On 31st May 2011 the citizens of Cagliari elected their new Mayor with a landslide majority grazing 60%.
While the city will have to wait for its new Council till the 21st June, a sizeable part of its web savvy citizens have already started making themselves heard via a new website based on the same principle of Give a Minute!, which has already been adopted by US cities such as NYC, Chicago, Memphis, San Jose.
The Ideario per Cagliari by developer Marcello Verona is built instead on the IdeaScale platform, also chosen by Austin.
Ideario can be translated as Ideas-Bank and is categorized into policy areas: housing, environment, sustainability, tourism, transport, transparency.
To date over 300 ideas have been posted and voted by over 750 registered users.
It would be interesting to see how the new Mayor and upcoming City Council choose to connect with their citizens, reply to their ideas and most importantly keep the dialogue alive and communicate progress updates throughout the term of office.
A possible answer to these instances can be a Pledge Tracker on the lines of the one built by The Guardian in UK to track the pledges made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition in 2010 and inspired by the PolitiFact project of the St. Petersburg Times, which is tracking and rating the campaign promises of the Republican leadership and President Barack Obama and has already won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the 2008 election.
