The idea

We want to bring open source thinking to bear on the development of government policy.

To do this, we’d like to create an online framework to capture local knowledge, ideas and multi-media evidence in a format useful to decision-makers.

The open source approach has shown that internet-enabled collaboration and information sharing is very effective at harnessing ideas and innovation.

Our aim is to improve the quality of policy development and decisions, particularly at the local level and in fields such as land-use planning, urban design and renewable energy.

What social need does it address?

We want to help government (central and local) think better. As complexity and regulation increases, much of the policy designed and decisions taken by central and local governments show little sign of improvement. Our experience is that the knowledge that resides outside the formal decision-making structure is sometimes greater than and certainly complementary to the expert knowledge held within government teams.

We believe that efforts to merge the formal decision-making structure and the informal knowledge, skills and ideas from outside government would generate value – specifically in the form of better and more cost effective decisions, and especially at the local level in
collaboration with stakeholders.

What’s new about it?

1. The creation of an online framework to capture the creativity, multi-media evidence, expert and local knowledge in a fashion useful to decision makers
2. The intention to test this model in conjunction with some of the experiments in Participatory Budgeting (i.e. community controlled) taking place in some Primary Care Trusts in the UK.
3. We want to allow multi-media contributions as well as standard documents – much information is best conveyed visually. For example, streamed video contributions to planners were used to illustrate problems by residents in the regeneration of areas in the East End.
4. We want to organise contributions in novel ways (e.g. following the Six Thinking Hats model) to assist decision-makers in their analysis of contributions

What inspired you?

We live in a community that is victim to poor, wasteful decisions on a regular basis. We’ve watched our council spend hundreds of thousands of pounds they could have avoided if they’d talked to local residents before spending it, and then, even more painfully, witnessed the same council waste a similar amount after they’d been told at a consultation exercise how they could save it.

Idea submitted by Alex Templeton

Alex runs the Farm Energy Project and has helped to set up the Narrow Vehicle Research Institute.