Civic questions / answers

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Posted in Proposals 2009

Describe your idea:

The place to go to get help with your civic / social / democracy problem, when you don’t know where to begin.

A community of volunteers will answer your question, and you can choose the best answer. People get rewarded with more powers and badges for answering questions well.

Works like Yahoo Answers, or Stack Overflow. See description on this page of an open source implementation of Stack Overflow http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2009/9/2/plurk-solace-released Perhaps that could just be reskinned and used with appropriate text, and marketing cross links from other sites.

What problem does it solve?:

mySociety provides lots of specific tools, which are all very useful, but not if you don’t know where to begin. What tool should you use first? Who can you go to to solve a specific problem?

This site would invite people to enter their problem – which could be mundane, or complex. The community of mySociety supporters would then suggest places to go or ways to work round the problem, or offer ideas to help start a campaign about the problem.

The best answers would get rated up, and the site would gradually become a resource which would fill up Google search results for civic problems that people ask of the oracle.

Type of idea: A brand new project

3 Comments

  1. I think you should talk to Sarah Hamilton-Fairley of StartHere. SHe’s worked on this principle for a decade or so, and it’s likely, I think, that what youre suggesting amplifies what she does, and her experience would strengthen your proposal.

    http://starthere.org/

  2. I think it could work. We might have to pass people to CAB, ACAS but we could do that and it might be just the pointer that person needs and it would leave a marker for others to follow.