Today I stumbled across many examples of crowdsourcing. In one case, crowd-sourcing patient data for tracking disease and health state information, to crowd-sourcing scientific data and Nike crowd-sourcing running information.
All amazing examples of using the power of the collective. Fundamentally super-charged by technology, enabling access, connection, storage, tracking and distillation - to either the macro or the micro. You can see that the global average running time is 35 minutes and that people in America run shorter distances, more often. If you included Nike+ mapping you could take it to the favourite running tracks in your neighbourhood.
So - this acts on the fundamental lever of engagement and kicks off the Hawthorne Effect - what gets measured (observed) gets done.
What are you trying to change - are you trying to improve heart health, encourage people to make the healthier choice in breakfast cereals (which just might be yours)? How can you enable and engage people, harnessing their collective information to help them? Would it be that hard to set up a national wine drinking poll or a national dietary register...? The learnings could work to shape an entire country's behaviours to a healthier way of life.
All by enabling one person at a time to simply track their behaviour.
It may not be perfect (i.e. Wikipedia)...but it can be an enormous step in the right direction.
Flickr photocredit: Geoff Penn
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