The past few years have seen a wide range of projects that were designed to foster greater engagement from the public in government matters.

The last few years have seen a big growth in attempts by governments to better engage with citizens on a whole range of matters, whether it’s looking for ideas (as Obama and the Labour party have), participatory budgeting or even civic co-creation, there are no shortage of attempts to tap into the power of the crowd.

Indeed, innovation charity NESTA predicted that 2014 would be the year when politics became crowdsourced, with the likes of IBM and Deloitte all producing reports on the topic.

Crowdsourcing the legislature

Whilst most of these projects have focused on civic engagement, there have also been various initiatives to get the public involved in the legislative process.

Back in 2013 the London School of Economics attempted to crowdsource a constitution for the UK, with a final document published earlier this year.

A similar project launched this year via GovRight.  The Legislation Lab aims to increase awareness of upcoming legislation, and foster debate and discussion around the issues contained within it.

A similar project was launched in Morocco when the country was going through a constitution change.  The venture, called Reforme.ma allowed Moroccan citizens to suggest changes to the constitution.  The project saw over 200,000 visits and 10,000 proposals for change, with some 40% of these eventually making their way into the new constitution.

Thus far, most projects of this nature have taken place in areas without a rich history of democracy, but the LSE project shows that it can also gain traction in developed countries too.

It’s all part of a process to create a more informed and engaged citizenry that is willing and able to participate fully in the operations of its government.  It’s a process that includes making information more transparent so that citizens can monitor what their government is doing, and then of course, make suggestions for improvements.

No silver bullet

Of course, this should not be taken as an easy process, and I covered a study recently that revealed the awful success rates of crowdsourcing projects, and it’s worth pointing out that Reforme.ma currently has no website on the domain so it isn’t clear quite how constructive it was in changing the style and level of engagement in Moroccan life.

That isn’t putting off the folks at Legislation Lab however, who are rolling out similar efforts in Chile and New York City.  Nonetheless, they highlight the challenges in getting engagement, especially in more mature democracies.

We may have seen some 40,000 people submit questions for new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s first PMQs session, but that level of engagement is the exception rather than the norm.

Despite various organizations proclaiming the coming age of participatory governance, I suspect we have some way to go yet before our governments and public services are something that public is truly engaged in on a regular basis.

You do suspect however, that the times, they are a changing, so it’s heartening to see organizations like RightGov fighting the good fight.