The Internet Wishlist

I really like the idea of The Internet Wishlist - a platform where people can submit ideas for applications and websites they would find useful.  Demand-driven design through crowdsourcing, really. 
 
From the creator Amrit Richmond: "I hope the project inspires entrepreneurs, developers and designers to innovate and build the products and features that people want...I see so many startups try and solve problems that don't need solving... I wanted to uncover and show what kinds of day-to-day problems people have that they want technology to solve for them." (H/T Good)
 
It would be great to have a similar platform for Data.gov (and similar initiatives), bringing together not just the developers and crowd-sourced ideas, but also people that were familiar with the data/ content that is actually/ potentially available.  Of course this could get messy when someone tries introduce IP to blossoming project...
- sezflom

Why has Wikipedia succeeded?

In line with Berno's link (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/09/a_fork_in_wikip.php), here are two of the better of many, many articles which have tried to get to the bottom of how Wikipedia manages to stay coherent when so many other crowd sourcing projects ultimately become little more than gibberish.

Slate traces the history of wikipedia through the Jesus entry: http://www.slate.com/id/2281294/

Spiegel has a long article which explains the inner workings of the wikipedia process by looking at the entry for the Danube Tower:  http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,690402,00.html

Crowd sourcing ideas for national intel

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (USA) is sponsoring a prediction tournament in which "each team will develop its own tools for harnessing and improving collective intelligence and will be judged on how well its forecasters predict major trends and events around the world over the next four years."  The tournament will be administered by  the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California Berkeley.   US citizens are invited to sign up. More info here.  [H/T NYT]
- sezflom