TechCrunch had an article today ("Is Obama Ready to be a Two-Way President?") that addresses, in broad strokes, many of the issues that civicsgraph.org seeks to cover. I will blog more about some of the ideas in that post soon, but as I read it, it sparked an idea: what if John McCain made the goodwill effort of "linking-in" Obama to his social graph?
One of the biggest challenges of transitioning from campaigning to governing using social technologies is the fact that Obama's starting point (barackobama.com, his Twitter, Facebook & MySpace followers, etc) is overwhelmingly his partisan supporters. It's one of the reasons that Twitter and Facebook are better as retention and community building tools than marketing tools - you're preaching to the choir.
So, what if John McCain donated his 618,000 Facebook fans, 191,000 YouTube fans, 4,856 Twitter followers and the rest of his social-graph to a new community (maybe hosted at change.gov) in order to seed a bi-partisan civics graph? It could be as simple as a message from McCain to his followers with instructions on how to follow the new joint community, but it would be an extremely powerful message.
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