David Cameron & Mark Zuckerberg discuss spending initiative on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

David Cameron & Mark Zuckerberg discuss spending initiative on Facebook

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20 pointsd4nt12 comments

What the coalition government is trying to do in terms of soliciting ideas and having more engagement with the public via the internet is very welcome. There is a signal/noise issue though and a lot of silly suggestions are made, so I think that better rating systems are required - perhaps similar to HN.

However, I'm also wary that the previous administration also tried to court popularity and "listen to the people" during the early years. Everything hinges upon whether the new government actually makes constructive use of good suggestions by the public. If they subsequently ignore highly rated suggestions then there could be a backlash - as there was against Tony Blair when he built up great expectations of change only to subsequently dash them later.

They Reykjavík municipal government headed by The Best Party is using a web application to solicit ideas: http://betrireykjavik.is.

The source is up on GitHub: http://github.com/rbjarnason/open-direct-democracy

It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. You can vote things up or down, make arguments for and against proposals etc.

I think software of this kind is the future of collective decision making (government), but as you say this sort of thing is very much in its infancy and it will probably be many years before really compelling systems emerge.

We already have compelling systems for most things. Open data formats for things the government produces, version control that could be used for legislation etc. Just think about how much accountable legislators would be if they were all forced to use Git, and you could annotate any piece of legislation.

Version controlled laws would be a great idea. You could have an rss feed for each law and subscribe to any changes or make comments on the changes. So all this sort of technology exists now, and what's to be done is more about assembling those things into a form which is customised for government use.

This very much reminds me of the "America Speaking Out" initiative by the Republicans at http://www.americaspeakingout.com. As you are saying, simply letting anybody say anything doesn't produce results or encourage intelligent conversation.

The main problem, just like on HN and other forums, is finding good technical rating mechanisms which allow the good stuff to rise to the top and the noise to be ignored.

Prediction: the highest rated comments will be extremely naive and rightly should be ignored. Go look at a Digg or Reddit... or YouTube.

I find that extremely unbecoming for a PM. Probably trying to seem down to earth but I just think its very embarrassing.

"Adding comments has been disabled for this video." But enabling comments for the budget deficit won't result in a stream of inane trolling?

TLDW: - thank you, it's great - thank you, it's great

Get a decent backdrop, Zuck! I can't stop staring at that heating vent.

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