posted
I'm a strong believer in democracy. I'll define that loosely as "public participation in government," for my purposes here.
I have heard many comments about how the internet has a "democratizing effect." The recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (etc) have shown this to be true in some very important ways.
But in the aftermath of the Egypt uprising, it seems that the momentum gained can quickly become unfocused, and potentially devolve into chaos.
The problem, as I see it, is that whenever politics is discussed (on the internet or otherwise) the noise to signal ratio is too high. If people could make creative suggestions rather than just feeding the fire, a lot more could get done, and I'd bet people would be happier with their government.
It would help if there were a democratic equivalent of Facebook, or perhaps a better analogy would be Wikipedia, where people spend a lot of time writing and editing entries simply for the purpose of improving the information available to the public. I have my own vision of how this would work, but as it turns out, there is a website http://www.opencongress.org that does pretty much what I had in mind, by allowing the public to make comments on bills as they move through the legislative process. (Although I think that my ideas would be more accessible to the general public, but I'm keeping them under wraps in case I can get some kind of intellectual property protection on it.)
I'd like to see more people participating in this process, and in particular, when a controversial bill is being written, instead of arguing over what it means in blogs and writing letters to congress that never get read, the internet should provide a means to allow focused participation that deals with the actual legislation, rather than public perception and spin.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
In many cases, the actual legislation is not publicly available until the bill is out of committee. Would you change this?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Maybe. Maybe it would change itself. I understand that on wikipedia it is common to create an empty entry, so that other people will fill it with content. Similarly, legislators could make public notice of their intent, and then allow the public to present suggestions as to what the legislation should actually say. Then it's just a matter of winnowing out the best ideas.
Other times they may choose to go into a locked room and conspire in secrecy.
The thing is, without a structured way to stay focused on the actual legislation, this would suffer from the same problem; the noise level would be too high. Historically, we've said "write your congressman" because that is the mechanism by which ideas get distilled into bills, but it's not nearly as efficient as having computers doing the distillation. The internet is democratizing, but only to the extent that all this discussion actually reaches the ears that need to hear it. I'm just suggesting that that should be more automated.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's along the same lines. It's only for WA state right now. It seems like it could be adapted to the federal level though.
posted
I like that one a little better than opencongress.org, but I still think it could be done better. It's got to be trendy and accessible. That's why I compare it to facebook and wikipedia.
But how such a thing would go viral depends on the public's level of interest in the first place. People spend huge amounts of time on the internet arguing about politics, but I wonder how many would take the time to write their ideas down in a format as formal as wikipedia (if you call that formal). The library of congress ( http://thomas.loc.gov/home/bills_res.html) uses google sidewiki to allow comments to be appended to their pages, but I'm not sure where the comments wind up. Perhaps what needs to happen is that there needs to be a central database of govnerment actions that can be accessed through third party open-source software. So developers could produce their own user interface, but the resulting data would be channeled into a central repository that would be directly available to government officials.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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