The UK Coalitions first major Crowdsourcing initiative ‘Your Freedom’ seems to have hit a snag.

What started out as a cool programme to Crowdsource UK voters views on amending or abolishing red tape has turned into a PR embarrassment. You see, it seems that no government department wants to listen to the suggestions.

9,500 people smacked in their ideas on how to improve laws and regulation – but when Ministers turned to civil servants to see if they might implement any of the them they got snow-balled. Which is government snaffoo for ‘Yes Minister!’.

The challenge with Crowdsourcing is to make sure you know how to turn crowd feedback into action – if not it gets interpreted as crowd abuse. 9,500 British taxpayers now feel taken advantage of. Turning a cool Crowdsourcing project and PR stunt into a political embarrassment.

The key to successful Crowdsourcing is to ensure that the Crowds mission is clear and the processes and systems required to turn crowd inputs into outputs are carefully planned from the start and successfully executed ‘through the project’.

Hate to say ‘we said so’. But we did.