Debate2010 : CrowdSourcing and Cloud Computing united for democracy
Telegraph and Salesforce united for democracy and transparency.
Debate2010, a democratic tool provided to citizens to propose ideas, vote on the ideas of others, look at what citizens are thinking, what is a priority for citizens, share ideas on social networks. This is Debate2010, born from a union of forces between the British Telegrah and SalesForce.com inc, world leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Cloud Computing.
The Telegraph hopes to offer a unique insight into the priority of UK citizens’ politics through crowdsourcing, the website, Debate2010, was officially launched on Monday and aims to foster debate centred in the public sphere, while creating a road map of priorities for MP candidates during the election.
The editorial staff will publish the topics of debate that will last on the site, depending on their popularity, for 1-3 days. Users will be able to answer questions, vote for and against, and comment on other users’ answers. The home page of the site shows all the open debates, as well as the most popular answers and a selection of the keywords used by users indicative of the tone of the general debate.
The technology mirrors that used by the Obama-Biden campaign and transition team during the 2008 U.S. election, but Marcus Warren, Telegraph.co.uk, sees the site as a new way of surveying public opinion.
“It’s a real-time poll — not a poll of political intentions, but of political ideas,” he said.
The political priorities highlighted by the public on the Debate2010 website will be packaged in a UK Citizens’ Briefing Book for MP candidates to help them drive their campaigns. Kate Day, Telegraph.co.uk, hopes the site will illuminate the variety of opinions across the nation.
Crowdsourcing has been increasingly used by journalists not only to the public but also to help the search for articles. In the United States, the New York Times and The Huffington Post used it to search hundreds of pages of official documents and bills in the United States, and last year the Guardian used crowdsourcing to analyze data on MPs’ spending.
But there is always the danger of malicious or uninformed users abusing it as it is a public forum. Joanne Jacobs, Social Media Consultant, expressed her concern about the comment-based system of the Debate2010 website.
The developers of the site, however, are optimistic that Debate2010 will be a key program for both candidates and the public in the run-up to election day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9970wlgcmU
