Apps for Democracy “Community Edition”

I’m heavily buried in the process of preparing my materials for the upcoming MARCOM 2009 conference, however I wanted to post this up rather than just tweet about it. Basically, Apps for Democracy , the Washington D.C crowd sourcing initiative that I often use in my presentations, has just launched a new initiative called Apps for Democracy “Community Edition”. Citizens get to submit their community improvement ideas in real-time and vote using this insights portal.

Why do I think this initiative will work? Because last time they had very little support and yet they managed to have citizens develop 47 applications in 30 days using crowd sourced government data. The estimated cost had they gone through the RFP process, would have been $2.3M, not to mention 12 years of procurement. The total cost ended up being the prize money of $50K. The ROI therefore was 4000%.

Have a look at this video if you’re confused.

Apps For Democracy Community Edition from Peter Corbett on Vimeo.