Total support of this
Ladies and gentlemen, my congratulations. It seems you are zeroing in onto the core question of opencare: can “open” really help “care”?
Let me chip in, following @Ezio_Manzini 's scheme.
- Main question and working hypotheses. Generally, more specific questions are easier to address. The loss of generality does not worry me here, because opencare is CAPS and CAPS is collective awareness oriented. The idea that online interaction influences offline reality is appealing, but also hard to prove. You do not have to worry about irrelevance, that's for sure. The breakdown of the main hypothesis into 2+1 seems to me to be a very promising move. Specifically, the +1 (the influence of hacker culture) is more profound that it seems, because policy makers and business people are the children of legal scholarship and the humanities. To them, hacker culture is deeply alien, incomprehensible. Accepting "+1" means, for example, throwing out the window 99% of all open government initiatives out there.
- Theoretical background. The brand of quantitative economics I practice has no way to test your hypothesis. We need observable events, and enough variance in the date to build counterfactuals. People moving from talk to action is not observable from where I stand. This is why we retreat to observing the interaction itself, that is observable. The collective intelligence crowd (Klein, Buckingham Shum, Hammond etc.) also cannot help, because they focus on mapping arguments, and assume that, once the terms of a debate are clear, whoever is in charge of deciding can make an informed decision. I imagine that ethnography might help: maybe you would identify certain behaviours that you want to track and look in the ethno data for signs of those behaviours. Certainly, it makes sense to use this mass of coded text we already have.
- Uniqueness. I don't think you need to worry about that. There are at least two novel pieces in the puzzle: the use of ethnographic data (hopefully also of their network representation) and the explicit interest in hacker culture. If you argue for hypothesis +1 you are going to be saying that one human culture is better at collective intelligence than others. That's a very big deal.
With all that said, you do the work and you make the decisions. Feel free to discard or ignore my suggestions.