barandiaran

The most successful cases involve the city council setting up the platform for all citizens, it is otherwise difficult to avoid overlaps and become the "official" website. However, the software equally useful for other types of organizations (NGOs, cooperatives, social movements) for them to coordinate their action and decision making. It is already been used for that purpose.

Polls aren't certainly the best possible reflection of what a community thinks if there is no perfectly representative a sample of participants. But it can be a good aproximation. Electing representatives is a kind of poll, so is HN itself. Participants vote here and there, factions balance out, you get some unstable equilibria that does the job of reflection part of what a community thinks and it often helps a community take better decisions than what a few (interested and absolutely politically factioned) politicians usually do.