Now this was launched in 2007.
Very successful for a couple of years.
He actually managed to get about 40,000 people to, to pay some money, to buy,
to buy, put enough money into a fund to buy a football club.
They bought a club called Ebbsfleet United.
A small, small, lower ranking club in the U.K., and for the first season or
so, they, they were very successful.
They actually won a trophy.
They were able to, to actually get the manager of
the club to agree to being owned by this mass of people.
But the problem is that the enthusiasm just ran out of steam.
I mean, there's, there's no better way of saying it.
It's kind of fun, this idea of, of being part owners of a football club.
So you got the crowd incited.
You got them excited about the idea of, of owning a football club.
But from 40,000 members in 2007, by about three years later it had dropped to
about 3,000 members and so, of course, they ran out of money.
And ultimately, I think they ended up having to sell,
sell the thing because they simply couldn't afford to keep it going.
So the point of that little story is it's quite easy to get a crowd excited, but
it's actually quite hard to maintain that enthusiasm.
And those organizations I know who've created, for example, big suggestion
schemes around innovation, they often find that enthusiasm wanes very quickly.
My second, slightly humorous example is actually from
when Barack Obama because President in 2009.
And he was a presidential candidate who used social, social media a lot.
And so he had the bright idea of using digital technology in order
to create what he called a citizen's briefing book.
And a citizen's briefing book was a classic idea scheme,
whereby he got people from across the country to submit their ideas for
things that he should be working on, principles, you know, bits of legislation
that he should be, should be actually spending time on when he became President.
And they went through two rounds.
First of all, people submitted ideas and then they clustered them and
then they went through a voting process.
Well, once the results came in,
it became clear that this wasn't going to be a very useful list.
Top of the list was legalizing marijuana.
There was a piece around age appropriate sex education.
There was a piece about making America the greenest country in the world.
Something about bullet trains.
Not, not necessarily bad ideas.
That's not my point.
My point is that these were special interest ideas.
These were people who had a particular axe to grind.