Intellectual Property Law

Barack Obama's transition team is soliciting feedback from US citizens on where they'd like to see their country go through Change.gov, but it turns out that a rival web site named Change.org might beat the incoming administration to the punch when it comes to soliciting and building a citizen-created action agenda.

"These aren't meant to be suggestions," says Ben Rattray, Change.org's founder and CEO. "These are meant to launch a national lobbying campaign."
Photo: Courtesy Ben Rattray.

The issues-based blogging and social networking venture Change.org has teamed up with MySpace to ask the denizens of the online world to submit policy ideas to the Obama administration. The community has a chance to vote for and comment on the ideas until the end of the year in each category of issue. They can then vote again for the top 10 overall ideas, which will then be presented to an Obama administration official on January 20th (Inauguration Day) at an event in Washington DC.

"These aren't meant to be suggestions," says Ben Rattray, Change.org's founder and CEO. "These are meant to launch a national lobbying campaign."

That people-powered lobbying campaign will begin shortly after Inauguration Day when those winning ideas are paired up with one of the many non-profit groups sponsoring this initiative. The non-profits will try to harness the energy and enthusiasm the electorate exhibited during the election, and to channel it towards members of Congress so that they'll enact the relevant legislation.

Change.org hopes to build momentum by limiting the number of action agenda items to 10, and by partnering with non-profits and media organizations such as MySpace to bring their large communities to bear on those "winning" issues. MySpace alone has 118 million members (around the globe.) This model and other ones like it build on the one formulated by TechPresident, which funneled traffic from blogs and media sites during the election for its 10Questions presidential candidate project.

Change.org and MySpace's project launched Monday. Predictably, "The Economy" has so far received the most submissions with 228 ideas. The top-rated ideas in that category: Make more businesses employee owned (with 65 votes;) pass a second stimulus package (with 42 votes;) and encourage the growth of small and locally-owned businesses (with 37 votes.)

The difference between this effort and other similar efforts such as  BigDialog.org and Whitehouse2.org is the involvement of the non-profit groups, which will actively lobby members of Congress, say Rattray and Change.org's Managing Editor Joshua Levy.

"It's not just sitting in your underwear, posting your idea, and eating a burrito, says Levy. "You could do that if you want, but that idea's not going to rise to the top if that's your approach."

Indeed. Change.org encourages members of the community to virally market ideas that they support through their social networking communities.

Nevertheless, with a staggering e-mail list of 13 million, and well-established tech expertise on his team, the Obama administration itself won't have a problem, once it gets started, reaching out on its own.

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