Practical Government 2.0 Tips: Crowdsource Relevance

Social media and networking web sites, along with successful social learning communities, provide powerful examples of the principles that government and the military can apply to their social learning programs. Here is one tip (we'll outline more in the weeks to come) that NewsGator has discovered by working with government clients such as the US Army and the US Air Force.

Crowdsource Relevance

Most social networking sites and communities have so much content, that it can be overwhelming to  users.   These sites, to varying degrees, make use of crowdsourcing, where users essentially do the work of “classifying” the information.  For enterprises, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool that enables the organization to take mountains of information and connect users with only the best and most relevant content.
 
Just a few examples of crowdsourcing in action include when users bookmark information (which is an implicit endorsement), users mark something as helpful, users visit something (implies popularity), users tag or classify something (when you upload the content) which provides important meta-data.  Crowdsourcing, when used in conjunction with social filtering, becomes a powerful tool for government 2.0 initiatives as the information is classified and aggregated for users, enabling them to get the most valuable information fast, sorting information by what their peers find most valuable.