Earlier this month, the White House announced that it is seeking public input on “a design concept for a government-wide software tool and process to elicit expert public participation.”  The announcement says that the government is looking to expand its traditional approaches of getting citizen input – announcements in the Federal Register and the use of Advisory Committees –

According to the announcement, “we anticipate that a citizen consultation tool could be broadly used to pose questions to the public to elicit relevant and manageable feedback.”  Some federal experiences to date, such as in NASA, have found that crowd-sourced innovations are effective ways of solving problems faster, and at a lower costs.  This led to a new federal website earlier this year, Challenge.gov, where government agencies can ask the public for help in solving specific problems.  But the Expert Net idea is different.  Here, questions from government officials could be distributed to existing professional networks to elicit responses.

This proposal was formally described in a Federal Register announcement (I guess a White House blog post just won’t do).  To provide feedback, they’ve developed a wiki where you can post your ideas directly, and see what others have offered, to date.  As of today, there have been about three dozen comments, so there’s room for more ideas!

In an update, the White House blogged yesterday that there have been a number of useful ideas posted on the wiki and then outlined areas where they’d like more input:

“We are eager to hear about specific examples of tools that will achieve goals outlined here (or something different and why that's preferable).  We'd like specific examples of people using such practices, what works well, and what doesn't.  We want prototypes, wireframes, and designs.  Our goal is to implement a new system for citizen participation as quickly and cost effectively as possible.”

Interestingly, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science is sponsoring “Expert Labs” – “. . . a new, non-profit independent lab, with a mandate to help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens.” 

Hopefully, it and the federal ExpertNet will complement each other!