Squidoo $80,000 Giveaway

I'm sharing this with you for a couple of reasons unrelated to community indicators (and one that sort of is.) Squidoo is giving away $80,000 to the charity of your choice.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not much. They have $80,000 to give away. They have a list of charities. You have a vote. Your vote is worth $2 to the charity you select. After 40,000 votes, they're done.

So why am I bringing this to your attention? Some of the charities on the list are ones I give to, so adding in $2 was kind of fun for very little effort. The organization I work for is not on the list, so there's no personal interest involved.

But I like the idea as a marketing effort with word-of-mouth advertising and a fixed budget. I like the range of choices. I also like what Squidoo offers, and am amenable to helping them out.

And I like the idea of looking at the data (voting results) to see something about who gets the word out the best, as well as which of the charities are more popular.

It would be interesting to see something like this in a local community used to allocate some portion of grant resources. It's insanely democratic. And that captures my attention. Especially when the Senate just added another $100 billion to the bailout package in pot-sweeteners -- wouldn't it be interesting to put that $100 billion on the ballot in November, and everyone who votes gets to allocate some piece of that to the issues/organizations/budget item of their choice? How amazing would that data set turn out to be?