Great post. Thanks for following up on my earlier comments on another post. Members of Congress sort through 100s and 1000s of brilliant ideas every day in the form of constituent mail (including emails). Well, a few are brilliant. They have automated systems that are fairly antique compared to what's being discussed here. The thing they do very well, though, is to personalize the responses to make the constituent feel as though they had been heard. That requires some human hours. My point being that if you're going to portray to the public that you are open to their input, then you're inevitably going to have to involve some real human time in developing a response. Failure to do so will eventually dry up the input. That's not good for a politician.

Most of the constituent mail gets a form letter response and most of it only deserves that much. For those letters that are unique and/or more thoughtful, a more personalized response can be sent. For that one in a million letter that says something no one else has ever thought of, hopefully the lowly mail sorter has been sufficiently trained to get it to a higher level staffer for consideration. In reality, however, the constituents offering those brilliant ideas are usually communicating through different channels based on their credentials.

In case you missed it, Wikinomics author Don Tapscott is working with Steve Papermaster and nGenera to implement the concepts of the book for Global 2000 companies. http://is.gd/cjx