UK Conservative Party Offers £1 Million Prize for crowdsourcing platform

One common scenario for government action is that some problem isn't being solved well by market-based solutions, so a solution needs to be imposed by force. A communication technology would be of use here to help determine if a coercive solution is necessary and if so, which solution would be best.<p>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.<p>The problem could probably have been addressed better if there had been more deliberate and open discussion.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Legislation that doesn't have these overwhelming upvotes for a long period of time, or has significant counter-arguments, probably shouldn't be passed.<p>So it seems to me that collaboration software could be used to select good legislation for passage.

Interesting.<p>MySociety on the need for the government to figure out how to build a large-scale consultation system that works: <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/07/top-5-internet-priorities-for-the-next-government-any-next-government/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/07/top-5-internet-prioritie...</a><p>MySociety.org on why it wants £1m: <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2009/02/19/why-i-want-a-million-quid" rel="nofollow">http://www.mysociety.org/2009/02/19/why-i-want-a-million-qui...</a>

Looking forward to details of the competition coming out. The facebook mention in the article is a good call. Any site of this type could fairly solidly bet that most users will have a facebook login, so why not use facebook connect as an auth layer?<p>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!

Generally I'm in favour of this kind of thing, although the proposal is astonishingly vague. There probably are ways in which the web can be harnessed to facilitate smarter collective decision making and identification of problem areas.<p>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.

If the Tories really want to be innovative, they should just cut taxes, cut spending, reduce regulation, and let people naturally and without coercion figure out what they want and how to get it by cooperation. This is called the free market and it doesn't require a fancy computer program to work.

I just hope that if they award the prize, they do so for working software that is already solving a significant part of the problem, and not, say, a powerpoint presentation given by some compelling-sounding guy in a suit. This kind of thing is vulnerable to vaporware.

Things like reddit or HN (or my own website) sound like they could be applied to this.<p>Submit each proposal as a story, then allow people to vote on it, comment on it, etc. etc.<p>I'll sell my site to the UK government for £1 million!

Online debates are mostly about disagreeing and polarisation - what I would like to see is a platform that would reward agreeing - saying things that would be acceptable by both of the usually formed sides.

Anyone seen any concrete information about this competition yet? There's nothing about it on www.conservatives.com as far as I can tell.