Anthony D. Williams raised an interesting point on his blog recently, he suggested that instead of the government creating forums such as this one on the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office website, we should use rating systems such as those used by Digg to organise and collate this information.
Many government websites, minister’s Blogs etc have places where you can feed back or share your view but there is no structured way of compiling this data, it often ends up being lenghty and difficult to browse. If the public could rate and sort these ideas it would provide a very powerful representation of public opinion that would be a very direct way to shape policy. The technology for such a system exists; I think its the potential power of this technique and the potential difficulties of dealing with this information that stops policy makers from seeking information in this way.
Does anyone know of any tests of this type of system?