His name was Eugene O'Brien. He ran a waste systems company, and he had heard about the Ideas Campaign's efforts to kickstart the economy. He phoned up the office. "We're all very impressed with what you're doing. You've got clean hands," he said, at a time when clean hands are believed to be in short supply in public and corporate Ireland.

He said he wanted to make a contribution. Next day, he showed up at the office with his offering. It was a hand sanitizer, just the job for keeping your hands clean. They got a great kick out of that in the Ideas Campaign. The sanitiser now sits on a shelf in the office, the first trophy for a unique citizens venture.

The Ideas Campaign is a prime example of what can be done at a time when most people feel helpless. It facilitates the generation of ideas from every corner of society on what can be done to make the bad times go away. It is a sponge for creative thinking but, crucially, it also provides a conduit between citizens and the seat of power.

Suggestions that might otherwise get lost in cyberspace or across a bar counter, can, through the Ideas Campaign, be made flesh at the cabinet table.

Aileen O'Toole and her business partner Fiachra O'Marcaigh came up with the idea after O'Toole had appeared on a Prime Time programme accentuating the positive aspects of the Irish economy.

"After that programme I was ambushed by people everywhere saying how good it was to hear positive things," O'Toole says. "Fiachra and myself thought about what we could do and we hit on this."

The pair run Amas, an online business consultancy service. Their business is the internet. What better tool to use in mobilising the creative instincts of the masses?

"We know the net, we know the media, and we have network support," O'Toole says.

On 18 February they got a logo designed. Within a week a campaign manager had been found and the building of a site got underway. O'Toole's long tenure in the media business – she was a founder of The Sunday Business Post – means she had a bulging contacts book to consult.

"Nobody said no," she says. "Even people who were up the walls. Companies like Hosting 365 came through for me immediately. The whole thing, including staff, was put together with a budget of €10,000."

The concept is simple. Ideas are e-mailed to the website which provides 19 different categories, from agriculture to transport. The copy is processed and edited by a team of volunteers. The ideas are then posted back on the web.

Crucially, they are also referred to an advisory group assembled by O'Toole. The group includes Kieran McGowan, ex-chief of the IDA, Moya Doherty, and Seán Gallagher of Dragon's Den fame. This group puts the ideas through the ringer and assesses what is worth further consideration. Ultimately, the plan is to present the cabinet with the results of the campaign.

Ideas range from a one liner: "Host a music and dance Olympics in Ireland to boost tourism", to 10-page policy documents on innovation and green energy.

The campaign went online on 5 March. By Friday lunchtime, there were 21,045 visits to the site and 2,020 ideas generated. "We are drowning in data," O'Toole says. "We have to beef up our team to cope with it all."

The hub of the operation is one room on the second floor of a Georgian building in Leeson Street. Campaign manager Anne Marie Boyhan and a team of volunteers operate on laptops around a table.

Boyhan is among the army of casualties from the property crash. Formerly marketing manager of the online property site Daft.ie, she was made redundant in January. Now, she is at the heart of something which is attempting to rebuild the economy.

"We got it off the ground in no time," she says. "And our motto 'no whinging'. The word is spreading. I was at a business meeting this morning and the guy next to me said he had attached 'no whinging' to his e-mail."

The surge of success enjoyed by the campaign has brought its own problems. A report last Friday said that intellectual property rights would be forfeited on any ideas submitted. But Fiachra O'Marcaigh points out that the campaign isn't looking to cash in on others' plans.

"What we want is ideas for public consumption to benefit the economy," he says. "Not private business plans."

The campaign has also had to deal with other problems. European election candidate and senator Alan Kelly bought keywords "Aileen O'Toole" and "Ideas Campaign" on Google with a sponsored ad. This means that anybody keying in those words comes up with a Kelly-related site as the first result. This in turn has the effect of diverting traffic to Kelly's site. Kelly is running his own ideas initiative in Munster and hosting a conference on the economy. O'Toole declined to comment on the affair, but a posting on the Ideas site expresses disappointment at Kelly's actions and points out that the campaign is non-political.

In a statement to this newspaper, Kelly refused to address the issue of buying the key names or hijacking traffic for the Ideas Campaign. "Ultimately this is a storm in a tea-cup," he said. "I have spoken to those who are running other campaigns and we have agreed that the more encouragement we collectively give through our work to those who have new ideas, concepts, innovations, the better for all concerned."

The Ideas Campaign site will remain live until the end of the month. Then the ideas begin winging their way to the cabinet table. The results of a campaign conceived on the back of positive words amidst gloom, could yet be far reaching.

"It's all about getting citizens to engage with the economy," O'Toole says.

www.ideascampaign.ie