Hi everyone, I'm proposing a political crowdsourcing system - powered by the new Google Moderator API (http://code.google.com/apis/moderator/) - that has the following (possibly unique) aims and features:
* To raise user expectations massively, in comparison to the "speak your mind", "vote in our leadership poll", and blog comment-box interaction models. * Following directly from this: raise policymakers' expectations about the *quality* and *usability* of crowdsourced content. * All discussions can/should be seeded with existing political content, rather than created out of a clear blue sky. * All discussions to be integrated with, and matched against an existing political knowledge base: the content from 2000+ top blogs, feeds, and Wikis, from 2002 to date. * The results of all discussions to feed back into the knowledge base. * To be integrated with an existing, long-lasted, non-partisan system, so users don't feel their contributions may be wasted or abused. * Wherever possible, the results of all discussions should be freely, publicly available, and/or queriable, so they can be used by other tools. In short, the aims are to establish the crowdsourcing model, create a really usable technical solution, feed the results back to the political data/tech community, and improve policymaking: using what we already know to produce fewer bad policies, and to make the process more efficient. Is this something MySociety might like to get involved with? I'm proposing to implement this system as part of my existing Poblish system, as I think we're in a great position to deliver all of the above, and I'm hoping that if some of these goals inspire you guys, you might be interested in suggesting, advising - here or elsewhere - or perhaps even deciding to become more closely involved with the work. I guess the main challenges are: * Usability (for users) and interoperability (for developers). * Promotion and community development. * Newness of the Google Moderator API, and the need for users to have Google accounts. Background reading / what this is all about: * http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk/2010/01/13/poblish-when-crowdsourcing-new-policies-dont-waste-existing-content/ * http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk/2010/01/26/poblish-better-blogging-and-better-technology-to-help-crowdsource-new-policies/ * http://theconnectedrepublic.org/posts/467 (and comment) WDYT? Andrew Regan [email protected] / +44 7906 123390 http://www.poblish.org/ _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
