Crowd sourcing: the political future or a load of hype?

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has written one of the best posts I’ve read this year on the internet and political campaigning – i.e. it takes the impact of the internet seriously but doesn’t swallow all the hype. He starts:

Are the political parties now too impoverished – or just too bone idle – to do the basic work of research and campaigning by themselves? Or do they really believe in the wisdom of crowds? I ask because both Labour and the Conservatives appear to have caught the crowdsourcing bug.

The rest of the article is a good piece of analysis, not taking Tory and Labour claims at face value and also remembering that:

Well I think the Liberal Democrats might contest [Labour’s claims to be the first to crowdsource political adverts] – they’ve had a campaign running for a while on their ACT social networking site, inviting activists to “design a poster promoting the core Lib Dem value of ‘Fairness’”. They already have a number of entries up on the site, and appear to be making their “crowdsourcing” more of a public affair than either the Conservatives or Labour.

The full piece is well worth a read.

UPDATE: For more on the possible role for crowdsourcing, see the experience of MyDavidCameron.