A next big step for grassroots democracy

We need a government that listens to us, and online discussion boards make that doable, at least for people who can get online. (We'll need other solutions for everyone else.)

Problem with conventional discussion boards is that it's hard to find the good stuff, and it's also very easy for a bad guy to disrupt the discussion, maybe to fake a consensus. We're hoping that can be solved with discussion boards which allow people to vote up the good stuff. That works if you have a lot of people getting involved.

With the new Federal Open Government Initiative, people have been experimenting with such a discussion board, IdeaScale, which might facilitate tens of millions of people working together. Now, government agencies will start to implement it broadly.

The big challenge ... getting actual results from the government based on citizen feedback.