An Experiment in Dynamic Democracy

This is an pretty old post from my blog, which has been preserved in case its content is of any interest. You might want to go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.

Dynamic Democracy

I’ve been an advocate of opening up our democracy and involving the public in government decision-making for some time, without doing anything particularly concrete about it besides placing my vote. The Digital Economy Bill fiasco showed us that, really, we’re not involved with the day-to-day workings of government at all, and born of that is this experiment.

I’d like to know what we, the people, think our government should be talking about. I’d like us ordinary people to submit our ideas, vote on other people’s ideas, and come up with some idea of what we really care about. And so here we are:

Dynamic Democracy

This is all very experimental at the moment – please sign up, post ideas, vote on other people’s ideas, and if it proves popular I’ll take it on as a permanent project. Let’s do this!

Comments

I've supported a fair few of 38degrees' causes in the past, but in order to suggest a campaign you have to provide an address and wait to see if they approve it. What I was intending is a more anonymous system, where anyone can submit an issue and anyone can vote on it, and we see what floats to the top.

the_hidden_paw 24 April 2010

(because this doesn't seem to have pulled through from LJ, for some reason)

Further feedback, based on having had a look at (admittedly very short-term) developments so far. I think you're in danger of it just turning into a political forum, with lots of discussion but no actual decisions being made or implementable policies crystallising out of the opinion-spam.

I think it'd need some kind of structure which encourages a narrowing towards specifics, if it's going to actually achieve anything. Buggered if I know how, though... :)

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