boakes.org

The British Government has never been more accessible and the DirectGov website now boasts over three million unique visitors per month, a figure that’s rising by 10% each month.

Those users are primarily discovering public service information and not having an active say in government, but something is changing in a small but significant way: you can now petition the UK Prime Minister online. The dawn of digital democracy is upon us.

A beta test of the system has gone live on the UK government’s web site today, and it’s already attracting petitions on some controversial topics; everything from “Launch an independent public enquiry into the decision making process which lead to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.” to “Replace the national anthem with ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet”.

What’s particularly interesting about this site is that, because these are officially recorded petitions, they cannot easily be ignored, so if the UK gets a bee in it’s collective bonnet, this exists as a stark and instant way of making the powers that be sit up and take note.

Either that, or it will be so massively over-used or abused that the petitions will be ignored. Lets see how this one develops!

Try it: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/

The computer system that drives the test has been developed by mysociety.org and is freely available under the Affero GPL.