TownHall – Microsoft’s Social Networking Platform For Politicians

At the Politics Online Conference Microsoft unveiled the ‘Campaign Ready’ suite of online offerings for polticians. As part of Campaign Ready, Microsoft showed TownHall – an online forum platform tailored for representatives to interact with their voters.

TownHall is like vBulletin or phpBB but customized with features meant to engage citizens by making it easier for them to ask questions, share their opinions, like or dislike proposals. Participants will awarded ‘badges’ for their contributions. Screenshot:

Microsoft has a live demo at Microsoft TownHall, NASA’s project Be a Martian runs on TownHall too. Campaign Ready tools will be hosted on Windows Azure and will be plug-and-play.

The number of politicians using social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook to get their message across and interact with their voters is increasing across the globe.  It will be interesting to see if politicians will adopt Microsoft’s TownHall for their campaigns. I sure hope they do.

via Mashable

Further reading: Microsoft On The Issues