In a previous job as a community worker I helped organise a public meeting about local housing. The meeting caused some controversy within the council and attracted more council officers than residents. I was quite disheartened and refrained from getting involved in the discussions as it would have added to the imbalance: one more worker amongst the handful of residents.

At the time, a community development professional I respected told me, "It is better to consult wisely than widely." The phrase has stuck with me. And in the light of the Coalition government's foray into crowdsourcing, through the now defunct Spending Challenge and Your Freedom websites, I have been thinking more and more about this advice. Respectively, these sites asked people to suggest how government could save money and remove unnecessary laws, with the former supposedly feeding into the Spending Review and the latter now in the process of being archived into the National Archives.

The web has the power to involve citizens in policy-making but there needs to be more focus on how citizens get involved- how wisely, rather than how widely. Many of the platforms that the public sector is using to gather ideas don't make this distinction.

The focus on widely rather than wisely has a number of consequences. Namely, it affects the credibility of those who actually make decisions. The biggest challenge for any citizen involvement in public policy is getting the policymakers to act on what people say they want. It's been that way with offline consultation, and it will be even more so with online consultations - regardless of the added transparency. If policy makers distrust the platform which brings them new ideas, it gives them a quick and easy excuse for inaction.

When looking at better ways for citizens to influence policy, I am reminded of another piece of advice, this time at a workshop on social media I did with various council officers. I asked an attendee who his bosses wanted him to engage using social media. His reply: "well, everybody." I understand his bosses' intentions but, pragmatically speaking, this just won't cut it when it comes to making good, citizen-influenced policy.

Some ideas from the private sector, however, could offer useful lessons. Firstly - online focus groups can adopt tools like Facebook, providing they are properly planned. Organizers should recruit participants and setup an online focus groups in much the same way as an offline focus group. Anecdotal feedback suggests that the information people are willing to be astonishingly open in an online context and this provides really useful insight into their experiences.

Secondly, competitions have proved very successful. Use the model of online scientific innovation platforms they ask people or organisations to submit thought out, pragmatic ideas and solutions to policy problems. The best ideas win prizes, to be reinvested back into organisations or into communities - perhaps using the Community Dividend model we developed in our paper on public services and civil society working together.

Smaller scale online crowdsourcing and the ‘let's engage everybody' approaches aren't mutually exclusive - the two could work together. But to get something substantive where the results are formed out of good quality deliberation - something that public servants will take more seriously - we need to give as much credibility to the wisely as to the widely.