The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

As far as I know, this is one of the first cases in which a government makes targeted use of the Internet’s new collaborative technologies. It seems to be a promising approach. For a long time, scholars and policy makers have complained about the increasing knowledge gap on part of government agencies on a rather abstract level. Now there is an active attempt at leveraging the (in many people’s opinion already rather buzzwordy) “wisdom of crowds” for better regulation.

It will be interesting to see how the decentralized review fares in practice: Will a critical mass of people participate? How susceptible is the process to gaming? And in a government context most importantly, will the system meet the normative benchmarks of the legal system, such as due process and accountability?

Beth Noveck, one of the masterminds behind the plan, addressed some of these issues in a recent paper for the U.S. context.

I wonder what other applications of recommendation systems in public policy one can imagine, especially in the European context. One idea would be to think about the problem of how to classify content that is potentially harmful to minors, a big issue in most Western European countries. A collaborative filter that generates community-specific ratings based on the reputation of raters may be just one idea to think about. It would bypass the problem of rather obscure procedures in overworked and understaffed content rating commissions and add transparency as well as – arguably – legitimacy to the process.