I just came across this interesting idea on TechCrunch.
Jon Evans: Is Facebook Finally Going To Do Something Interesting?
An online parliament would be nice. The administrator would invite people or keep the voter pool open. The online parliament would allow for the holding of elections and subsequent debates.
Say I run an organization that has 500 members. I would use the Facebook Online Parliament to get all members to join, and then to hold elections, and to hold subsequent debates. The debate of course would include the organization's budget.
The election process has the nomination process. Say there are five offices and 30 people running for each of them. The organization should have the option to hold a run off election between the top two vote getters.
I think it would be fun. It would be great. It would make some serious noise if Facebook were to make it possible to do this at large scales. How about being able to do it for an organization with 10,000 members? Or a country with half a million people? Or, god forbid, a country with 50 million people? The election commission of the country would have to put together an official list saying these Facebook members are voting citizens. That would be a challenge, but a much lesser challenge than is the putting together of the current offline voter lists. They leave out too many people in the first place.
This would be huge.
This is not Facebook Groups. The Facebook Online Parliament would be a whole different ball game, a different magnitude altogether.
I hope they nail this by the next F8 Conference.
This online parliament would be great for democratic organizations where each person is one vote. Something different would have to be built for corporate organizations. Facebook should go ahead and built that too.
Buy Asana. Integrate it into Facebook. Add features.