If you’re Finnish, you should try the innovative online service, Kuntalaisaloite.fi (”Citizen Initiatives”), where you can submit ideas to improve your local community. The Ministry of Justice provides this service, and in the first month more than a hundred municipalities have joined. The ministry has succeeded in making the service delightfully usable: the menu is short, the text is light, and the functionality is functional. Once you sign up with your e-mail address, you’ll receive a link to a web form for submitting your idea. You can choose to include your name or to have it not appear on the site’s list, which currently has about one hundred such ideas. These include five issues related to Tampere: people want Helsinki-style taxi-buses, more benches for the elderly, recognition for former athletes, equality in wages, and opportunities to learn about mental health issues. Across Finland, issues related to traffic are probably the most popular topic, but citizens in Ranua are demanding that officials reply to e-mail, and citizens in Helsinki want the library to stock the television series “The Wire.” The Kuntalaisaloite.fi service is a way to turn complaining into influencing.