There have been several proposals around educating citizens on issues and creating public issues reports to assist people in meaningful public deliberation and dialogue. Some have raised concerns about the trustworthiness of the information, the sifting and editing of scenarios and background information used to inform and prompt public engagement. Might a wiki-public issues site be worth exploring here, where the conventions of non-partisan, self-correcting information generation would co-produce a trusted, balanced overview of issues of concern and proposed policies in plain language. Public and private sector experts, citizens, and consumers/producers could contribute to shaping the issue descriptions providing a full 360 perspectives on how all stakeholders are being affected.
This wiki system could be developed at multiple scales so the issues would be generated and translatable at the appropriate local, state, regional and national perspectives. A pilot system or development site could begin with one issue set and build out from there.
Comments (1)
This is similar to the general idea of expanding this site, http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/3863-4049
I agree that a Wiki would be desirable, though I think that there should be a PRO and CON WiKi page to allow people who were basically in favor of the idea to develop it and the people who were opposed to express their opposition. One hopes that they would be civilized :-) so that the idea could be developed while still honoring constructive criticism