Gordon Brown's second YouTube exercise asking for questions from the public has come to a close. It's great to see that the PM wants to respond personally to issues raised by people like you and me.
But is this really the best way to do it? Submission of questions has ended and the answers aren't due to be published until September - an exercise like this really needs to be immediate or it will lose its impact. Then, if you're interested in what people have been asking the PM and want to browse the questions, as far as I can see, there is no easy way to do it - you have to go through the questions one by one. Quite simply, nobody is going to bother.
And finally, how does the PM choose which questions to answer? Will he choose to answer the trickiest questions or will his people cherry pick the easy ones? In the end it doesn't matter which option he chooses because regardless, people are naturally going to think he's chosen the easy ones.
An exercise like this must be transparent or it will have no value. Naturally, we at Yoosk can think of a much better way of carrying out a public engagement exercise like this......we just need somebody at Downing Street to listen to our ideas.
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