It’s worse than that. The site linked to above is Your Freedom – the government’s other crowdsourcing attempt. In fact Spending Challenge – http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk – is almost completely down. You can’t even browse previous submissions. There’s simply a bog-standard web form. This government’s gone from web2.0 to web1.0.

And check out the government’s much heralded Spending Challenge Facebook site:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/HM-Treasury-Spending-Challenge/131377053565194

56 people have subscribed.

Actually, 57 people – I just signed up : )

Is this the Big Society™ in action? Wow, impressive stuff.

The sad thing is that you can now guarantee the Spending Challenge site’s inbox will be packed with suggestions that the government “Bring Back the Spending Challenge Website.”

ooops – all sorted Clifford – thanks for pointing that out. I really should stop doing these stories late at night…

I would have thought that public contribution should be encouraged rather than mocked?

Or is seeing the government fail more important to you than improving the civil liberties situation in this country?

They seem to be back up now, with suggestions open.

As well as the horrendously right-wing suggestions it might also have something to do with these guys: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3327957 trolling the crap out of it.