Social Software and Politics by Jon Lebkowsky's is a recent post to the Extreme Democracy blog where he details some of the emerging dynamics of social software and democracy. I found a couple of his in action - one is the NYC public advocate and another is a post from businessweek . Jon's ideas on social software extend to every organization, including businesses.

Jon quotes Dave Reed, author of "That Sneaky Exponential - cooperative communitivities scale"

"In 'real' networks, it is important to note that although the total value of optional transactions that involve pairs and groups grows faster than linearly, the total price that can be paid cannot grow that fast. Typically, the consumers of the value have money and attention resources that scale linearly with N. So the law of supply and demand will kick in, lowering prices until the available resources (dollars and attention) are saturated. What's interesting is that this saturation process affects all types of optional transactions-so GFN value, peer transaction value, and broadcast content value all compete for the same resources. Once N grows sufficiently large, GFN transactions create more value per unit of network investment than peer transactions, and peer transactions create more value per unit of network investment than do broadcast transactions. So what tends to happen is that as networks grow, peer transactions out-compete broadcast content in the arena of attention and return on investment. And remarkably, once N gets sufficiently large, GFN transactions will out-compete both of the other categories."

Funny how this social software works...

Betsy Gotbaum where are you? + Google Maps and Flickr NYC Pothole Mashup! by Jason Calacanis

Andrew Rasiej uses the web to show exactly how poor a job Betsy Gotbaum has done as public advocate…. it’s painful. Watch this very funny video. Politics is really changing and Andrew is using every little piece of technology to do it—including video blogging.

We'll be able to tell Betsy's fate at election time.

On the flip side, "How corporations track the blogs: A blogger weighs in" from BW's Steve Baker

I still haven't found the answer, but I did receive an email with some lively examples from an experienced corporate blogger (who asked to remain nameless):

How long do you wait to act responsibly before someone tells you, under harsher conditions, that what you are doing doesn't work anymore?

This question is directed to those who work in profit, non-profit, public or private organizations. Here's my organizational performance advice.

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