Crowd-sourced governance

Over the weekend, NDP MP Craig Scott, the NDP’s democratic reform critic, launched a three-month pilot project called New Democracy, an online platform for policy discussion. (It uses the same platform as ImproveSF, an initiative of San Francisco’s mayor.) Here is the official announcement.

The Ontario Liberals are using something called CommonGround for similar purposes and, during his leadership campaign, Justin Trudeau launched Soapbox (I’m told Soapbox will return at some point). Tony Clement’s Open Government Action Plan also includes steps in this direction.

All of this you can probably include in the larger discussion about open government and government 2.0 or 3.0. The Fins seem to be up to interesting things in this regard and a California assemblyman recently claimed the first “wiki bill” in U.S. history.