Here is an application that is on the way to doing just that.
http://www.My-Representative.org

They are beginning to support the Grassroots Legislative Process
and
They are supporting an innovative method for the Electoral Process, Voters can actually compare the work Congress members have accomplished, and use it as a National common method of evaluation.

We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1855

I completely agree with you on that many times what matters is on what we are trying to optimize, our focus. Some people is more “solution-focused”, for which what matters is the end result; others are “technology-focused”, for which what matters is to buld a ‘cool’ and typically complex system; and others are “selfpromotion-focused” which is pretty self explanatory.

On the information retrival concept, it is certainly interesting that most need to be familiar with a concept to accept it.

And as Albert Einstein said: “Information is not knowledge”.

-Pau

‘Knowledge’, as such, doesn´t really exist. We do have massive libraries and repositories of files, books, data, whatever… However, what does exist is partial information residing on the -by nature- limited brains of individuals.
This goes beyond the scope of this topic, but when working in teams, the knowledge available to the purpose of the task is what’s on the team member’s head, plus the ability of the team to search on the knowledge repositories (and take advantage of it), in short.
I’d say that the latter is seldom done (too much mork..) and most is relied on the ‘RAM’ or the ‘cache’, the current working knowledge, which is handy and easy to access.
“Did you say pencil..? let me think… no, I get no hits on ‘pencil’, sorry. I bet it must be a good idea but, listen, why don’t we try to get the pen work fine instead…?”.
I bet chances are that there are -old- solutions for current problems. If only the ones solving the problems knew…!

As an example, I wonder, has this discussion ever happpened before? How can we know? We rely on what we ‘know’ or believe to know and move from there. Most likely this discussion, in its different forms, has taken place other times somewhere else, and will continue to be in the future.
We may be taking baby steps on a trial we believe is unexplored when in fact we’re walking on a busy highway…?

Anyways. Is there a problem with that? Of course not.
There isn’t right or wrong. There is certainly an ‘optimal’ way of doing things / solving problems, but the solution may be different depending on ‘what’ is that is ‘optimized’. Be it product features, and a pencil must work fine. Be it ‘let’s put all this folks to think in something new and see what the heck they come up with..’ and you’ll probably end up with a hole in your department budget, oh, and tools and prototypes too.

At the end, though, humanity is SO imperfect! If we were half innefective than we are today the system would -certainly- collapse. But that may deserve a separate posting.

Humans are not either ‘lean’ nor ’six sigma’ yet (at least as far I can tell from the top of my head -which is what I -believe to- ‘know’, right now-).

http://www.ponoko.com/

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19678/page1/

http://www.twine.com/