The Conservatives are officially in love. After weeks of flirtation with the use of Crowdsourcing in their reviews of Labour’s budget and election manifesto, the Tories have provided further evidence that their party might actually hold legitimate feelings towards the concept.

During the weekend, the Conservatives released a new document titled ‘Big Ideas to give Britain real change’, which outlined nine changes that they consider would revolutionise government practice. Avoid trawling through all the other promises and pledges and familiarise yourself with point number six. In the event that the party was elected into government, members of the public could be presented with the opportunity to Crowdsource legislation.

The Conservatives plan to release draft clauses of new Bills online and subject them to public scrutiny in an attempt to make more people involved in the political process. Furthermore, parts of the new legislation would be subject to a ‘Public Reading Stage’- including a formal ‘Public Reading Day’ when MPs and Lords would consider suggestions submitted on the internet.

The Conservatives said:

“In the post-bureaucratic age, new technologies make it easier than ever before to involve the public in the legislative process and harness the wisdom of crowds to improve legislation and spot potential problems before a Bill is implemented. This is a Big Society approach to improving legislation…

“This process will open up the legislative process and improve the scrutiny of proposed legislation, while still retaining the fundamental character of our representative democracy.”

The relevant government department putting forward the legislation would publish detailed instructions on the aims of the policy and members of the public would then register for an online forum, in order to submit draft clauses.

Participants would be encouraged to rate the draft clauses, with the highest-rated put forward to the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel- the official government drafter of legislation.

Is this a romance built to last? Well, first of all, the Conservatives would need to gain power- and judging by recent opinion polls, there’s no certain guarantee that this will be the case. But let’s just assume they do- the greatest problem will be to actually engage the general public with politics.

These are formal legal documents- and they’re designed to be read as formal legal documents. That the Conservatives hope that the efforts of academics, professionals and lawyers will take apart and scrutinise these bills, places a large amount of faith in the mentality of the general public. Will they have saint-like patience? Can they afford the free time to spend ploughing through a dull pdf file of several hundred pages?

The media will play a great part in the Crowdsourcing world too. The most innocuous issues could seemingly pass unaddressed, through no fault of the public or the politicians, but simply because the subject matter appears ‘boring’. The media will pick and choose the issues that they believe deserve the most scrutiny and attention, and it will be those bills that gain the majority of public involvement.

Don’t get us wrong, we’re all in favour of more conversation between politicians and the general public. For far too long now, the divide between the two has been left to grow far too wide and any system which actively attempts to make politics more accessible and democratic should certainly be encouraged.

To make it truly accessible, however, the public will have to be able to have far more engagement at lower levels, in order to understand the complexities and complications that the draft bills will contain. And that’s obvious anyway- if the crowds are not involved, there’s little point to Crowdsourcing.

So have the Conservatives got the love for Crowdsourcing that will see them through?