Telegraph launches 'crowd-sourcing' election site

UK’s largest online forum opens for political debate

Telegraph Media Group has launched a cloud-based website where people can debate, vote and comment on issues in the run up to the General Election.

Debate2010 will provide a platform for discussion on issues such as healthcare, education, crime and foreign affairs and will run until polling day.

“The goal for Debate2010 is to create real-time, large-scale opinion polls. Crowd-sourcing is something we’ve already seen companies like Starbucks and Dell use to build large scale communities and ‘grow big ears’ to listen to customers,” said Tim Barker, senior director products EMEA at Salesforce.com.

This is the first crowd-sourcing UK site to report national opinion in real-time and is powered using saleforce.com’s crowd-sourcing application, Saleforce Ideas. It took just four weeks for three developers to go from a standing start to launching the site.

A similar site was run by the Obama-Biden team in the transition period between governments, attracting 134,000 people and creating 52,000 ideas in just eight days.

“This is a great way to get away from party politics and look at important issues,” said Barker.

Telegraph journalists will post features for discussion on the site and visitors will be invited to contribute their ideas or vote for or against other people’s suggestions.

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