MyIdea4CA shows both the power and limitation of opening up to the crowd

US media strategist and Business Week columnist Ben Kunz points us towards this site created by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration in California.

Essentially California is short of $21 billion and Gov Schwarzenegger has involved the voters directly by creating myidea4ca.com. People can submit ideas by adding the hashtag #myidea4ca to a tweet and it’s then voted up or down by the general public.

It’s a great idea and as Ben says, Schwarzenegger deserves credit for using Twitter as a listening device.

Yet…at the same time a scan through what’s up there shows that it’s being used less to put forward constructive suggestions and more by people who just want to push this or that particular cause.

Some suggestions are (whether you agree with them or not) legitimate ideas, such as emptying the jails of non violent offenders…

…and then we have a fair amount of tweets for or against the idea of creating a Harvey Milk Day, which might well be a good move in promoting equality, but I doubt will raise $21 billion anytime soon, and suggestions such as getting rid of ALL gun control laws.

Plus there is the problem that everyone (including someone like me who clearly does not live in California!) can vote the ideas up or down.

In that sense it reminds me a little bit of the Skittles experiment where the website was taken down and given over to social media comment.

The principle of it was, I thought a novel and brave move, but the implementation – making Twitter centre stage – gave prominence to those who shouted loudest and those who had an axe to grind (in Skittles’ case people who wanted to sabotage it through copious swearing).

What Skittles ended up doing was to revise the experiment slightly by rotating in other social networks from Flickr to Facebook. Maybe MyIdea4Ca.com would work better along a similar lines – encourage people to utilise other networks to bring their idea to life, and substantiate them, a bit more?