About Social Media Today
The UK government has been continuing its experiments in crowdsourcing at redtapechallenge.cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
The site invites the public (although the actual audience is likely to be those with some particular expertise) to comment on rules, regulations and laws of various sorts and to suggest which 'red tape' should be scrapped.
As well as having a section for over-arching rules (such as health and safety), it is also focusing on different sectors of the economy (beginning with the retail sector, before moving on to subjects like road transportation and manufacturing).
So to mark the occasion of this tweet...
...I thought it might be worth taking a look at how well it is doing.
The visualisation below (courtesy of IBM Many Eyes - data here and enlarged version here) shows the extent to which there is obviously some campaigning going on around some issues.
But having browsed through the comments, its good to see lots of reasonable points being made there.
It is also interesting how many comments there are which reject the suggestion that regulations should all be viewed negatively.
The comments seem to me to be of a generally higher quality than those left on the previous 'your freedom' consultation site. The moderation policy doesn't seem any tougher, so I suspect this might be because this site does a better job of focusing the user on specific regulations. Each page contains links to the relevant regulation texts and appeals to the commenter to be specific about what they want.
And (with a couple of these campaign-related exceptions) the data shows that, as would be expected, the more specific a policy area is, the fewer the comments it will receive.
One of the interesting moves on this site is that there is no rating mechanism for the comments, which I thought was one of the most effective tools for assessing the 'your freedom' comments (useful when there is the potential for a lot to be submitted).
The other interesting change on this site is that commenters are asked to state whether they are giving their opinions individually, on behalf of an SME or on behalf of a larger company. This should make it easier to highlight what issues particularly vex smaller firms, for example.
