UK Conservative Party Offers £1 Million Prize for crowdsourcing platform
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
For example in the early 2000s, Enron's bankruptcy and other corporate scandals illuminated a problem with corporate accounting. The Sarbanes-Oxley law was passed to fix this problem. Now it seems generally recognized that the law was flawed.
The problem could probably have been addressed better if there had been more deliberate and open discussion.
Hacker News has a Feature Request page (see the footer). I imagine if there were a feature request that had overwhelming upvotes and no significant negative discussion, then pg could feel confident that such a feature would be good to implement.
Something similar could be done with legislation. If there is a particular piece of legislation that has overwhelming "upvotes" over a sustained period of time, and no significant counter-arguments, such legislation could probably be safely passed with the confidence that it has been thoroughly vetted.
Legislation that doesn't have these overwhelming upvotes for a long period of time, or has significant counter-arguments, probably shouldn't be passed.
So it seems to me that collaboration software could be used to select good legislation for passage.
MySociety on the need for the government to figure out how to build a large-scale consultation system that works: http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/07/top-5-internet-prioritie...
MySociety.org on why it wants £1m: http://www.mysociety.org/2009/02/19/why-i-want-a-million-qui...
Consider this case: If a defence company CEO advised a political party on defence spending, and recommended they invest in particular types of projects that happened to be his company's expertise, and his company ended up wining the contracts. Would you be happy with this situation ?
I'm not say Tom/mySociety are bad guys, far from it they are awesome guys and they've done great work. But we can't hold those we like to a lesser standard than those we dislike.
So I'm not really seeing the difference.
Of course, like all good politics, wait for the small print - you will probably be contracted to run the website for the next 10 years on accepting the prize money!
However, I'm also wary that political parties often come up with popular proposals pre-election, only to discreetly dump them once safely in government.
That's right. All it requires is an ideal world.
For example, the reason we don't have lines forming in front of filling stations is because the free market regulates gas prices. When government intervenes by mandating a cheaper price shortages occur.
>When government
I love how libertarians use "government" as a mass noun, as if governments were formed out of some kind of homogeneous toxic gloop.
Another example of the contrast of an ideal world with the free market in the real world is stock markets. In an ideal world, there would be no need for a stock market because there would be no uncertainty as to stock value. The free market exists because we don't live in an ideal world.
> governments were formed out of some kind of homogeneous toxic gloop.
This is not far from the truth. Government that does not draw its power from the consent of the governed is essentially just a very powerful criminal gang.
Cohen's book "Self-ownership, freedom and equality" is good on this point. Quite a bit of it is viewable on Google books, in particular page 60-63.
> This is not far from the truth.
Actually it is quite a long way from the truth. Governments are neither homogeneous nor toxic nor gloopy.
Submit each proposal as a story, then allow people to vote on it, comment on it, etc. etc.
I'll sell my site to the UK government for £1 million!