

UK Conservative Party Offers £1 Million Prize for crowdsourcing platform - larryfreeman
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tories_1_million_prize_for_crowdsourcing_platform.php

======
dpatru
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.

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.

------
handelaar
Interesting.

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...](http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/07/top-5-internet-priorities-
for-the-next-government-any-next-government/)

MySociety.org on why it wants £1m: [http://www.mysociety.org/2009/02/19/why-i-
want-a-million-qui...](http://www.mysociety.org/2009/02/19/why-i-want-a-
million-quid)

~~~
ig1
I doubt MySociety is eligible. Tom Steinberg the founder of MySociety is a
technology policy advisor for the Conservative Party - this would seem to be
an obvious conflict of interests and a clear breach of anti-corruption laws
(siphoning public money into a charity run by one of your advisors).

~~~
handelaar
Tom's also advised the Labour Party. Should that make MySociety ineligible for
any government grant or contract for all time?

~~~
ig1
I'm not an expert, but I believe the Labour Party approached MySociety for
advice on a specific project that was related to their expertise. Tom acts an
appointed general purpose advisor to the Tory party in a private capacity,
which is substantially different.

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.

~~~
handelaar
In fact Tom helped with relevant parts of the last Labour election manifesto.
And now he's been asked to assist the Tories with policy (unpaid).

So I'm not really seeing the difference.

------
lordmatty
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?

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!

------
motters
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.

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.

~~~
simon_
Sounds like a reasonably good fit for at least one existing YC startup:
<http://inklingmarkets.com/>

------
dpatru
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.

~~~
foldr
> This is called the free market and it doesn't require a fancy computer
> program to work.

That's right. All it requires is an ideal world.

~~~
dpatru
An ideal world doesn't have problems. The real world has problems that are
messy to solve. "Solutions" often have unintended consequences. The free
market, by not relying on coercion, generally does the best job at arriving at
a solution that optimally balances the interests involved.

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.

~~~
foldr
FWIW, I find these sorts of arguments unconvincing because (a) there is no
particular reason to think that solutions involving little or no coercion will
be good solutions (b) there is a vicious circularity in the relevant notion of
"coercion" (as pointed out by GA Cohen) and (c) there is no general situation-
independent notion of an optimal balance of interests that's worth having.

>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.

~~~
dpatru
I'm not sure what you mean by circularity in coercion.

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.

~~~
foldr
>I'm not sure what you mean by circularity in coercion.

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.

------
gruseom
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.

------
blhack
Things like reddit or HN (or my own website) sound like they could be applied
to this.

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!

------
zby
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.

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

