People, organizations and government are beginning to realize and leverage the immense power of the crowd through contests and challenges, especially using Web 2.0 technology, and offering prizes for success. The “crowd” simply refers to a large group of people or a community, usually the general public. Today, the Case Foundation is hosting a public-private strategy session with the White House about “driving innovation and civic dialogue through the use of prizes, challenges and open grantmaking.” It’s all about reaching new people and ideas through innovative means. The Foundation has successfully employed this model before, such as through the Make It Your Own Awards.

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If you missed the Fiscal Future Forum last evening, you can catch a recap here:

It was a pleasure to plan this event, and thanks to Ustream, many more people can benefit from this discussion and take part in the conversation on-demand. On a Tax Day marked with angry protests, events like these show how people from different generations and different political views can get together and have a rational and civil discussion.

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The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday announced its relaunched Pick 5 campaign – an innovative use of the Web and social media to get citizens to do environmentally friendly things. While it launched for the first time last Earth Day, it has now reinvented itself on an international level – asking people around the globe to pick and commit to doing five things to help the environment. From the site:

“Being an environmentalist means different things in different places. By choosing five or more of these actions and sharing your stories, you CAN make a positive difference for the environment. Join with others around the world today to take the small actions that will add up to make the biggest difference. Are you ready?”

The new campaign is a vast improvement over where it was a year ago – offering more actions, greater immersion with the social web, and a more compelling user experience. I had the opportunity to study Pick 5 as part of an assignment for my E-Government 2.0 course this semester, in which we had to examine a “failed e-government project.” You can download my report “Pick 5 Analysis” and view some PowerPoint slides highlighting my research below. The report explores how Pick 5 fell short of its public engagement goals but utilized a method of “failing fast” to identify areas of improvement and build off of them (as this relaunch demonstrates).

Many thanks to EPA’s Web manager Jeffrey Levy and the State Department’s Lovisa Williams for the time in this project.

E-government, Government 2.0, report, social media Hide

A few months ago, Michael Gerson wrote, “Amazingly — out of idealism, ignorance or both — people in their 20s remain the strongest supporters of health care reform. They are also the most likely group to wake up the day after passage of Obamacare with a health reform hangover — forced to buy coverage at higher premiums to reduce the cost of someone else’s health insurance.”

Well, the hangover is upon us.  An Associated Press analysis recently found that young people’s health premiums could rise at much as 17 percent under the new law. Although the analysis did not factor in potential benefits to young people such as being allowed to stay on parents’ insurance to age 26 and tax credits that vary for those making under $42,320 a year, it’s safe to say that a 27-35 year-old making more than $42K a year will see a pretty steep increase in the cost of health insurance.

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With the announcement of Justice Stevens’ retirement, the political world is abuzz about who should fill his seat. Although the balance of the court is not likely to change, a partisan battle will surely still ensue. The nominee to the high court will face many questions about constitutional interpretation, but the ultimate decision will probably be determined by Senators primarily based on the nominee’s likelihood to support or oppose particular issues that may come before the court (after all, they are accountable to we the people who have largely arrived at the mistaken belief that the justices should do as we want). We are polarized on these issues; hence, the recent partisan outcomes of Justice Sotomayor’s 68-32 and Justice Alito’s 58-42 confirmations.

It wasn’t always like that. Justices Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia and Kennedy did not have a single vote against their confirmations. That the opposite is happening is not just a reflection of growing partisanship in Washington, nor the attributes of the nominees themselves – but of the very real and growing problem of the idea of a “living Constitution.” If we were to treat the Constitution as it should be treated – a legal text whose meaning must be discerned within the context of what its words meant when they were adopted by the people, in order to apply it to various cases – then we would be looking for legal scholars who can do this job well and reasonably.

“If on the other hand,” Justice Scalia once said, “we’re picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a new constitution with all sorts of new values to govern our society, then we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look principally for people who agree with us, the majority, as to whether there ought to be this right, that right and the other right.”

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