Achieving effective citizen partcipation in government -- participation that goes beyond a vote once every four years, is a hard problem. As part of being involved with Personal Democracy Form next week, I've been priviledged to hear from Jim Gillian, founder of White House 2, on his experiences building a crowd-sourced website for political policy discussion.

Here's Jim explaining his reasons for getting involved:

"I started this right before the election, as an outside effort, not sanctioned by the White House, because I knew there were all kinds of restrictions on what they could do, both legally and culturally. I figured that if I could show it working, if I could figure out how it *could* work, then it would give the people who want to do this ammunition to convince people in the bureaucracy to let them do it. It's hard to innovate in a bureaucracy, big brands have a hard time with failure. When it comes to democracy, the United States has the most important brand in the world.... whereas I'm very good at failing.

So the advantage I have is no bureaucracy. The challenge for me is publicity, but i have managed to get 8000 people involved, which is plenty to experiment with. Obviously, attention will be no problem for the White House. "

On how White House 2 works:

"At WH2, we make policy a game -- fun and competitive. As a way to encourage good talking points, and to discourage spam, we have an economic system called political capital. Massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft all have systems like this. It's modeled after how political capital works in real life. The more people like the things you do, the more political capital you earn.

This is a fairly common concept on social web sites, but the twist at WH2 is you can actually spend it. You can buy "ads" for priorities you want to get more attention, and track their progress. If I have an idea, I can post it on WH2, and I can write talking points explaining why it's a good idea. If people like it, I earn political capital, and then I can spend it promoting my idea."

Fascinating stuff. Jim will be talking about his plans for integrating prediction markets into White House 2 at our panel discussion at Personal Democracy Forum in New York city next Tuesday.