Firstly, I'm really impressed by the idea, and think it would be an excellent way to have public feedback - if this had existed during washup, would the digital economy bill (now act) have passed?
But I have a few reservations - no. 10 has had a petition part of their website for years now - the problem was that any ideas that didn't fit with the government's ideas already were ignored. Petitions with only hundreds of signatures got noticed, those withtens of thousands got ignored. It's perfectly possible that this will just be repeated in a different form.
If it does work, then we might get ill informed opinion taking precedence - such as people voting against say road user charging without understanding the true costs and benefits of the system... But that's always a problem with democracy, so who knows how to solve that?
Also, there appears to be some technical issues with the site. There's no way to class entries as duplicates, and as such there are already man redundant posts - say on cannabis legalisation. When you rank by rating, they make the mistake that Amazon make - one 5 star rating is worth more than 20 five star ratings and 1 one star rating.
Firstly, I'm really impressed by the idea, and think it would be an excellent way to have public feedback - if this had existed during washup, would the digital economy bill (now act) have passed?
But I have a few reservations - no. 10 has had a petition part of their website for years now - the problem was that any ideas that didn't fit with the government's ideas already were ignored.
I think your second statement does a nice job of counter-acting your first.
Maybe I'm cynical, but this looks like a pretty shallow publicity ploy. I'd love to see some real change come from this (or sites like this), but I'd be shocked if it actually happened.
But I have a few reservations - no. 10 has had a petition part of their website for years now - the problem was that any ideas that didn't fit with the government's ideas already were ignored. Petitions with only hundreds of signatures got noticed, those withtens of thousands got ignored. It's perfectly possible that this will just be repeated in a different form.
If it does work, then we might get ill informed opinion taking precedence - such as people voting against say road user charging without understanding the true costs and benefits of the system... But that's always a problem with democracy, so who knows how to solve that?
Also, there appears to be some technical issues with the site. There's no way to class entries as duplicates, and as such there are already man redundant posts - say on cannabis legalisation. When you rank by rating, they make the mistake that Amazon make - one 5 star rating is worth more than 20 five star ratings and 1 one star rating.