Wired’s Jeff P Howe has an excellent article today called “Obama and Crowdsourcing: A Failed Relationship?” The story behind it is that, as many people know by now, the President has been active in embracing social media and “crowdsourcing”, but the results have not neccesarily been good. The article provides a great summary of the issues at play, and the different challenges the government faces versus the likes of Starbucks and Dell.
Here are two my favorite parts:
1. In its current iteration, Open for Questions isn’t really enabling democracy, unless if by democracy we mean the “never-ending, small-bore struggle for advantage among constantly shifting coalitions of interest groups,” a conception of politics articulated by the early 20th Century political theorist Arthur Fisher Bentley.
Back story: the advice Obama primarily gets from his crowdsourcing initiatives is to legalize Marijuana, even though polls – and common sense – show that there are far more pressing issues on peoples minds right now.
2. The last part is the trickiest and most important: “It involves not just enacting the ideas, but going back into your community and telling them what you’ve done.” Starbucks, which maintains its own version of IdeaStorm, employs 48 full-time moderators whose only job is to engage the online community. In other words, Starbucks is investing the vast share of its resources in the second and third parts of the idea management cycle.
By contrast, the White House essentially used its platform as a listening device, and failed to participate in the ensuing conversation.
The “last part” refers to a three part process described in the paragraph above it – listening, disemmination, and implementation.
I also think there are some far bigger questions to ask about Obama’s political approach overall. It seems that there are thousands upon thousands of people out there trying to make a living off of talking about Obama’s “new” methods, how he engaged with social media (and by extension, citizens), is far more open, etc… and trying to apply them to how businesses run. But as I read more and more stories like this one, and particularly stories in the Economist, there seems to be a lot of things that Obama does that are very old-school (such as talking about bi-partisanship and bringing people together, and then – as the Economist regularly highlights – taking a very partisan, “controlled message” approach to policy building). So how much is really different here? Has the Obama story been way overblown?
