The Telegraph hopes to offer a unique insight into the policy priorities of U.K. citizens through their new crowdsourcing website, a collaboration between clowd computing provider Salesforce.com and the Telegraph.co.uk site. According to journalism.co.uk, the website, Debate2010, was launched officially on Monday and aims to foster focused debate in the public sphere while also creating a road map of priorities for MP candidates during the election.

The Debate2010 editorial team will post questions for debate that will last on the site, depending upon their popularity, for 1-3 days. Users will be able to respond to questions, vote for and against and comment on other user responses. The home page of the site shows all open debates, as well as popular responses and a key user quote selected by the editorial team as indicative of the tone of the overall debate.
The website's crowdsourcing technology reflects that used by the Obama-Biden campaign and transition team during the 2008 U.S. elections, but Telegraph.co.uk editor Marcus Warren sees the site as a new way to gauge public opinion.

"It's a real-time opinion poll - not a poll of policy intentions, but of policy ideas," he said.

The policy priorities highlighted by the public on the Debate2010 site will be packaged into a UK Citizens Briefing Book for MP candidates to help guide their campaigns. Kate Day, Telegraph.co.uk's communities editor, hopes that the website will illuminate the variety of opinions throughout the nation.

"We also want to steer it away from a lot of people just having a view and make it a comprehensive map of what people think about all sorts of different areas," she said.

Crowdsourcing has been increasingly used by journalists not just to map public opinion but also to aid in article research. In the U.S., the New York Times and the Huffington Post both crowdsourced research on hundreds of pages of official documents and the U.S. stimulus bill, and last year the Guardian crowdsourced data on the expenses of MPs.

But there is always the danger that malicious or uninformed users will abuse a public forum. Social media consultant Joanne Jacobs expressed her worry about the comment-based system of the Debate2010 site.

"So long as it is not the subject of extremist and uninformed opinion-bombing by ignorant individuals who are addicted to the sound of their own shrill cries," she said, the site will be successful.

The site's developers, however, are optimistic that Debate2010 will be a key program for both candidates and the public in the run up to election day.

"Social media will be a central theme of the 2010 election," Warren said. "There will be no better tool to map public opinion in the weeks ahead."

Sources: Journalism.co.uk, Joannejacobs.net, PublicTechnology.net