Your Freedom consultation

On 1 July the coalition Government opened the Your Freedom consultation.

The consultation consists of a website which encourages members of the public to identify unnecessary laws that they think should be repealed. People are encouraged to post their ideas on the site and can reply to threads. Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, has promised to put the best ideas into practice.

This is generating lots of interest amongst the deliberative engagement practitioners; see, for example the following blog:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/guy-aitchison/your-freedom-serious-or-all-for-show

The consultation is a very open ended call for ideas, a ‘suggestion box’ approach rather than a deliberative exercise. There may be an opportunity here to initiate a more deliberative approach to this conversation, either by encouraging suggestions to be written in more a deliberative way (by providing more information and allowing participants to expand on ideas) or running a series of workshops to scrutinise the most popular suggestions.

Let us know what you think about this approach and debate with others at the Sciencewise-ERC forum.