In the 11 years I lived in Washington DC, from the mid '90s to the mid 2000s, I attended one city-wide town hall. Just one. At that meeting, our bow-tied and technocratic then-mayor, Anthony Williams, got up on stage at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown and proceeded to have abuse and invective hurled at him for the next several hours. Mayor Tony, as we liked to call him, stayed fairly straight-faced throughout the session. When it was done, we had vented, he had listened. It felt like participatory democracy, but was it? Did what we had to say change how one bit of how the mayor did his job when he headed back to city hall? I was pretty sure it hadn't. And that's a big reason I never went to a second town hall.

The question of how effective our attempts at influencing power from outside the system have been and will be has been on my mind a lot lately. And so it was on my mind when Melbourne, Australia's attempt to form a city plan by wiki was celebrated during yesterday's OneWebDay.