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How Social Software Can Improve Democracy
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Nov 09, 2008 08:07 AM
from the liveblogs-from-the-senate-floor dept.
from the liveblogs-from-the-senate-floor dept.
Geek Satire writes "Politics breeds cynicism; politicians seem to pander to contradictory focus groups to get elected, then break their promises to everyone. Mass mailings and faxings overwhelm their staffs, and who knows if you can tell your representatives what you really think? Experienced techie and political consultant Silona Bonewald (creator of the Transparent Federal Budget) believes that simple software solutions can fix these problems and more. O'Reilly News recently discussed with her how social software can improve democracy and leadership."
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I wish (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lynchmob justice?
Re:I wish (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the practical experience with direct democracy (for example from Switzerland) says the exact opposite.
People are _very_ conservative and don't like the change, even if it's for better.
It's funny that you are talking about media influence, but at the same time parroting the power elite's propaganda about why the direct democracy cannot work.
Parent
Re:I wish (Score:5, Interesting)
You underestimate how easy people can be influenced by the media.
This direct democracy would only work if everyone was very politically involved , which is just not the case.
Also , pure direct democracy , if everyone would really from their own opninion , would slow everything done , because there is always someone who disagrees with it , resulting in endless discussions and debates , and no real solutions.
As a goverment type , i think a good idea to try might be technocracy : decisions are made according to what the best solution the problem is , based on scientifical approach and simulation models , that can veryfied by everyone.
Sure , this isn't completely flawless either , i'm sure , but it may solve some of todays problems ( for instance , by solving the problem of global warming rather than endlessly debating it )
Parent
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I am not underestimating anything, I am referring to empirical experience with direct democracies. It's you who are making things up.
I recommend this book [democracy-...tional.org] as a source of information. It answers all your misconceptions.
About technocracy - it would not be good at all. In the real world, the main issue is power. If you would give power to small elite, it would quickly degenerate. In my country, communist party tried to run a country based on such a system (planned economy and society), and it spectacularly fai
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As a goverment type , i think a good idea to try might be technocracy : decisions are made according to what the best solution the problem is , based on scientifical approach and simulation models , that can veryfied by everyone.
Good luck getting the religious know-nothings to agree to that.
Rich.
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Also , pure direct democracy , if everyone would really from their own opninion , would slow everything done , because
... which we have already decided is so overwhelmingly a Good Thing that it is the reason we have three separate branches of government, as well as a bipartate legislature. A system of checks and balances is not a flaw, it's a feature, and one that is wise to retain regardless of the details of how the responsibilities of governance are divided up. We want enough time and enough inertia, meaning tendency to resist change, that we can realistically identify the results of the changes we make so as to repea
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In fact, in a direct democracy, doing "more to address global warming" would pass with a veto-proof majority: 68% [time.com].
The answer to this is of course, that in a direct democracy, we would have more influence (votes) in the areas of our specialization. I would have a much greater say in IT, especially software, than would say for instance a doctor. This would enable the focused expertise of the general populace to be utilized in making informed decisions.
This is obviously a very simplified example. There would need to be layers of voting and decision makers. These layers would ideally be based upon levels of experience in
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Actually, the practical experience with direct democracy (for example from Switzerland) says the exact opposite.
Yes and no. Switzerland, clearly yes, their practical direct democracy works well. However for the "mother of all direct democracies" you have to look at the ancient Greek city-states, Athens being the prime example. Direct democracy in Athens resulted in the legalized slaughter and enslavement of many Athenian enemies.
Interestingly in Athens, every government position was directly elected e
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Well, as I already pointed out, direct democracy is not a cure-all solution. I don't think Athenean democracy (as any other society from that era) can be really held to today's society standards.
But this is not an issue. The issue is if the direct democracy (or semidirect, which is actually what I mean when I talk about it) is better than representative one.
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I don't know how well the system would scale given the lengths our system has gone to to try and prevent larger groups from gaining unquestionable power, I can see it making it very hard to make necessary but unpopular moves.
Re:I wish (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
We can, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, I see many ways you can use software means to improve democracy. Hell, I also see many ways to do this by using social-only means, using the currently established online communities... I can even develop a perfectâ software solution that fixes all known problems with democracy... And let's us do what you mention.
There is one simple problem, all of these might work in theory, but in practice the systems that would keep all of these running would be set up by people and will be run by people. And t
What I wish is... (Score:2)
I wish I was the guy paid to implement it.
Imagine, government of the people, in real time.
Imagine, government of the people, in real time...
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Direct democracy _cannot_ go beyond the issues the society has. In particular, it cannot solve problem with religion. But neither can representative democracy. And gay marriages are (unfortunately) a religious issue in the US.
There exists similar examples like this from Switzerland. However, in general, people are happier there and trust each other more. There exist excesses both in representative and direct democratic systems, but there is less of them in the latter.
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I looked there, it was mentioned already, but honestly, I don't believe that consensus is going to work better than majority voting. I have several reasons for that:
1. I believe consensus scales a lot worse than majority voting.
2. If there is no consensus, then a status quo is preserved, which may be minority opinion - thus, in effect, enforcing minority rule over majority. This I consider worse than the dreaded "majority rule over minority".
3. There are no clear rules when the consensus has or has not been
Anything which threatened the current system (Score:5, Insightful)
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I believe that it's a lot more subtle than that.
There are certain issues that can make people really angry, and could be in principle used to pass more democratic laws. However, what happens in such cases is that the current powers will much rather compromise on the specific problem than to allow more democracy (which could cause them more problems in the long run). So it's not impossible to fight for, but democracy itself needs more awareness among people not to be satisfied with such compromises.
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Monitoring is not an issue. Monitoring does happen (thanks to free speech). The problem is power. People don't have power to change things easily when something goes wrong.
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Nice to see someone thinking along these lines... (Score:5, Interesting)
..as I have been thinking about such system too.
I wanted to map laws that are passed in Czech parliament to simple statements (such as "increases taxes", "limits freedom of speech") and then anybody could create their own profile and test this profile against all the laws that have been passed, and this would be connected to parliament voting data to select which party he should vote for. And all the data would be publicly available (except for the personal profiles, of course), so anyone could reproduce the result.
Also, I have been thinking about social networking. It would be cool if we could get past the reputation systems that just have a reputation as a single number, and we could also measure reputation depending on how the reputation is connected among people; so it would be impossible for an isolated group of people (connected to single entity) gain high reputation by giving high reputation to each other.
I like what these people are doing, and I applaud them for trying to make the system more democratic.
Re:Nice to see someone thinking along these lines. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Meta Government [metagovernment.org] is good answer. It's not too advanced yet, but worth mentioning.
Parent
Of course! Cross Hollywood with Silicon Valley! (Score:2)
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"Join 'Amend der constitution for me.' 100,000 members. Dis time it's personalized."
"Constitution" (Einrichtung) is feminine (die), and german speakers tend to fake "th" with "s" when speaking english rather than d, though equivalent german words tend to replace "th" with "d". e.g. to think becomes "denken".
HTH
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Software can't fix human nature (Score:3, Informative)
You simply have to understand that the more power you give politicians, the more corrupt they will become.
The real question... (Score:2)
Can software solve the human problem?
Sarah Connor might say yes.
Should a statesman lead or follow? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article has a definition of statesman I like:
It's also an important function of government to be a statesman and that's one of the things I think that's lacking in modern government these days is very rarely do you ever see a politician actually being a statesman anymore, being the middle ground that several different groups come to when they're diverging on topics to find a middle ground. One of the things I've been working on is tools to help enable that.
Often strong leadership is identified with a politician forcing through what they think is best, despite opposition. However in a democracy I see the role leadership as arguing strongly for you believe in, but then letting the people have the final say.
I'm actually in favour of having each (lower-house) representative run regular referenda within their electorates to determine their vote in the legislature. In each referendum the representative is given one proxy vote for each constituent who didn't cast a ballot, preventing control by a vocal minority.
To allow constituents to debate and be informed about issues, without the information overload talked about in the article, a system like my Make the Case [makethecase.net] site could be used to build and preserve a closely-argued community memory on important topics.
Ways to get involved in civic-technology projects (Score:5, Informative)
There is a growing but now well-established community of techies focusing on this at the federal level, especially for the U.S. Congress. There are open-source projects like my GovTrack.us http://www.govtrack.us/getinvolved.xpd [govtrack.us] and oGosh!: Open Government Open Source Hacking http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh [opengovdata.org] and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=45606565313 [facebook.com].
There's no end to what techies can do to work on improving civic life. I really encourage you to check out any of those links to get involved.
Political harrassment pander (Score:3, Insightful)
"politicians seem to pander to contradictory focus groups to get elected"
Can we PLEASE stop using the content-free scare word "pander". When 'they' do it, it's 'pandering'; but when 'we' do it, it's 'remaining true to our core values and not selling out'.
The real word is "represent". That's what a representative does, you know?
Shock, horror: there are groups of people *who hold different political views to you!* Oh noes! And they have *political representatives*! Noooo! Pandering! Obviously their representative is completely devoid of a moral compass and is only cynically using those people with their silly beliefs. They can't actually *hold* those beliefs, surely.
Actually, no. That's not how it works. People have concerns; they elect representatives who share those concerns, and speak to them. When that happens, that's democracy *working*.
If you don't like a certain group of people's polical views, by all means attack those *views*, but don't attack their elected representatives for correctly and honestly representing the differing views of their constituency.
Re:How Social Software Can Improve Democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, people don't seem to realize there are hardly any real democracies in the world, only republics.
Either you must be using some strange definition for the word republic that I'm not familiar with, or you're excluding countries which certainly are not republics, like the UK, Australia and other countries in the monarchy, and many other countries around the world which are not republics.
Parent
Re:Improve the Republic .. not the democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand your objection about direct democracy. If you don't think voters are rational or worse as leaders, why have democracy at all? I think people who don't want direct democracy actually don't want democracy at all, they just either don't say it in open or don't realize there is a logical inconsistency in their statements.
By the way - I am from Europe and believe that the reason why USA was so much advanced is really the fact they had very advanced democracy (in some cases direct) on national and local level. If you had direct democracy on federal level, maybe you wouldn't have any problems you have now with war and debt.
About your constitution - your founders may have been wrong. They were just people, anyway (they also didn't consider women and other races equal to white males). And at the time, there were no practical results with direct democracy. But they are now, and show very good results (increased happiness, better budget management, higher voter turnout, etc.).
Parent
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If you don't think voters are rational or worse as leaders, why have democracy at all?
Voters may be intelligent and rational, but they are not informed. They don't have time to be informed on every issue. Most of us don't have time to be educate ourselves about every single thing that a modern government needs to understand, so we pick representatives who don't have to do anything other than learn about them and then make decisions.
Think how many people believed Iraq was behind the World Trade Center attacks. Would you want the average man on the street making decisions about foreign pol
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Re:Improve the Republic .. not the democracy (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually amazing how many Americans don't understand the roots of their foreign policy. If you would have direct democracy, Osama bin Laden would never plan 9/11 - he wouldn't know who the Americans are.
Also, people believed connection between 9/11 and Iraq because George Bush lied and emphasized it. And you are going to blame common people, rather than him, for that.
So instead of doing something with the leaders that give people incorrect information, you argue that people who were deceived by incorrect information are the danger. This "sleight of mind" is getting really old and boring.
Parent
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As long as people are believe what they are told, without applying critical thinking and seeking multiple sources then they should not be directly involved with running the country.
Who should run the country then? Surely not the people who are feeding other people with incorrect information?
And of course, the basic question remains - why would you allow such stupid people to vote at all - when they cannot decide the issue, how can they decide who decides correctly?
Also, this poses another interesting problem. There are people who are critical thinking in one area and not in another. What would you do with them, can they decide or not?
I'd rather be without democracy... (Score:2)
Personally I'm not having a hard time seeing that indirect democracy is not perfect either. But on the other hand it's probably the only thing that really works.
As it make people think their vote matters and that they rule... When in reality it's probably almost completely random who gets elected... and the ones that does get elected feels a
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Well, when direct democracy supporters (like myself) talk about "direct democracy", they mostly mean "semidirect democracy" ala Switzerland. Still think it cannot be implemented?
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"I am from Europe and believe that the reason why USA was so much advanced is really the fact they had very advanced democracy (in some cases direct) on national and local level."
I am also from Europa and I believe that the reason why the USA was so much advanced is really the fact that they are a country with over 300 million people, vast amounts of land, leader of one camp in the Cold War and the fact that they are able to amass massive amounts of debt because oil is mostly traded in us$. But that's just
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Czech Republic. Our country is much less democratic than the US (or most of Western European countries), and it shows a lot. Even though the situation got a lot worse in recent years in the west too.
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This is solved by direct democracy. In direct democracy, you vote about the laws directly, so you directly control that the laws you want are passed.
Note this is simpler (thus superior) solution to having court decide if the politician kept his promise. In such a system, whoever would control the court would control the politicians. Then you would have to vote about people in the court, and you couldn't rely on them either. So in comparison with direct democracy, you would have an additional set of people a
Re:Improve, not fix (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In practice, this is not a problem for several reasons:
1. If you are not interested in the issue, you just don't vote - it's as simple as that.
2. If you are interested, you are going to get the information. And there are simple solutions to this problem too - for example, in Switzerland, every voter receives a summary which contains details and debate points about the legislation they are voting about.
3. If someone is completely ignorant, then he votes randomly, and effect of such people in voting will canc
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In fact, that's not clear at all. For example, our country has been building a new nuclear power plant. There was a question whether we should build it or not. Most people (about 70% IIRC) supported building it. The negative voices were mostly (financially) supported by Austrians, because they have hydrodynamic energy from Alpine glaciers and don't need nuclear power.
Anyway, now it's actually questionable if it was good or bad. CEZ (the energy firm that built it, which has almost monopoly on energy creation
Fix, not vote (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
douchebag: i don't believe in private property.
me: ok, give me your shoes.
douchebag: no, they're mine!
(i actually had this conversation irl)