Some political ideas just make sense. And the Coalition’s Great Reform Act 2.0 (or “Your Freedom” as it’s officially called) is one of those. I was lucky enough to be invited along to the launch event this morning (at the really very cool Ideas Store in Whitechapel) and listening to Nick Clegg’s speech was impressive. Not impressive because of the magnitude of his speech, but impressive because of the simplicity of the whole Your Freedom concept.
All the best ideas are simple ideas, and the simple proposition of Your Freedom is: “there are too many unnecessary laws – tell us which ones you want to get rid of.”
But beyond this basic proposition, there is some other smart simple thinking as part of the initiative – my favorite being a “one-in-one-out” rule, where if any new law is created it has to replace an old one i.e. a kind of law-capping scheme.
And with the simplicity of the concept, comes the simplicity of the web2.0 execution – an easy to use crowdsourcing app (to quote Nick Clegg), which allows users to suggest ideas, and comment, rate and tag other people’s ideas.
Of course we’re super proud that it’s one of Delib’s apps (the Dialogue App) that is powering the online crowdsourcing process. As a company we’ve been banging on about the virtues and simplicity of policy crowdsourcing for an age, and thanks to the forward-thinking guys in the Cabinet Office and COI we’re finally practicing what we preach in the UK – using all the knowledge we’ve built up over the last 18 months doing awesome crowd-sourcery stuff with our friends in the US : – )
Check out Your Freedom here. (Blurry) launch photo below!
May be best to keep this one quiet , at least until it works – nothing more ironic than “we have had to disable logins” on a site called yourfreedom! Or maybe that it’s called ‘dialogue’ is equally ironic
before we start
you really do need to publish your blog so that mobile web users may have a say. suggest facilitating at the very least browsers windows mobile and safari
tom
Hey Tommy, do you mean this blog? We’ve updated to support mobile browsers
But you can always switch back to the desktop version by clicking the link at the bottom.
Is there a DialogApp where we can suggest improvements to the DialogApp?
I like that it’s simple to use although wouldn’t mind a tab for ‘Recently Commented’ and perhaps the Highest Rated should ignore those with not many votes … and voting should work in the Opera browser.
But apart from that – good work!
Cheers, Andy. We’ve been thinking about a ‘feedback’ Dialogue App and I guess your comment was enough to prompt us to actually ‘just do it’ (feedback works
). So I’ve just created http://www.dialogue-app.com/feedback – please feel free to add ideas/suggestions/comments in there. Of course, putting them on the blog or on Twitter or wherever is good too – we’re open to all the feedback we can find! As I said in response to some previous comments, we’ll try and pull together a blog post where we respond to some of the common themes all together.
Now that’s good service!
I’ll post my ideas in there now to get you started.
Its a complete car crash of a site. Every crank and nutjob going has appeared to vent their spleen on it about immigration, drugs, restoring the death penalty etc. etc.
So much for the wisdom of crowds.