The British Conservative Party is ready to offer a price of £ 1 million for making an online platform that would allow "the collective wisdom of the British people" to produce innovative ideas in the service of the country.
The prize will be awarded only if the conservative party win in the next general elections, but the idea should mobilize the enthusiasts of "crowdsourcing", popularized by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.
According to Wikipédia, crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and a short for Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions. The idea is to delegate to citizens development projects, ideas or solutions to "solve the problems they have themselves".
According to the party's culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt, cited by Dailymail, "The collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts". Mr. Hunt is close to David Cameron's political guru Steve Hilton, who has pushed the Tories to embrace the so-called 'post bureaucratic age', a term that refers to ways in which technology can be used to hand power to the people.
This idea is controversial in UK, but I think it's interesting to follow it.
