DIY online democracy

Intro

We’ve seen enormous changes occur because of the web/internet:
. vast amounts of user generated content (blogs, youtube)
. vast online social networks created in a short time (facebook, WoW)
. huge numbers of people interacting
Huge numbers of people show their support in facebook groups hoping for religious, social or political change but facebook is not designed for mass voting or discussion.

What I Think We Need

2 areas I see where we have yet to see the internet impact greatly and where I beleive something needs to happen very much are: the political world and the financial system. I propose an idea to tackle the first of these: an online debating and voting system designed to do the job of the government (of the houses of parliament at least). Although it would have no power what-so-ever in the real world, it gives people a chance to debate and form opinions and to gauge public opinion. If it proved itself sufficiently, could it take the place of our existing political system? Lets face it, our government is never going to do this by itself, but user built systems (slashdot, wikipedia, facebook) can grow rapidly and effectively.

If the population of the UK had wanted a social networking site, the government wouldn’t have given us facebook. If we’d asked for online shopping we wouldn’t have got amazon. Let’s face it, government can’t do these things. And if we want to use the internet to improve our democracy, we’ll have to make it happen ourselves.

How It Would Work

Users create propositions. The have associated tags, eg. “Reduce speed limits on motorways to 60mph” might be tagged “road safety”, “climate change” and “transport policy”.

Comments can be made on each proposition. A facebook style system is used to rate comments (a simple thumbs up or down). The highly rated comments should be much more prominently displayed. Users can filter to see only higly rated comments or all comments (like on slashdot).

Users express if they agree or disagree with the propositions. While reading the on-going debates users may change their opinion at any time. The current level of agreement can be seen
and changes can be graphed over time.

The default front page for visitors not logged in shows hot topics and highly praised comments (in other words the most interesting content to persuade you to join).

To be really effective user accounts should be linked to one individual. That would be difficult but just an email verification would be reasonable (facebook uses a mobile phone account to validate). Faking large amounts of support should be rendered quite hard by the volume of legitimate traffic. Users breaking the rules (eg. creating multiple accounts) can be banned permanently, which would be a harsh punishment in a true democracy.

I think the most important requirements are as follows:
. It has to have transparency – like with wikipedia where analysis of metadata showed organisations editing topics to suit their purposes – downloadable zips of propositions, comments and votes with usernames and IP addresses.
. So it also has to be open-source.
. It has to have a good privacy policy.
. Users can hide behind a username but the history of their posts is easily accessible to others.
. It cannot be owned, or be seen to be owned, by any one “side”. That’s why I think it can only be set up by geeks – seeking debate and consensus rather than forcing their opinion.

There are currently sites trying to promote online democracy but I have yet to find one fitting the above criteria, especially they tend to be “owned” by an individual or group.

Further reading: the article “Rebooting Britain: Open democracy to the online masses” discusses similar ideas.