The use of Web-based collaborative communities and tools can use labour, intelligence and interest to develop policy collaboratively, allowing the interests of the public to be better represented and engaged.

Three of our friends, Mark Elliott, Darren Sharp and Matt Cooperrider, have published a great case study on participative policy making, describing the experience of Melbourne, i.e. Future Melbourne, the world’s first collaborative city plan, and wePlan, the online collaborative development of a large park management plan hosted by Parks Victoria.

In summary:

“Collabforge worked with the City of Melbourne to map the existing city planning process and then reengineered that process to employ Gov 2.0 solutions. Most importantly, an open source wiki-based collaboration environment enabled collaboration amongst the City officers and stakeholders, as well as members of the general public, during the public participation period.”

More details here.