Crowdsourcing and the next Netflix Prize

An interesting development on the polling front: Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is open-sourcing his polls. Yesterday he asked for suggestions on which state to poll next and posted a draft questionnaire for Joe Wilson's district for comment.

This approach, which I think is brilliant, raises a more general question: where's the innovation in content creation among political organizations? Beyond MoveOn.org, very few organizations in politics take advantage of the creativity and intelligence of their supporters.

Along similar lines, why doesn't a political organization like one of the major parties offer up some money in a competition to, say, predict who will respond favorably to solicitations for money, votes, etc. using anonymized data? The Netflix Prize, which will be awarded on the 21st, drew a vast amount of effort from the machine learning community, and there's now a company that will provide infrastructure for similar contests. Who's going to be the innovator?

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Comments

[Ben Fritz]

This sounds good, but like nearly every political effort open to public participation, isn't it very likely to be manipulated by interest groups who will "encourage" members to, say, suggest a loaded question for a poll? How do you avoid outcomes like last year's YouTube debate where there was that question asked by a union official posing as a regular working mom?

The major difference being that it takes highly specialized knowledge and major commitment to participate in the Netflix prize. And nobody has a real incentive to screw with the contest and waste Netflix's time.
But any random idiot can suggest questions for a poll. Any if a political group is looking for good ideas from supporters, won't opponents quite possibly be motivated to make bad suggestions and generally manipulate the process however possible?

I don't dislike the idea. I'm just a little wary.

If it could work, though, I wonder if elections are a less exciting opportunity than government? Crowd sourcing certain types of legislation/regulations that are largely technical and non-controversial (e.g. improving the student loan application process, not regulating abortion) seems very promising. Difficult to prevent manipulation, no doubt, but hard to imagine it could be worse than modern Washington or state legislature lobbying.