Just one day after the election, Josh Bernoff challenged Barack Obama to use the groundswell:
I call on president-elect Obama to create a community of committed Americans to discuss the solutions to the problems that face us. I call on him to designate a US Community Manager, with a small staff, to moderate and harvest those discussions to solve the country’s problems. Forget polls. With a few million people in my.america.gov, Obama will be able to tap into the world’s largest focus group. Communities are cheap, compared to most of what the government does. Create a space for the brightest people you know; use them to attract the best ideas. And better yet, use this energized community to sell those ideas to America.
A day later, Obama answered the challenge with change.gov, a social media site, to create engagement in the transition process.
On the site, you can read Obama’s transition blog, upload your vision for the future (with images), apply for a job and learn more about Obama’s policies and transition team.
A hint of things to come? You can join the site by providing your email address and zip code. No doubt Obama will take direct engagement to the people to a new level. That’s one of the hallmarks of the social media campaign that propelled him into office.
Yet another way that our President-elect is using social media to tell his story: Obama put his election photos on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
Read more about the creation of change.gov at Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.