Ohio's Suggestion Box

Do suggestion boxes at work actually work? How about the anonymous letters you turn in to your teacher? I don't think that any employees or students think that they do, but I am sure they are used for a reason. Nevada has decided to use this idea to help their citizens get in contact with their representatives.



The plan behind this website is that Nevadans will send in their complaints and suggestions and the law makers will look them over and respond to them. Basically, it is a giant suggestion box for the entire state, and it has the goal of ensuring that all good ideas and suggestions are vetted.

This is an interesting idea, as it makes sure that there is accountability in the system. More importantly, it ensures that all good ideas will be heard. How often do citizens write in great ideas to the newspapers and then they are never used? All the bloody time. This system takes all of the good ideas, vets them, and then gives them to congress to use as they need to. Great idea.

Let's think for a second on how it would work in Ohio. We would take suggestions for any issue in the state submitted to one website. We could probably break them into 5-7 categories, and have staffers for each category. Those staffers serve to take out the obvious Spam suggestions and then use them to remove copies. We count the popular ones and look at them first, then we look at the rest. The good ones get used, the rest are kept in a searchable database for future use. All suggestions will be looked at by a person prior to any decision rendered on them.

I believe that we could run this system through Brunner's office and use her to move the stuff to the appropriate groups. The State House could even create a committee to look and analyze these positions, and then they could move the good and viable ones further up the system. All suggestions, those from that plumber named Joe and those from people like myself would be looked at. Any good ones (i.e. any from myself) will be good enough for our government to look over. I only hope that they are modest enough to use other people's ideas.

I am all for this sort of system. Seriously, it is about time that the state representatives and the like start to pay attention to what the little person wants. We have people in congress who are just sitting around doing nothing, or saying they represent us when they are acting opposite of how we want, this sort of system will make sure that they are not able to avoid the big issues or argue that they didn't know how the citizens actually felt.

So, guys, what do you think? Would you write into this system? Do you think that it would work?
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