Policy Creation

Policy creation is a complex and challenging activity of Government. Policy needs to represent a balance of all agendas while providing a net benefit to society as a whole. The goal of Government 2.0 should be to replace lobbyists with domain experts and interest groups with interested citizens.

An informed citizenry should be encouraged to take part in every level of grass-roots policy creation. Citizens will probably focus on areas that are of personal interest to them. It is likely that experts and influencers will emerge much like those in the Wikipedia community who can lead the debate. Social Media acts as the key source of information whereby domain experts help spread the facts and influencers generate debate and highlight interesting commentary.

Wiki Policy Making might take the following form.

1. Any citizen can open a Policy Wiki and tag it with appropriate metadata.
2. The act of creating a Policy Wiki triggers a notification process. Citizens can subscribe for notification and filter by topics/interests.
3. Contribution is governed by rules of etiquette. These rules can be based on the rules of Wikipedia (this needs to be expanded)
4. Policy review should have a preset timeline. The review timeline can be extended by community consensus.
5. Community members who emerge as experts in the pre-determined constitution highlight constitutional concerns during the editing process.
6. Once the review timeline expires, a vote is called. If passed, the Policy becomes eligible for conversion into law.

Suggested Tools

• By Sam Rose: incorporate ConsensusPoll, a readily applicable, and tested process for incorporating community decision that is based on consensus.

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