The Conservative party has decided to dabble with a dose of Crowdsourcing to aid their analysis of yesterday’s budget announcement (which you can see at http://www.yourbudgetresponse.co.uk/).

Writing on the Conservative’s official blog, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, said:

“The simple but effective idea of harnessing the power of mass collaboration has informed many of our plans for government. You can see that in our pledge to publish government data and spending online, so that tech-savvy citizens can mash up the data in useful ways to help make public services more transparent.”

For all the hype leading up to the release of the Conservative’s Crowdsourcing exploits, there was an almighty wait for the online publication of Alistair Darling’s Budget. Eventually, at around 3.30pm yesterday afternoon, 26 austere looking pages landed on the Conservative website for public scrutiny.

There were a few problems to arise from this. First, the pages were initially of minute size, meaning anyone who had the patience to sift through mountains of technical financial jargon had to squint over their computer screen or blow up the size of their browser to around 150%. Second- just how many people do the Conservatives think have the endurance to spend hours deciphering the careful wording of the Budget?

The concept of Crowdsourcing government documents is not all that new. When I was at University last year, the Guardian actively recruited members of my class to participate in the scrutiny of the reams and reams of paperwork that needed sorting through during the MP expenses scandal last Spring. A surprising number participated- mainly for the potential kudos of having their name acknowledged in a national newspaper- but what incentive are the Conservatives offering?

Presumably, the opportunity to undermine the Labour government ahead of the General Election in (what has been widely speculated) six weeks time. And the Conservatives obviously expect a reasonably significant number to participate due to the extended comment section headed ‘Did You find anything we should investigate further? Let us know below.’

So far, there is no-way of telling how many people have decided to leave comments in this section as the Crowdsourced messages delivered to the party are being kept strictly in-house. According to the Conservatives:

“If all comments were public straightaway, the Labour Party and the Treasury’s army of civil servants would be given free rein to start revving up their spin operation on the important matters that are identified by our army of armchair auditors.”

No doubt they have initiated this policy as a safe-guard against rogue postings as well, which may have otherwise littered the website page with spam and inappropriate messages. Their rivals in the other parties may well be sending these in any case, in order to slow down the progress of the small Conservative research team.

It will be a good few days, perhaps weeks, until the Conservative Crowdsourcing experiment reveals any true results. The media headlines and opinion polls will ultimately form the acid test as to whether the Conservatives have gauged just how to go about using the public as part of their team of researchers, or if there are better methods of interaction yet to be explored. 

What does seem certain, however, is that the General Election will be the first battleground for social media to take centre stage. According to the political tweet machine, Tweetminster:

“During the budget today there were 11,132 tweets across Twitter, averaging 2.29 tweets per second. To put the figure into context- there were six times more tweets during Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, and double the posts when Blair testified at the Iraq Inquiry.”

Nonetheless, the British political parties are beginning to realise the importance of social interaction over the internet. Had the Budget been explained in layman’s terms, perhaps tweeting activity would have been far greater. After all, the most activity in the twittersphere yesterday came from the announcement of a new heavy tax inflation on cider. Yeah, you know. The important issues (although personally, I hate cider).

If a week is a long time in politics, then the five year gap between General Elections must feel like a few centuries.  In which case, eight months must feel like a different era in the world of political social media, since David Cameron told listeners of Absolute Radio last July:

“The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it – too many twits [he meant ‘tweets’] might make a twat.”