comments from Zephyr Teachout and Britt Blaser on the judging of submissions to the Since Sliced Bread contest for original ideas on how to improve the lives of working Americans (original Smart Mobs post on the contest). The 70 ideas chosen by a group of experts out of the 22,000 ideas submitted apparently didn’t strike those who had been watching the contest as that interesting or original.
Blaser notes, “The debacle illustrates what can happen when a top-down organization like a major labor union tries a “web 2.0″ approach without fully preparing itself for all the implications of empowering a network or community; that the participants in fact expect to have power.”
