Do you have a good idea for President-Elect Barack Obama, a concrete policy proposal? All week long, Obama’s transition site Change.gov has been soliciting policy proposals from people across the country through an app called the Citizen’s Briefing Book. Friday is the last day it will be accepting ideas, so submit yours now.
The Citizen’s Briefing Book is very similar to the Open Questions app the site was running before the New Year, which solicited questions from the populace and let visitors to the site vote up the best ones. Open Questions was based on Google Moderator. The Citizen’s Briefing Book is powered by Salesforce.com’s CRM Ideas product, which runs on Salesforce.com and is used by Starbucks and Dell to solicit ideas from customers.
Instead of asking questions, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is soliciting the best answers to what ails the country. Once you log in, you can vote up or down the ideas that have already been submitted (only one vote per idea). Or you can submit your own. Vote for my idea to End the Bailouts. The Obama transition team will collect the best ideas and present them to the President-Elect in a briefing book.
Some of the ideas are inane (“Boost America’s Economy with Legal Online Poker”) but some are worth considering (“Vote and debate all bills online,” “National WiFi”). One of the most popular proposals, not surprisingly, is to legalize marijuana. What is surprising is that it is the top-voted proposal to fix the economy. Hey, it’s what the people want.