While crowdsourcing has been used for innovating, branding, advertising and even knowledge sourcing, the problems put before the crowds have generally been smaller and more or less financially motivated. But a new initiative by the US Government is all set to grant some publicity to a lesser-known use of crowdsourcing: to better society.

The US Government launched a bid to post a continuing crowdsourcing competition of its own. ChallengePost, a crowdsourcing site conceived by a Columbia Business School graduate before graduation, beat out seven unnamed competitors to win the opportunity to host this competition. In the site's favour is the fact that they're already running Michelle Obama's Apps for Healthy Kids competition, which has a prize tag of USD 60,000 attached.

The US Government will call for new ideas at the grassroots level, in an effort to increase public participation in the government, in actual terms. The US General Services Administration (GSA) will set up a custom-built platform for every department of the government to post problems, large or small, and request for solutions from the public.

The success of this experiment will possibly determine if governments around the world will finally use one of the most fundamental merits of the Internet-i.e. as a platform offering equal opportunity to be heard.