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

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.