Crowdsourcing policy, visualising debate and evolving consultation

I attended a session on crowdsourcing public policy at the recent LocalGovCamp event, an unconference for local government held in Birmingham.

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by employees or contractors and opening it out to a large group of people. It’s mass collaboration to collectively achieve a task or refine something that already exists into something better.

David Price led an interesting session on crowdsourcing policy, demonstrating how Debategraph—a global debate map—can be used to:

• Set up a policy debate
• Open the debate to enable others to collaborate
• Graphically visualise the issues and inter-relationships within a debate
• Share and re-use the debates both on and offline

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LocalGovCamp unconference for local government

LocalGovCamp is an unconference for local government being held in Birmingham at Fazeley Studios on 20 June 2009.

The event will be will be a gathering of people interested in how local government needs to adapt to a world of social networks and data sharing.