"The web can fracture"

"Even when people engage in political debate on the web they often talk to people they already agree with. Liberal blogs tend to link to other liberal blogs; environmentalists connect with other environmentalists. The web can fracture democratic debate into partisan spaces where people of like mind gather together; democracy depends on creating public spaces where people of different minds debate and resolve their differences."

Charles Leadbeater in We-Think.

The proposed Interactive Democracy system is a formal way of introducing ideas into a public forum. It provides a system of peer and parliamentary review but does not prescribe where or how public debates should be held. If ID is done correctly, these debates will emerge on TV, on the radio, in the papers, in political parties, on the web, at work, with union members, in professional journals, among friends and family in the pub and over the dinner table. All these natural channels will be given the impetus that comes from taking part.

Idea Indegestion

According to No.10's ePetition site "The most common reason for rejection is duplication - many users have commented that there are many petitions on similar subjects clogging up the site and we are trying to eliminate too much duplication or overlap, though balancing that with the need to allow for the nuances for similar petitions which take the subject in a slightly different direction." (Click here for more.)

Obviously this sort of manipulation by the webmaster must be checked in a fully functional Interactive Democracy. Maybe checking would be the responsibility of an inter-party Parliamentary committee.

Using the search facility makes it easy to identify ePetitions with a similar theme. These should be filed in a root directory and assessed as a group by Parliament, who would then present the choices in a referendum.