I am looking for good examples of citizen organized policy development. The best example I know of is Jerome Guillet’s Energize America, and there are excellent lobbying efforts like the Save the Internet Coalition. Help me out and give me other good examples of think-tank like activity that is taking place on the intertubes.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Not sure if your definition would include the FluWiki website about avian influenza, but that’s “people-powered,” (DemFromCT from Big Orange is a founder) as is the RealClimate website, which while not generating policy papers provides a very useful function in providing scientifically accurate data in a timely manner to the public:
There’s also TheOilDrum, which is kind of a cross between a think tank and a blog on the subject of Peak Oil. They have a lot of blog-like activity, but there are often papers posted for discussion; our friend Jerome also posts there:
Some other sites that I thought were “people-powered” had a foundation backing them when I looked into them more deeply, so I’m not sure if they fit your definition or not. A pure “think-tank” seems to be less common, in my experience. I’ll post again if I come up with any.
I’m on a good private discussion list re California election protection. It’s an invitation only group so there’s a minimum of disruptive influences, and it’s been great for sharing information and occasionally, organizing.
However, the community is split in three directions – those who want to work with whatever incremental improvements we can get, those who want only hand-counted paper ballots, and those who believe open source is the best possible goal.
I don’t see these efforts as incompatible, but some want to stop two of the three to get their one done, and that’s both silly and frustrating.
Netroots Nation? (formerly ykos) Or is NN more of an aggregator of policy developers? There is a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on now, only some of which I am aware of.
Have you heard about Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation by Stephen Coleman & John Gøtze (2001) They have some case histories in Chapter 5 (available at the link), but in general they seem to say about online policy collaboration that “it’s a great idea but no one is doing it much yet.”
I was very surprised to see that Google searches for (online “citizen organized” “policy development”) and (internet “citizen organized” “policy development”) turned up next to nothing – but at least this diary is the #1 Google listing in the latter search!
Perhaps policy development requires a little bit of privacy to allow space for people to develop enough trust to open up and brainstorm – plus you might not want to tip your hand to your opponents prematurely.
I appreciate your help. It does seem that the blogosphere is not much for policy development, but that is largely a function of a lack of expectation that it can make a difference. And I’m sure there is a lot more of it that we think, if we only know where to look.
There’s always the origina, the Free Software Foundation, and its child, the Creative Commons project. Another example from here in Canada is the opposition Michael Geist organized to the Canadian DMCA using Facebook. They may not seem like think tanks at first glance, but they’re having many of the same effects.
I don’t know if this will lead you anywhere but Larry Lessig and Joe Trippi’s project Change Congress received a “Transparency Grant” from the Sunlight Foundation.
The Sunlight Foundation’s site has a list of their grant recipients and describes what the grant was specifically for.
It’s possible that some of these grant recipients are doing more than the development work described in their grant application and are developing policy or are at least thinking of developing policy. You might want to check it out and see if it leads anywhere.
For instance, The Sunlight Foundation gave a $4,500 grant to More Perfect (http://www.moreperfect.org)to support its development of a wiki designed to involve the public in creating and collaborating on laws and policy.
Jim Hightower’s new book, “Swim against the Current” sounds like it covers citizens organizing in resourceful ways, including steps they took. It might have some of the flavor you’re looking for?
Susan G’s review.
Not sure if this exactly fits the bill, but here in Oregon we have Onward Oregon, http://busproject.org/programs/onwardoregon, a program of the Bus Project, http://busproject.org.