People have been asking a lot about ways for us to continue the momentum of the Obama campaign. How do we make sure that the country doesn't snap back into apathy and how do we work together to identify and address our problems. Clearly, the internet is going to be a major organizing mechanism... but how? With which tools?
Here's an idea I've been toying around with:
Make local.change.gov into a directory of discoverable placenames... local.change.gov/11209 or local.change.gov/Bay_Ridge. On those pages, mashup and localize a few services that are meant to inform, encourage collaboration, provide feedback and ideas, etc. Here's what I would add:
Get Satisfaction: A place where people could not only complain, but provide ideas and solutions, too. Make sure my local elected representatives are on it, too, so they could be accountable when someone posts an issue and no one responds. I think local government (and education, too) are hugh opportunities for GS to seed pages for people to discover.
Meetup: They should create a placeholder Meetup for Change group in every zipcode, so that people aren't just adding their ideas to the cloud--they're getting out of the house and doing something about them. List other local Meetups, too, and make it easy to create new ones right from these pages.
Outside.in: What's the community talking about? What's going on around you? Seems fitting that hyperlocal news should be fed into this platform, not to mention the fact that Outside.in's local placename taxonomies are probably going to come in very handy in creating these pages in the first place.
Blogging: I don't really care what blogging platform gets used, but if we're going to be creating these local organizing places on the web, giving more people a voice seems appropriate.
Community event calendar: No brainer. Not only allow people to publish events to it one at a time, but allow groups and organization to publish calendar feeds to it as well.
Non profit opportunities database: Do you know many times people have asked me where they can go to find a good cause to get involved with? I have no idea where to send them. Seems like that's got to be out there somewhere, but if not, let's create it here and allow syndication of the data to everyone can have it and add to it.
Community Forum: Here's something I actually think it best to avoid. Forums always spiral into hate and troll behavior. Let's keep the discussions here to user publishing on their own blogs, syndicate it around, and also in the structure of GS idea and issue posts, or in a focused Meetup with an organizer.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Anyone want to just build this? (Or at least start wireframing.)