Great example of a "wiki moment". You come across a topic or issue that is confusing. Information sources, including subject matter experts, do not provide enough insight. The topic though has enormous implications. So you collect information for personal clarification (in this case, using a wiki). The body of information grows as you pull content together. It evolves into a participatory environment - beginning with your own social network of friends that contribute their perspectives. But the wiki has the potential for network effects to kick in as friends invite friends and so on to the point where perhaps the wiki will "'go viral". At some point - the community gets noticed more broadly and mainstream conversations are altered as a result.
I'm pretty sure this scenario could be duplicated within your own enterprise.
SuperDelegates.org
SuperDelegates.org grew out of a simple question: Who are the "super delegates" that get a vote in the Democratic National Convention? They represent 20% of the vote, and in a year in which the Democratic nominee may well be chosen at the convention, it seemed like we should know more about these individuals.
This site is designed to shed light on the super delegates. If you have information you'd like to share, feel free to add it to the site.
I started this site as a personal project to try and figure out who the delegates are, which candidate they support, and where they're located. (I'm Rick Klau, by the way.) I started with the list of delegates and endorsements at DemConWatch, a terrific blog that's been following convention news and super delegates in particular. From there, I found a DNC membership roster to verify names and locations, and used searches at Google to get basic biographic data on the delegates, links to endorsements, etc.
Once I had enough data to feel that the site was marginally useful, I started reaching out to friends who might be interested in participating. As word grew (TechPresident, CNN and others), a few visitors turned into tens of thousands - and now the site is largely self-sufficient.
Thanks to everyone who's contributed content, and a major thank you to Juliano Ravasi, author of KMLExport, the MediaWiki extension that makes the KML layer possible.
Retrieved from "http://superdelegates.org/SuperDelegates.org:About"
Very nice, and interesting example of moving from the opaque to the transparent.
Forgot that Rick was so politically involved too... (shows I haven't been on his blog in a while, whoops!)
Posted by: Dan Keldsen | February 22, 2008 at 02:13 PM