Québec - Consultation publique Web 2.0

The Province of Quebec has an online consultation about Web 2.0

Comment le gouvernement du Québec peut-il exploiter le Web 2.0 – réseautage social, sites wiki, applications composites (mashups), blogues – pour améliorer la qualité des services aux citoyens et son efficacité interne?

http://www.consultationgautrinweb2.gouv.qc.ca/

There's also tweeting from @GautrinWeb2 and use of the hashtag #GautrinWeb2

I encourage you to provide your opinions and votes in their ideas market (they're using the IdeaScale platform).

However, I think there are a lot of issues with these kind of broad-based open-ended ideas market public consultations.  In general the participation level is low and the ideas are all over the map. 

I am strongly in favour of government finding new ways to open up to citizens, I just think we have to be mindful about the types of consultations and technologies we use, and our expectations for them.

With low participation levels, it's easy to game the system (that is, for a particular interest group to get their ideas voted to the top).  You need to get into the thousands or tens of thousands of users for an open consultation before someone can sway the results just by reaching out to the members of their personal social network or broader professional networks.

These are the current response levels for the consultation, running since July 25, 2011:

51 idées soumises, 192 commentaires, 519 votes, 181 utilisateurs