By: Ale Jochum, Blitz Bazaar Community Manager
We submitted an application to We Media’s Pitch It! (http://wemedia.com/pitchit/) competition. According to their About Page, We Media is an organization that “helps companies and their leaders see, understand and respond to complex change.” Subsequently, their Pitch It competition seeks “Bold Ideas”; new ventures that seek to create a better world through media. (That’s us!)
Here’s the kicker: The Finalists get to pitch their ideas in one month at the We Media Pitch It! convention in Miami. $50,000 in seed money will go to the two best ideas pitched at the convention. I love conventions, winning, money, gators and sun, so please welcome us to Miami.
In all seriousness, I truly believe we are the venture this competition was designed to find. Reading our (uncut) answer to the first question should make this clear:
Question 1: What is your idea? What makes it innovative? Why is it important?
Blitz Bazaar is a web platform designed to irreversibly transform the way people mass-organize and drive social change, making it easier than ever before.
The Green Revolution in Iran and the Obama presidency have one thing in common: they both owe their existence in large part to the rise of social media and social networking. The Internet’s platforms and tools are only now reaching a level of pervasiveness and maturation such that they can start to be used for more complex social interaction.
Furthermore, people are tired of feeling powerless, unable to shape their communities. Simultaneously, most are still not willing to sacrifice the time or money needed required to self-organize and be local leaders. The solution: Blitz Bazaar. Blitz Bazaar is an Internet campaigning platform that radically lowers the cost to organize, radically lowering the effort and acumen required. Blitz Bazaar is positioned to empower the emergence of a new class of non-professional organizers who can do what before only professional campaigners, activists and union leaders were capable of.
Blitz Bazaar disrupts the campaigning industry by giving everyone access to the tools they need to change their world. As a consumer web product, it Blitz Bazaar is far more accessible and affordable than the $1 billion annual professional campaign management software on the market. It is simultaneously far more effective than Facebook Groups and other groupware products that are currently being utilized by the vanguard citizen organizers. Finally and importantly, Blitz Bazaar makes changing the world social and fun. Envision a mass-multiplayer game, but with real results that matter.
Blitz Bazaar’s vision is Everybody a Changemaker. We consider ourselves part of a broader civic participation movement that is democratizing power and rapidly gaining momentum on the back of new web-based technology.
Anyway, wish us luck. We’ll keep you posted. I’m your community manager, signing off.
