A big night for open innovation online
While Sarah Palin, Robinho and Gustav have been extraordinary stories of recent days, tonight we saw the launch of two very noteworthy open innovation projects indeed:
Google Chrome, the web giant’s entry into the browser market with an open source product is clearly the big story of the week when it comes to the web. The accompanying story-telling that Google share about the project is particularly well done and ranges from the very personable to the wonderfully geeky.
So is Chrome this week’s Cuil or will it be a major success? The proof of the pudding is in the surfing and despite Mac users being left out until 2009, my initial play and instinct is that this one is going to fly, and fly big – but given Microsoft Internet Explorer’s continued dominance and Firefox’s flexibility, it is likely to be a slow burn.
Oh boy Obama! – oh boy indeed. The hits just keep on coming from everyone’s favourite Illinois-based senator. Billed as an "unofficial thinktank" and given the disclaimer that it is not affiliated with the Obama campaign, this new policy/issue crowdsourcing site is being touted around via the prodigous Facebook presence of that very same campaign… interesting.
This feels like a dangerous (but understandable) game since it gives users of the site no formal assurance that Team Obama camp will listen to their voice while we all know that they will, if appropriate, use it as political leverage. However this plays out, one thing is for sure – open models of crowd-sourcing just got a brand new poster boy.
PS Hat tip to Maz Hardy for bringing this to my attention re: Chrome.
By David Simoes-Brown, Sep 2, 2008
Rohan,
intersting points.
thinking about politics – in a sense democracy is the original crowd-sourcing. People put ideas out there and everyone gets to vote on them.
Obviously as politics has developed this concept gets squashed and many people end up feeling like they have little voice.
Is this something endemic in any crowd -sourcing system/concept? Maybe we could use political science and the history of democracy to model the future of crowd-sourcing?!