Team: I just spend a day with our IBM Partner Nyherj and learned alot about Iceland and its Social Excellence! The Nyherji team is an outstanding user of Social and value creator with clients in Iceland!
Iceland rocks social! For instance, did you know:
- The Iceland Constitution was reworked using Social Communities!
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4 – month constitutional process
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25 – person council elected by popular vote
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Sought comments/dialogue on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, flickr
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Gathered 1600+ ideas on council website
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Constitution submitted to Parliament on July 29, 2011
After Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008, the island nation decided it was time to write a new constitution. Iceland’s small population of 320,000 elected 25 assembly members from 522 ordinary candidates (including lawyers, political science professors, journalists, and many other professions), who in turn opened their process up to the public in an unprecedented example of crowdsourcing. The Council was given less than four months to create a draft of the constitution before it was to be presented to the Icelandic Parliament. The Constitutional Council was highly active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, where they solicited comments and suggestions for the new government. The committee’s website (www.stjornlagarad.is, also quickly became an incubator for comments, with more than 1,600 propositions and comments on the suggested text. On Friday July 29th, 2011, the Iceland parliament officially received the new constitution.
2. Pariliament members like Siv Fridleifsdottier have embraced social for their citizens. www.siv.is
And there is more to come!!! I met with Ari Kristinn Jonsson, President of Reykjavik University, and over 100 attendees on Social Business. Ari has innovative university programs focusing on entrepreneurial endeavors. I met one of his past new CEOs who is focused on Social Gamification! Very impressive!
I loved Iceland, the people, the country, and the passion for Social! Iceland is ranked number 3 in the world for the percentage of population using Facebook and Icelanders have most Facebook friends; The AVERAGE number of friends each Facebook user in Iceland has is 290 friends. That is number one on the world, according to Facebook, and more than double the world average.
I hope I have gained a whole new set of friends there as well!
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