About Feedback Nation

Shortly before the 2008 election, I started White House 2 to democratically set the agenda for the incoming Obama administration, and track it like the Nielsen's TV ratings. There was so much to be done, I wanted people to think hard about what the priorities should be -- there was just no way he could do everything at once!

I put the first site up in two weeks, and people from all over the world started contacting me about bringing it to their country. I've been working non-stop since then on what is becoming NationBuilder, a web service that will let anyone set up their own site just like White House 2.

You can look at White House 2 and easily see how this could be used for governments of all kinds, but I believe it can also be used to bring democracy to business. Successful businesses of the future need to involve all the stakeholders, whether they are employees, management, shareholders, or customers. They need to establish the right incentives, and have tools that work better when hundreds of thousands of people are involved, not worse. Oh, and it has to be fun, or no one will care.

At Brave New Films, we pretty much turned the documentary world upside down doing a first generation version of this. We built our own audience, and then involved them as much as we could in making and distributing the films. They hosted tens of thousands of screenings, shot footage, took photos of abandoned Wal-Marts, put up half the funding for our last documentary ($260k), and even suggested the name of the company itself. But the only reason we were able to do as much as we did, is because I could code anything we might dream up. There just aren't many tools designed for companies to operate like this.

NationBuilder is a general purpose operating system to run democracies online, and we're using this site, the software itself, to run the company. It's kind of a far out idea, and I don't have all the answers on how it should work yet, but I'm having a ton of fun figuring it out. Will you join me?

-- Jim Gilliam, May 2009

Getting involved is easy and fun. Just join and start setting priorities, like a to do list. The more people who make your priority their own priority, the higher it rises in the charts.

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