Policybrief
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
The Power of Us: Re-Imagine Media competition.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
54 Churchfield Avenue
Project City
London
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
N12 0NT
Project Country
United Kingdom
Your idea
Will you launch your idea as a business or non-profit?
Business
Web site (url)
Name Your Project
Policybrief
Describe Your Idea
Innovation
What is your idea? What makes it innovative? Why is it important?
The internet can make a huge improvement to representative democracy if it fosters a valuable conversation about policies among the general public. However, think tanks and policy institutes make no effort to market their products to the general public, preferring to aim them solely at senior politicians and civil servants. My idea is to crowdsource people who will build up an accessible database of good policy materials that have already been published, market them to the general public and foster high-quality discussions. This idea is innovative because - even though it's an obvious one to do, no-one is doing it.
Impact
What will be the impact of your idea?
A large number of people - including many lower-level elected representatives - will have direct access to primary materials for the first time. They will find it easy to trace suitable data to help them form policy. Currently, most primary materials are viewed through the prism of either the commercial media or pressure / lobby-groups. This idea should empower elected officials at the expense of unelected ones, and at the expense of media owners and pressure groups.
This Entry is about (Issues)
People: We are looking for ideas from people who can make them happen.
I am collaborating on this idea with Mick Fealty - the editor of Slugger O'Toole - the UK's most influential political weblog. My 'team' will mostly be a distributed group of volunteers. This is how all projects like this should be run. The project will be built to a high standard of usability with the intention of recruiting a large number of collaborators.
Sustainability
How much will it cost to launch your idea?
I have achieved £15,000 worth of funding so far. I have spent this prototyping the idea using proprietary software. I believe that this project should be moved into an open-source environment, and I need funding to pay for this development. I have around 15 volunteers who have agreed to prototype the idea, but the long-term stability of the project requires that it be re-built in a more future-proof technology. The development and initial administration will cost in the region of £40,000 sterling.
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Comments
Paul, have you identified the type of open-source platform/software you would like to switch to from your current propriety software? There may be some other entrants/changemakers here who have experience with different types of open-source software, and may be able to provide some recommendations. Secondly, will your policy database focus on the UK or other countries?
Thanks, Tito
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Tito,
On the open-source question, I don't have a preference at the moment. I've been looking at a few options and I've had a few ideas put to me involving open source software big names and one or two that I'd not really come across before. I'm not fussy on that issue and anything that works would be good. I've got a lot of experience managing web-projects and the choice of technology will be made by a process (though for me the open source issue is one of principle as well as practicality).
On the territorial question, I'm looking to prove the concept in the UK and then apply the template elsewhere. I'm doing some work with people in Brussels, Berlin, Dublin and Belfast and they have all expressed a willingness to do it once I've found the (non-technical) bugs in the idea and fixed them, so I'd aim to cover EU, German, Eire, Northern Ireland and - of course the UK where I'm based. I've also got some contacts in Scotland who may cover the devolved assembly there as well, and my Brussels / German contacts have people interested in doing it in France.
If the idea works, then the question of finding partners will be easy to deal with, because there is an internal logic to running a site like this: manage your local version and develop a strong personal reputation as a 'public policy hub'.
Interoperability is important, but I've thought a lot about this and I think that it's important that each key polity has it's own instance of the site (with references to other ones, of course).
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Paul Evans
http://memeserver.co.uk
Paul -
By public policy, do you mean a specific proposed bill or resolution, or is this for examining broader questions? Can you give an example of a policy you would start with?
For specific resolutions/bills, I like the work the opencongress foundation is doing, though unlike your idea its U.S. centric, and not available as an open-source package where users could develop their own. It does do a good job of providing a number of tools to let users crowdsource a specific bill, and add resources, comments, updates, etc. Example:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s22/show
The other thing I like about this effort is they are working hard at developing APIs to let (advanced) users export the data out as XML and remix it.
For Policy Brief, would users be able to import or export XML / RDF files of resources? I'm working on building out export functionality for the existing citations on my project and could easily see sharing an XML file back and forth. To help on your platform decision, check out this module for the Drupal platform:
http://drupal.org/project/biblio
It allows users to add resources into the system using a simple form, then export back out to citation systems like EndNote or into other Biblio-enabled sites. I'm admittedly a Drupal-fanatic, but modules like this and the strong community support are one of the reasons why I think Drupal fits your criteria for a "future-proof" platform.
Best,
- Greg
Greg,
Thanks for the continued interest.
No - I mean a general area of policy. So 'public parks' or 'democratic renewal' - I'm not keen on the variety of deliberative democracy where any expectation of direct participation is raised - mainly because in Europe, there is no constitutional scope for it (and there is little scope for it in the US either). I'm keen for this project to create the kind of non-specific (in legislative terms) conversations that elected representatives draw from.
Policybrief (in it;s current incarnation - only a tiny amount of 'test' content has been added) has RSS feeds. However, as I mentioned before, I'm going to make the decision on platforms in a fairly methodical way. One of the options I've been discussing has been a drupal option though. I've not really thought about the End Note option - in the UK, a great deal of the material concerened is published directly by the think tanks / policy institutes concerned, so I suspect the need for any end-note integration would be a stage two development?
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Paul Evans
http://memeserver.co.uk
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