Back in April, the Digital Economy Bill was rushed through the wash-up procedure of the outgoing government without the due debate and consideration that I and others believe such a far-reaching bill deserved. My disillusionment with the government decision-making process over the following week led me to set up and announce a new site, called “Dynamic Democracy”. It was an experiment to see what would be discussed if everyone was involved – on an anonymous basis – rather than just our elected representatives that often do not do a good job of representing us anyway.

The site allowed all users to create and comment on ‘Bills’, encapsulated ideas or laws that they would be pushing for if they were in power. Registering gave users the ability to vote bills (and comments) up and down, leading to a list of highest-ranked bills that represented the users’ favourite potential policies.

Dynamic Democracy saw little success, possibly because writing a full, well-thought-out bill represented significant effort that a casual browser would be unlikely to commit. ‘Karma’, the point system that aimed to encourage users to submit bills and comments, did not prove to be a good enough incentive as there were so few users to compete with and no direct reward was ever implemented for reaching high karma levels.

What the site did bring, however, was a number of enquiries from like-minded individuals all over the world, keen to discuss the ideas behind the site and whether or not something like Dynamic Democracy could ever be implemented as a real government policy-making tool. One of the more notable contacts, Denny de la Haye, stood as a candidate for Hackney South and Shoreditch in the general election and promised to implement a crowd-sourced voting system similar to Dynamic Democracy for his constituents to voice their opinions in Parliament through him. (Denny, who sadly did not win his seat, now represents the UK arm of political party DemoEx.)

I have decided that today is the day to close the Dynamic Democracy experiment, because today the UK government announced their “Your Freedom” website. While largely focussed on repealing or changing laws rather than the complete freedom to suggest anything you like, Your Freedom is certainly in the same vein as Dynamic Democracy, with the crucial extra feature that is endorsed and used by our government and thus ideas proposed there stand at least some chance of making it into official government policy.

Time will tell whether that really happens, or if like the No. 10 Petitions site, suggestions will be responded to with an e-mail from the Prime Minister’s office explaining why thousands of users are all wrong. But I do still hold out hope.

Did Dynamic Democracy influence the government in their decision to create Your Freedom? Almost certainly not. As my discussions with visitors to the site have shown, I am far from the only person to have come up with this idea, and neither am I the only one to have coded up a website around it. No – this is simply an idea whose time has come. A vast gulf exists between Westminster and the world outside, just as it always has, but these days the public are coming to question why that is and if we can do something to correct it. And nowhere is the desire to bridge that gulf stronger than among the tech-savvy youth that have the drive and the ability to use the internet to that end. Sites like these will come and go a hundred times over the coming years and decades, and slowly but surely we’ll reshape our government into what we want it to be.

So to everyone who contributed to Dynamic Democracy: thank you, and goodbye.

If you’d like to contact me about Dynamic Democracy (or anything else), you can still do that via email. If you’d like to help get the Digital Economy Act repealed, please vote up and comment on one of these ideas on Your Freedom. If anyone would like use of dynamicdemocracy.org.uk until my ownership expires in 2012, let me know. Stay tuned for the announcement of another project that bridges politics and the internet in the next few weeks.