Daniel Steinbock

From Barack Obama’s platform on the subject of technology:

We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.

The deliberation and decision-making processes in the United States are archaic. They were designed in an era when the fastest message traveled at the speed of a horse. Consider that the precedents for presidential and congressional term limits were also set during that era. Four years worth of decision-making in 1798 was probably orders of magnitude less power than four years worth in 2008. The globalized, digitally-connected world moves far swifter than the one our Founding Fathers lived in.

I hope that the idealistic position quoted from Obama’s site above can be reduced to concrete practice in the coming years. Instead of relying on lobbyists to travel to Washington DC and “represent” the public interest with sweet talk and bribery, let us use the Web to create a channel for direct public comment and polling on legislative and executive issues. It would be really quite simple. That’s what Change.gov should really be.

The internet gave us all a voice. President-elect Obama, please open up an ear to listen.

In a recent post, I introduced Kluster, a new web startup that is trying to build a community for democratized design, i.e. crowdsourcing.

As an experiment, I recently sponsored my own design challenge on Kluster (you’ll need a Kluster account to see it). I offered $50 of my own money and challenged the Kluster community to design a killer location-aware application for the iPhone. The challenge ran for about a week and a half, during which time 47 proposals were made and 68,523 watts (Kluster currency) were invested to determine the best among them.

The main purpose of my experiment was to try and re-create the human-centered design process within Kluster, which, according to my previous post, is difficult if not impossible. Not to be a mere critic, I gave my own best shot and making it happen.

Continue reading ‘Human-centered crowdsourcing? Not yet.’