideas themselves. It’s one thing to rally your network to elect an individual candidate or to vote for a specific idea – but how do you take that network and sustain it, and more importantly how do you use technology to bring new and diverse voices into the dialogue? Read more »

Two weeks into a grand experiment of crowd sourcing ideas for the incoming Obama Administration, Change.org has received 3,681 ideas to date in almost thirty different categories. According to Change.org Founder and CEO Ben Rattray, the Change community is getting deeply involved to champion these ideas --wtih around 10,000 comments and more than 100,000 votes.

They also have a huge and growing list of partner nonprofit groups including Campus Progress, People for the American Way, Oxfam, and well, you can check all of them out here.

Some of the hot topics: Read more »

Change.org and MySpace have launched Ideas for Change in America (or on MySpace, www.myspace.com/changedotorg). The idea for "Ideas" is simple: post your idea for reforming government, get your friends to vote for it, watch your idea rise (or not!), and see which ideas percolate to the top. Read more »