Getting citizen consultation in public policy writing is a difficult task.  The first challenge is  finding a venue for citizens to voice their opinions.  By all accounts, the Web has improved this process – Obama’s Change.gov website gathered input from over 125 000 citizens.  But the the next challenge, and the more taxing one, is tying the input to to policy-writing in a formal way.  Change.gov, although it had an impressive user base, was really little more than a suggestion box.

This begs the question – how can Web 2.0 tools improve on this model and move beyond the suggestion box?

One innovative case of public policy consultation can be found in the city of Freiburg, Germany.  In 2008, the municipal government of Freiburg invited its citizens to partake in a participatory budgeting exercise.  The goal was to gather citizen input for the drafting of the 2009/2010 municipal budget.   With the help of software company TuTech Innovation, the Freiburg government created a website that used discussion forums, wikis and a new innovation – the budget slider.

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