It's good to see you working on related things. I like your Eigenpolls

I've got an Internet software company and could probably throw something together for this if I had a week I could dedicate. But that won't be happening in the immediate future.

My main interest (other than sending some attention and money toward good projects) is in how to structure the participation and voting for producing the best results.

Yeah... 154,000 world-changing ideas turned into 16 vague paragraphs of crap.

This is totally doable. Rather than propose a wisdom of the crowd project to Google, let's just do it. Maybe we can get many of the original submitters to send resubmit their entries. I still have mine.

We wouldn't want to use old-fashioned "vote for your favorite" methods because it would produce crap results completely skewed by Pareto Effect, But I think there are some real/viable options for approaching this in a manner which would build collective intelligence.

• Use Google's 5 pre-announced criteria: (Reach, Depth, Attainability, Efficiency & Longevity) as a multi-dimensional five-star rating scale. You can rate as many projects as you like.
• You cast your "vote" by creating a top 10 list. You can only put projects on your top 10 list that you have rated on all 5 dimensions.
• Each entry in a top 10 list is weighted according to it's slot number with slot 1 being 100 times higher than the last slot. The weights build from the bottom, so if you put one project in your list, it counts as if it's #10. If you want it to count it as #1, then add 9 more projects to your list below it. You can continually modify your top 10 list.
• For each project you add to your list, you must rate 3 projects who have received fewer ratings than the norm. This ensures that all projects are garnering attention and being rated. Yes, this means that you have to rate at least 3 projects to vote for 1, and 30 projects to make a complete top 10 list. It's part of how you reduce bogus voting.
• Reduce noise by ejecting non-serious submissions flagged as spam by X people or well below a quality threshold after Y votes. And/Or there could be some quality review process/panel of volunteers to send back submissions for editing until they meet some agreed upon threshold.
• Allow hierarchic folksonomy tagging pre-seeded with Google's categories (Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter) but allow new and richer categories to emerge (so people can specifically search for projects in their domain of interest).

Then we just have to team up with various social enterprise funders to support the projects. ;)