If you are the head of IT, whether in the public or private sector, at a large or small organisation, then you should be part of the silicon.com CIO Jury. Many of your peers already are.

The CIO Jury was created by silicon.com as a rapid and hassle-free way to allow leading CIOs to get their opinions out to the rest of the tech industry and beyond.

Here's how it works. Roughly once a fortnight the pool of CIO Jury members - which is made up of well over one hundred CIOs, IT directors and their equivalents - receive an email from silicon.com containing a short question that requires a yes or no answer.

Members of the CIO Jury can respond with a simple 'yes' or 'no' (sometimes just a 'Y' or 'N' from their BlackBerry), and they are free - and encouraged - to add more comments if they want, with the relevant comments then quoted in the resulting CIO Jury article.

It's called the CIO Jury because we take the responses from the first 12 tech chiefs to respond and use that as the basis for the article. As the popularity of CIO Jury continues to grow, we also try to use all responses in supplementary articles, wherever possible.

The subjects are chosen by the editorial team and often tap into hot topics of the week. Past examples have included 'Does outsourcing work?', 'Will the IT department exist in five years?' and 'Do IT suppliers understand your role and your pressures?'

Follow the link to read some recent the silicon.com CIO Jury articles, which will also show who took part in that particular jury.

We don't pass this off as scientific research. Rather, CIO Jury is a unique, rapid-response straw poll that allows IT leaders to speak freely in the company of their peers.

Questions are rarely very technical - the focus is on strategy, business decision-making and the changing role of the individual in charge of IT.

Members don't have to respond to every question. If a subject doesn't resonate, there is no obligation to take part - though we find most of our CIO pool are regular contributors.

Part of the attraction of CIO Jury to participants is that this has proved a hassle-free, convenient way of publicly contributing to key debates. It's a fantastic way of making your views known to the wider community, and the CIO Jury is keenly watched by other CIOs, analysts and vendors to name just a few. The positions of the CIOs are often provocative and subsequent debates often kick off in our Reader Comments section.

So if you're a CIO, IT director or equivalent and think CIO Jury, with its interesting subjects, low time overhead and high visibility is for you, then drop us a line at editorial@silicon.com