UK Government looks for a crowdsourcing strategy on Facebook

The UK Government is now working on a new Facebook app to crowdsource solutions for spending cuts. On the 9th of July, the British government announced an official partnership with Facebook, referring to the social networking website as their “primary channel” for communicating with the public. Crowdsourcing through internet is not new for the parliament. About a month ago they launched an official website called Spending Challenge where people could talk about fair cuts, but this site was subject to a “small number of malicious attacks.”

The idea is simple, the solution is not. Facebook users are invited to share their ideas on Democracy UK (the government’s official Facebook page), but somehow these ideas need to be filtered as many want to speak but have nothing to say. Therefore, the government is trying to build a new app, that would be added to the Democracy UK page, which will allow people to submit their perspective on spending cuts in a more formal and organized way.

The initiative of the parliament has caused a large variety of reactions. The social networking site declared that it has more than 23 million users in the UK: what better way is there to ask more than a third of the population to help contributing on improving the economy considering the fact that UK registered a record budget deficit this year and it is definitely not the time to spend more money on campaigns for people to get involved in their country’s problems. However, asking public workers to suggest cuts was condemned by many, including GMB union chief Paul Kenny, who said it was outrageous to basically ask people to “co-operate in sacking thousands of them”.