Open Source Democracy 2.0

Numerous learned diviners of the Internet future have prophesied that the World Wide Web will at some point revolutionize democracy the way it has revolutionized other aspects of society. They foresee the emergence of some type of Web-based mechanism or venue – the exact form of which is not yet discerned -- that will fundamentally alter our democracy as we know it today.

One thinker in this realm is Doug Rushkoff, whose book Open Source Democracy (Demos, London, U.K., 2003) posits an analogy between computer software and the mechanics of democracy.

He describes a computer program as a set of rules that defines how a computer processes input (data entry), and invites us to compare this to a democracy, where a set of rules (election laws) defines how the system will process input (votes). He then extends the analogy further by asserting the advantages of open source computing (software written through the interaction and participation of lots of people works better than proprietary software created in a central planning environment), and suggests that our democracy should be able to benefit from a similar open source renaissance – courtesy of the “emergent” and “participatory” properties of the Internet. This transformed democracy will result in the “redesign of political institutions in a way that enables new solutions to social problems to emerge as the result of millions interactions. In this way, online communication may indeed be able to change offline politics.” (Foreword to Open Source Democracy by UK Politician Douglas Alexander, MP)

What Rushkoff does not offer in Open Source Democracy is a description of these redesigned institutions. What will this new-and-improved democracy look like? How would it work? What would its impact be? How would it remedy the numerous flaws that are so obvious, so debilitating, and yet so entrenched in our existing closed-source institutions?

Picking up where Rushkoff leaves off, this essay details below an actual Web-based mechanism, called a “No” Vote Pledge Campaign, that has the potential to re-enfranchise a large majority of our citizens and empower them to wrest control of crucial issues from politicians and heavily funded special interests. To provide an interactive example, the author has created a prototype Web site, http://www.amendment-28.com, that is intended to demonstrate in real-time the efficacy of the “No” Vote Pledge mechanism. This Web site advocates a constitutional amendment to limit spending on Federal general election campaigns, however readers should feel free to substitute any policy or legislative proposition that can be clearly understood by voters in a “No” Vote Pledge framework. (Full disclosure: the www.amendment-28.com homepage includes a link to a related Web site that promotes the author’s novel The 28th Amendment, which is a fictional account of a future effort to enact the same.)

The remainder of this essay describes the "No" Vote Pledge (NVP) mechanism from two related perspectives: How It Works, and Why It Works.

How It Works

A “No” Vote Pledge (“NVP”) is a voter’s promise to NOT vote for any candidate who doesn’t support a clearly defined political option. For example, at the 28th Amendment Web site, the NVP proposition is:

“I am a registered voter, and I pledge that I will not vote for any candidate for Federal office (Congressman, Senator, President) who does not support the enactment of the 28th Amendment. As an early supporter of this initiative, I understand that my pledge will not take effect (and I will not be bound by it) until the total number of pledges recorded at this Web site exceeds five (5) million, or until twenty-five US Senators have stated for the record their position with respect to the Amendment – whichever comes first.”

A “No” Vote Pledge Campaign is a Web-based initiative to solicit NVP’s from voters with respect to a specific issue.

When a voter pledges a “No” vote on a specific issue, the voter is saying the issue is so important, it outweighs everything else a candidate might have to offer (if you’re opposed to Proposition X, I won’t vote for you--period.) The all-or-nothing nature of the commitment implies that only the most crucial and fundamental issues will emerge as viable NVP Campaigns (cf. Why It Works below).

As the pledges add up, the Web site displays the totals by electoral jurisdiction for all to see -- particularly campaigning politicians and their entourages of consultants and advisors, who will be able to easily track how many votes they'll lose if they don’t support the Campaign’s proposition.

When a “No” Vote Pledge campaign succeeds in attracting a visible majority of voters in a given jurisdiction, it says to the politicians of that jurisdiction: make this happen, or leave office (don't even bother running in your next election; voters have committed in advance to remove you).

The effect of a successful NVP Campaign would be to restore control of specific, crucial issues directly to the electorate, bypassing completely the filtering, dilution and manipulation of issues by political parties and politicians, who are burdened with agendas set largely by their campaign contributors.

Why It Works

Barriers to Launch – There are very few obstacles an individual, or a group of individuals, will encounter when starting a NVP Campaign. All that's needed is a clearly worded proposition that can be framed in the required double-negative form, and a Web site to promote the issue and collect pledges.
- Because a pledge to vote "No" is not an actual vote (it’s a promise to vote a certain way in a future election) voters can express themselves at any time on an issue that is of supreme importance to them, without waiting for an election or for politicians to take up the cause.
- NVP Campaigns require no sanction from any authority, so there is no bureaucratic or legal barrier to launch or to participation.
- Web site visitors who want to participate but are not registered voters will be linked to the appropriate voter registration portal for their jurisdiction via postal code. This linkage has the dual effect of bolstering the NVP initiative and at the same time promoting enfranchisement in the established, proprietary democratic system, which is a pre-requisite to effecting any fundamental change in our traditional, closed-source democratic institutions.
- NVP Campaigns do not challenge the legitimacy of our established democratic mechanisms, nor seek to replace them, nor is any change required in existing institutions in order for NVP Campaigns to be effective. They can be launched at any time without regard to election cycles or other factors dictated by the existing proprietary democracy. Rushkoff, op. cit., p. 63:

“ . . . we are not about to enter a phase of revolution, but one of renaissance. We are heading not towards a toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes, but towards their reinvention in a new, participatory context.”

Barriers to Success
While it may be relatively easy to launch a NVP Campaign, only a select few will achieve their goal (i.e. enactment or fulfillment of the campaign’s proposition). This is because the NVP mechanism itself has certain inherent qualities that limit the number of viable NVP campaign issues:
- Pledging one’s vote in a future election based on a single issue is an extreme action that will only be taken by voters for whom the issue is of comparably extreme importance. This has the effect of limiting viable NVP Campaigns to a small number of issues that people can feel very passionate about.
- Additionally, in order for a NVP Campaign to succeed, it needs to attract a visible majority of voters within a given jurisdiction, so the issue needs to be one that has the potential to attract very broad (usually bi-partisan) support.

Although the universe of NVP-viable issues must certainly be small, it does exist. The constitutional amendment proposed herein is intended as an example of an issue/proposition that could attract passionate, bi-partisan support. Who among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents really believes that our democracy is best served by a system that leads elected officials to spend most of their time and energy raising money for their next election, and makes them beholden to those who fund their campaigns? Who thinks that our hard earned tax dollars, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every year, should be re-directed through pork barrel legislation into the pockets of incumbent politicians' largest campaign contributors? One may question (in a separate polemic) whether or not the amendment proposed at www.amendment-28.com is the best remedy for our broken campaign finance system; here it is presented as an example of an initiative that could potentially attract passionate support across traditional partisan lines.

Not all NVP Campaigns need be phrased as constitutional amendments, nor even as legislation. For example:

“I am a registered voter, and I pledge to NOT vote for any candidate for Federal office (Congressman, Senator, or President) who voted in favor of the Congressional Resolution authorizing the Second Iraq War.”

Notwithstanding this initiative’s populist tone (tag line: No Child Sent to a Phony Front), it is cited as an example of an initiative whose potential success as an NVP Campaign might be corroborated by recent opinion polling and actual election trends. It also provides an example of a NVP campaign that could – if successful – have a major impact on our traditional closed-source power structure.

Ultimately, once a viable issue has been identified, the NVP Campaign advocating that issue will still face the same challenges that other political initiatives face: building public recognition and awareness for the issue, lobbying for official endorsement and support, fundraising to support these efforts, etc. While these barriers are certainly present for all such efforts, NVP campaigns have the potential to benefit from their open-source nature – exploiting the emergent and participatory (i.e. viral) properties of the Internet to achieve critical mass far more quickly than traditional initiatives of this type. For example, in today’s interactive mediascape, an endorsement of the 28th Amendment by an existing on-line community (www.moveon.org, www.democraticunderground.com) could lead to a very fast accumulation of critical mass. Fueled by publicity gained through established mass media (entertainers and public personalities are not in the least shy about using their platforms to advocate causes they feel passionate about), it’s plausible that a campaign could build the necessary critical mass in a matter of months.

Like a physicist who deduces from observable data the necessary existence of an as-yet undiscovered particle, Rushkoff (op. cit. p.61) that “An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us, or allow us, to confront the issues of our time more directly.” Five years later the NVP concept, as described herein, conforms seamlessly with this model, offering in function exactly what Rushkoff described in theory. It’s too soon to know if a NVP campaign can actually produce a change in policy (or law), however if it does it would appear to validate Rushkoff’s prediction ver batim.

Start-Up
Especially considering the nature of the commitment being sought, prospective participants may be reluctant to commit themselves to a NVP Campaign in its early stages if there are no other (or few other) voters who have already signed on. This phenomenon is common to every start-up enterprise; consider one’s natural reluctance to eat in a restaurant that has no other patrons. In an effort to address this issue and encourage early participation, NVP Campaigns can be structured (as with the 28th Amendment) to make voter pledges contingent upon the attainment of a pre-defined level of public support.

Validation
The effectiveness of NVP Campaigns will also depend on (among other things) a perception by voters and politicians that the pledges recorded at the Campaign Web sites are valid, and that the voters will fulfill their pledges as committed.

As currently envisioned, NVP Campaigns would function on a partial honor system. Visitors to a NVP Web site who simply state that they are registered to vote will be able to pledge their vote under the terms of the proposition (standard CAPTCHA methods will be employed to prevent massive, fraudulent registrations). To assure the integrity of a Web site’s reported pledges, the NVP Campaign would organize a regimen of regular sampling verification, in which one of every X number of pledges would be manually validated by comparison with voter registration rolls. Using consistent and transparent sampling techniques, the integrity of the Web site’s data can be assured within a relatively small margin of error. Should the sampling reveal a higher rate of fraudulent participation that desired, the frequency of sampling can be increased until the desired standard is met.

With respect to the issue of whether voters will ultimately honor their pledges, this question can only be resolved by events; certainly there is no way to compel voters to fulfill their pledges, nor to monitor individual voter actions. However, when the first NVP Campaign that achieves critical mass begins to cost dissenting candidates their elections, that precedent alone should enhance the potency (and voter appeal) of future NVP campaigns.

Conclusion

If NVP Campaigns did ultimately succeed in empowering the electorate to assert direct control over specific issues, how might that impact our existing democratic institutions? What would the political landscape look like upon the emergence of this open-source democracy?

This author envisions a new type of issues-only political party (IOP), one that would not ordinarily sponsor or draft candidates to run in traditional closed-source elections. An IOP’s mission and modus operandi would be to identify potentially successful "No" Vote Pledge campaigns and to promote those Campaigns on the Party's Web site and through other means.

One might speculate that in an initial period of experimentation, the traditional political parties will launch NVP Web sites of their own, touting propositions that adhere to their own party line. These NVP Campaigns are unlikely to succeed, however, if the issues they embrace cannot draw broad, passionate and bi-partisan support. For example, a pro-life proposition might attract millions of No Vote pledges, but unlikely a sufficient number to influence an election.

Successful IOP’s will therefore be those that can identify and promote winnable NVP campaigns. These IOP’s will derive substantial political power from their ability to reliably influence the outcome of traditional (closed-source) elections. As limited as the number of viable NVP issues may be, conceivably there may only be room in the democratic marketplace for one such issues-only party. The novelty of the concept itself may result in a “branding” for the first IOP to launch a successful NVP effort, and subsequent NVP’s may benefit from the critical mass already gained in the first successful campaign.

Just as the function of IOP’s would be fundamentally different than that of traditional, candidate-oriented parties, so would their membership and governance. Following an open-source model, an IOP party member might be anyone who pledges his/her vote in support of at least one of the party’s NVP propositions. These party members could then elect a group of peers to a Campaign Committee that would be responsible for identifying and drafting the party’s NVP campaigns (the equivalent of a Platform Committee in a traditional political party), and another group of peers to manage the affairs of the party (Web site, fundraising, lobbying, etc.).

Such activities would of course take place in their own open-source realm, and the traditional political parties would continue, as they always have, to compete in the closed-source realm of elections and constitutional governance. The two systems would function side-by-side, each posing no direct threat or competition to the other, and individuals could easily participate in both. Change would occur through the indirect influence of the open-source system over traditional elections, and in cases like the 28th Amendment, through the actual re-writing of the law. Rushkoff, op. cit. p. 58: “The implementation of an open source democracy will require us to dig deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth it in the new context of our networked reality.”

Only future events can prove or disprove the validity of the NVP concept. Will the famous (and infamous) Joe Average, the typical American whose attention span has dwindled to the length of a USA Today article, be able to embrace a totally new democratic medium, a form of derivative voting, and use it to effect fundamental changes in our nation’s governance? Rushkoff (op. cit. p. 64-65; 59), for one, seems optimistic:
“The new transparency offered by the interactive mediaspace . . . makes information available to those who never had access to it before. Access to media technology empowers those same people to discuss how they might want to change the status quo. Finally, networking technologies allow for online collaboration in the implementation of new models . . .. In a sense, the people are becoming a new breed of wonk, capable of engaging with government and power structures in an entirely new fashion.“This marks a profound shift in our relationship to law and governance. We move from simply following the law to understanding the law, to actually feeling capable of writing the law: adhering to the map, to understanding the map, to drawing our own. At the very least, we are aware that the choices made on our behalf have the ability to shape our future reality and that these choices are not ordained but implemented by people just like us.”

I propose a new media portrait of the U.S., complete with an average sample of American voters. This sample group of voters will be given weekly question and answer sessions with experts on the major issues, and then put into online deliberation, in small, mixed groups.

Our ongoing representative model of informed democracy would then be available as a reference point for the country as a whole.

The concept is based on the political scientist James Fishkin's work in deliberative democracy. The goal is a permanent reference website where regular Americans encounter each other (and reality) and discuss issues -- a polling group that reflects the electorate.

For a visual example, see this site from the cable channel USA Network:
http://characters.usanetwork.com/portal/map.html

Now, picture the USA Network map portal above, but about public opinion.
Choose two topics, climate change and the economy, that make for excellent pilot issues.
Provide weekly Q and A's with experts. Engage the participants (about 100 total, chosen to reflect the nation) in small online chat groups (juries), each group diversified geographically and demographically.

Fishkin's methods are well-tested in the real world. The key concept here is to have them applied to a continuous, Wikipedia type desktop resource. Aside from the direct impact on the political system, the research project would be an tremendous asset to high school and college classes: a window into the political mechanics of the U.S.

Finance the project through a CSPAN-like arrangement with broadband suppliers, with public donations, and/or with certain large search engines.

Pull highlights of the conversation among the juries out for a potential broadcast spinoff, and make the rest available through a web design like the USA Network portal. (A related example of online video dialogue is bloggingheads.tv.)

The growth in video tools for opinion and debate show the potential for creating citizen dialogue around a national project; but instead of pundits, we aim to create an MRI image of the idealized democratic society, with roles played by average Americans.

Our project would also address the question: what is the future of journalism, as technology changes? We will create a proxy audience in ideal conditions for learning, and with access to experts. The information discussed (climate, the economy) will be given a platform and context that can help make it accessible, understandable, and persuasive to the general public.

Also important is the demonstration effect itself -- for policy makers and for the public -- this is what a group of ordinary Americans would believe if they had the chance to learn from experts and then talk about what they've learned in free and open dialogue.

A note of caution about the various optimistic technology solutions presented in the writer's guidelines, and in some essays here. Without deliberation, tech-enabled direct democracy may be worse than the present form.

For instance: if one holds the belief that evolution is science (just like the development of the internet), the cold fact that only about 28% of Americans literally believe in evolution should give pause to the idea of American Idol-style voting, at least on school curricula.

Before jumping on the idea of imposing a ruthless online transparency on one's politicians, one should also consider the risks: fewer chances for representatives to meet in private and 'horse trade' to make a deal across party lines that is a net positive. Fewer chances for politicians to escape the scrutiny of lobbyists, or to accede to the passage of a bill without leaving their fingerprints on it. Occasional privacy can be essential to assuring political survival, for those from polarized voting districts who would do good for the nation but need to escape the wrath of pressure groups or lobbyists.

Total transparency has the potential to lead to more polarization, and not less. Voters with extreme views, and single issue voters, often speak loudest. Disenfranchised groups have no voice. In a world of transparency then, those without voice -- like the poor -- may lose any access -- depending as they do on the occasional good will of politicians who work on their behalf, even though the poor don't vote in numbers. (Campaign finance reform, and transparency in campaign finance, seems a simpler and safer step towards better governance.)

Re-reading Federalist 10, three or four times, may be good preparation to re-booting America. The Founding Fathers thought through many of these issues so well, and so carefully, it is hard to improve on their observations and predictions about human nature.

And for thoughts on polarization, and the intellectual complicity in that, it's worthwhile reading Susan Jacoby, from 4/20 in the LA Times, or David Brooks, 4/29 in the NY Times.

Democracy is not technical, it is deeply social. It's based on consent, and consent is based on trust -- and on a shared reality. Simply regaining a sense of a shared reality is the first step towards rebooting America.

In reading these comments, I suddenly realized even this forum wasn't utilizing the most efficient structure to actually move the "best" idea forward, i.e., placing comments with the highest votes first.

Granted, this may be a small point to some, but for those who see focusing the millions of voices of the Internet into a coherent representation of the "Wisdom of the Crowd", it's elemental.

As for my own "killer app." in this regard; well, you'll just have to read further down the list.

ex animo
davidfarrar

Fixing the constitution may take years, the first step towards doing it would involve thinking about major groups of citizens and how they feel about the constitution. Racism is still a problem in today’s modern society. Laws against racism are still loosely defined and badly enforced in 2008. People still don’t understand the whole idea of the bill of rights. The 1st amendment guarantees freedom of religion, yet the phrase “ in God we trust” is still on our money as an unpleasant reminder that we do not accept you if you’re not Christian. The conservatives of today continue to create principles of intolerance despite our overly popular statement of being a “free country”. The whole idea of making life fair for everyone is disintegrating before us. Our ever changing policies towards different minority groups makes the U.S. seem like a deceptive nation. We only concern ourselves with our problems in foreign nations and forget to address the problems of foreign people in our very own nation. One reason that the minorities treated bad in this nation is because of the way that the media portrays them. Saying that every middle-eastern person is a Muslim with such strong pride for their nation that they would go as far as killing innocent people in a suicide bombing would be stretching the truth. Somehow that’s exactly what most Americans seem to think. The national awareness of problems such as these is quite low and there are often some people who reject it altogether. Voices that are trying to speak out against problems like these are often silenced or mocked. America is no longer a black-oppressing, Indian-killing, immigrant-fearing, fundamentalist nation; at least it’s not supposed to be. If America is to become what it says it is; its people should learn to not be hateful. It is better to be a united society of different types of people to be many separate societies hating each other. Our principles need to match our laws so that we may not confuse any visitors or neighbors.

The ever decreasing standards of education contribute to quite a few of America’s problems. The teachers of today often do not try to teach well or give children a thick pack of papers that merely keeps them busy. Teachers are too concerned about their personal life to care about the students’ education. The teachers actually create a situation in which a student can go through a whole course and not learn anything, but still pass. The dumb people feel like they don’t have to try anymore because they have class in which they can slack off. Rather than striving to get smarter, they get stuck in a steep intellectual crater. Many countries around the world have less money to spend on education, yet they still get a better education in their supposedly third world countries than they would in America. Many foreign people with a previous education in their country become the “smart kid” in their class once they learn English. This is a sign that teachers need to quit giving every single kid the easy way out. How will we have a democracy if the citizens can not understand to concept?

Hispanics are regarded as a major problem when it comes to immigration. People act as if Hispanics are the only people ever to have immigrated to the U.S. Many people came way before the Hispanics. The majority of the ancestry in America is actually German which is nothing like the culture of the U.S. People complain about these illegal, unassimilated people entering the country, they don’t realize that they just have to put up with one generation of illegal, unassimilated people in this nation. All people are born to different races, would you like it if you were not American and someone denied your of your rights? If I was to ask an American why they hated illegal immigrants, I would only get illogical, incoherent, or nonfactual answers. Peoples’ only hate towards any person usually starts with false ideas that unjustly rank different types of people to lower levels in society. We need to give illegals a chance to become legal and integrate into our society. Another problem with illegal immigration is that Americans make such a big deal about an immigrant being illegal, yet they completely ignore the fact that there are many foreign-born citizens in the U.S. These citizens are just as foreign in the eyes of many Americans. If you don’t care if someone is a citizen, why care if they are illegal or not? The whole idea of becoming a citizen means equal treatment. To a lot of foreign-born citizens, however, it doesn’t seem to work that way in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Skin colors seem to play a bigger role than actual quality of character in certain parts of the United States even today. People begin to formulate inaccurate characteristics about you, and the only thing you did wrong was being a certain race. We should try to understand and cavort with foreign-born citizens, they are our people now. Why must we pretend as if we are being fair and just, when we know how much ignorance plays a part in the judgment of our very own citizens?

The way in which we “help” the middle-east is quite unnecessary. It would probably be better for everyone if we don’t help them. The middle-eastern people don’t like us very much that’s why we need to really consider leaving them alone. The reason they don’t like us is because America thinks that they have the right to go into other people’s territories and tell them what to do. The war in Iraq is such a waste of time and we keep coming up with excuses to continue fighting. The only thing we’re really fighting for now is the deaths of our soldiers.

False information circulates through the media to quickly to stop it from infecting the weak minds of the ignorant. A democracy is a not a democracy if it is founded upon inaccurate information. People treat politicians as if they were pop culture icons and they could spread all the rumors about them. The power of ruining someone’s career lies within just about any person who has the right amount of hate. The social reputation of a person seems to define them more than the actual governing skills of that person. Making people think Obama is a Muslim could cost him his presidency. The best way to stop this from happening is to stop believing in the lies and start checking the facts.

The House of Representatives should expand to make room for a new at-large delegation: the Delegation for Future Interests (DFI). These seats will be restricted to scientists and people under 35. The representatives will be elected by a nation-wide vote with no geographic apportionment (afterall, the candidates for these jobs will be familiar with the decreasing relevance of geography). The members of this delegation will have equal status with all other members of the House, including voting rights and committee membership.

The DFI will bring something new to Congress: ample representation of future concerns. Congress has always been a reactive body, responding to what happened yesterday instead of foreseeing tomorrow's problems. Its members are unfamiliar with new technologies and the problems they present. It shows in the demographics: Of our 100 senators, 56 are lawyers. Nineteen are lifelong politicians with little other professional or research experience. Zero senators have science doctorates; only four congressmen do. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the current Congress might be the oldest ever: of 537 members, eight are under 35. We trust this body to keep our democracy up-to-date. We shouldn't.

Our population includes people much better suited than your average politician to keep democracy in touch with the future: scientists engaged with emerging technologies that will define how we communicate and work in the future, and the young people eager to embrace, understand, and challenge these technologies. Just as seasoned lawyers bring historical perspective to our legal code, scientists and young people could bring foresight. Just as our armed forces are run by military experts, and our economy is regulated by economists, so should our science policies be guided at the highest levels by those with expertise.

Creating the DFI is a low-tech response to an essay prompt that is laden with high-tech overtones. Opportunities abound for Web-based citizen engagement platforms and crowdsourced government corruption discovery wizards. But no matter what widget we create, and no matter how we customize the Constitution for today's Internet, three things will certainly happen in the next 100 years:

• Both the widget and the Constitutional changes will become obsolete;
• One or two more technological revolutions will pass us by; and
• Those revolutions will pose new challenges to our democracy, challenges that our generation will never foresee. Challenges that will require their own essay contests.

In short, no Net-centric solution to our problems will last long. Even if such a solution is an extraordinary success, the chances are good that it will be short-lived: our understanding of the Internet undergoes a radical shift at least once every election cycle. High-tech solutions may sound sophisticated, but they are ultimately limited by their focus on the Internet. My DFI proposal may not make for the most exciting reading. But it is adaptable beyond the current definition of the Internet. When today's problems are long gone, the DFI will still be relevant.

That is what we must seek when changing our democracy: staying power. Major changes to a democratic system take decades to root themselves into the public consciousness. By then, the nation may have forgotten what inspired the changes in the first place. Our job is to make sure that when that day comes, our changes are still relevant.

"How would you redesign American democracy for the Internet age?" My solution may not be custom-built FOR the Internet, but it is certainly inspired by it. The Internet has taught me a lesson: when challenged by a new technology, our democracy convulses for a few years. (It hasn't yet taught me what happens after that.) If given one redesign opportunity, we should heed that lesson and try to solve the root of the problem: a lack of foresight by our leaders. Technical solutions can certainly help; that's why I spend most days trying to hack American politics. But the DFI will help us not only through today's challenges (Task #1: fund the projects proposed by other Reboot essayists), but tomorrow's as well. Let's reboot for the future, not just for the Internet.

While citizens, companies, and advocacy groups are developing innovative approaches to utilize the internet, our government is woefully behind the times. When it comes to technology, most politicians couldn’t google their way out of a paper bag. But information technology has the potential to transform the way we do politics, and take it out of the hands of lobbyists and bureaucrats by allowing the public a greater voice. Here are three immediate proposals for how to do this: a national suggestion, domain democracy, and the Changing America Project.

1. The National Suggestion Box
Most companies and organizations have an easy way for the public to offer them ideas and complaints online. Don’t bother trying to find this in most government agencies. What’s needed is an ombudsperson, a kind of public editor for the government, who can read what citizens have to say and help them address complaints that affect larger government policies. It’s easy to do: simply create a national suggestion box online, where the public can offer suggestions for improving government.

But the National Suggestion Box shouldn’t be a one-way street. A better model is to have volunteers sift through ideas to remove the obviously bad ones, and then post the relevant ideas on a website, allowing the public to rate these ideas and choose their favorite ones. A special section of “expert” ideas would allow established thinkers more direct access for their ideas to the public and the government.

2. Domain Democracy

Sadly, the .gov domain names are rarely ever used to help guide the public to government websites. Type in veterans.gov, veteran.gov, or vet.gov, and you get nothing. Type in technology.gov, and you’ll get an outdated website of an agency that’s been abolished. A few agencies actually make good use of the .gov domain name, such as health.gov, but expanding .gov domain names is just about the easiest thing the federal government to improve access to democracy. Many people who use search engines may find corporate websites rather than government sources of information. Imagine if typing in simple keywords with the .gov domain could lead you directly to the relevant government websites. The .gov domain names are even more useful to find state government resources, which are currently difficult to find. But the combination of keywords with postal abbreviations could allow any state website to be immediately accessible (for example, edil.gov or iled.gov or various other combinations would take you to the Illinois Department of Education website directly).

Another important reform would be to create publicnotices.gov, where all of the public notices across the country can be listed in a searchable format and eliminate the need for expensive publication in newspapers which waste paper and are widely ignored.

3. The Changing America Project

Even better than increasing access to the federal government would be enhancing the public’s ability to influence government. The Changing America Project aims to hold a series of diverse bipartisan policy discussions at colleges and nonprofit organizations around the country in the month following the November 4, 2008 elections, providing advice to the next president and the next Congress on what policies should be adopted to improve the federal government.

Because both parties are fixated with the November elections, and then focused on staffing the next administration, political insiders and consultants often formulate the policies for a new Congress and a new President, and the public rarely engages in the creation of these policies. The project would feature reporters, politicians, activists, students, and professors on stage together in panels discussing ideas about what government can do to change policies and solve problems.

The events could be as simple as one panel of speakers or as extensive as a full-day conference, depending on the goal of the campus or organization organizers. The goal is to broadcast the project events on C-SPAN and online, and to have summaries of the best ideas presented (both at the events and online) made available to the next administration and developed into a book to be published in early 2009.

Policy recommendations would include ideas for what should be done in the first 100 days of the next administration and Congress, along with long-term goals to be pursued over the next two years. The project would also include a website where the public and experts could recommend good ideas for the next administration, as an early version of the National Suggestion Box.

These three simple reforms–the National Suggestion Box, Domain Democracy, and the Changing America Project–would utilize technology to help transform the way government works. Of course, technology alone cannot solve all of our problems and fix all of our flawed policies. Without the willingness of government leaders to pay attention to these ideas, nothing will improve. But for the first time, the internet allows the public easy access to public policy debates and a way to propose new ideas. We only need to put these ideas into action and we will see the potential of reforming government put in the public’s hands.

John K. Wilson is the author of “Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest," obamapolitics.com.

Never before in the history of the world has it been possible for elected representatives to hear the voices of their constituents simultaneously and instantaneously across great distances. The Internet enables this. Today, for the first time in a modern nation, the citizen can be genuinely represented in the process of legislation.

But does your federal representative consult you before she casts her vote on bills and resolutions? Does she ask your opinion on laws that will affect you and the entire nation? For most of us, the answer is “No.”

However, does your representative talk to some citizens, maybe friends of his, as well as corporate lobbyists? We know he does. He is busy talking to somebody, just not to us. So why does he consult with those few and not with me or you?

The answer used to be that it was a matter of logistics—it was impossible to solicit the opinion of each constituent in every single district. But that’s not true anymore, not since the advent of the Internet.

Today, U.S. Representatives can easily ask constituents for their opinions on every bill and resolution. Now they can know how their districts want them to vote on every piece of law proposed. Electronically publishing the collective wish of the populace for each House bill would result in the “digital” will of the people.

Simply put, the digital will of the people is the measurement of our sentiment--a simple Yea or Nay--regarding proposed legislation. Let us use the Internet to render the will of the people visible, and let us give ourselves a voice in our own politics. Here is how it would work.

Each district of Congress would have its own web page at www.house.gov. Citizens would be invited to register for representation with their district, just as they are invited to register to vote now. When bills are scheduled for a vote in the House, citizens would receive an email with a simple poll asking them to indicate their preference with a Yes or No regarding any bills being proposed.

With an automatic tally of Yeas and Nays, each representative would know what her constituents want her to do and say. Aggregating the counts of all the districts across the country would create a national figure for each bill, allowing everyone first to see the collective wish of the people. Then, later, we could compare it to the actual vote in the House. For example:

Poll results for H.R. 103 Universal Health Care Act
the People: Yea (68% vs. 32%)
the House: Nay (49% vs. 51%)

To be effective, the digital will of the people would have to be official—it should be a governmental tool and bear the government’s imprimatur. Government sponsorship and implementation of the tool would ensure the best possible conditions for the integration of citizens and their representatives. The same tool managed by the people themselves would be ineffective.

To be clear, we the people want a voice, not a vote. Representatives need not heed the popular will once it does become visible; they would retain what amounts to veto power over the will of the people. The digital will can improve representative democracy, not by making it direct, but by requiring direct dialogue—a direct connect between citizens and their representatives.

Of course, representative government is alive and well. However, the entities being represented are corporations and not average citizens. Corporations, through lobbyists, have our representatives’ ears. Meanwhile, we the people are voiceless—what we feel, nobody hears. Corporations are not the bad guys; the system is. They are merely gaming the system as it exists.

The opportunity to involve the citizen in the process of legislation has existed since the Internet achieved widespread reach, since the year 2000 at least. That the government has not seized or acted on the opportunity in eight years should make us believe that it needs some prodding from you and me, i.e., the people—We.

Pablo del Real is the founder of Auroras Voice, a not-for-profit organization devoted to vesting American citizens with legitimate political power. The above essay is adapted from his book P-poll: are you happy now?

By Theodore McCombs & Dr. Kirstie L. Bellman

It is no great coincidence that American democracy arose only a few decades after Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encylopédie. Both projects attempted to achieve Enlightenment ideas—rational truth, rational government—and both employed highly educated, property-owning white men to do it. But the Internet age has changed both democracy and encyclopedias irrevocably.

The Founding Father’s original plan for democracy used a federalist framework: local communities control local matters, and elect representatives to defend their interests before a national Congress controlling national matters. But the advent of trains, planes, and the information superhighway have exacerbated a problem American law has struggled with for almost a century now, the increasing problem of interconnectivity. What is a local matter now? If a farm in Nebraska uses a Texas-made pesticide that poisons a produce consumer in Arizona—which state gets to regulate the pesticide? Which court has jurisdiction over the ensuing lawsuit? The power and predicament of interconnectivity is that local actions have global effects, a dilemma at the core of today’s challenges, from global terrorism to global warming.

With the Internet, not only are people more interconnected through actions and consequences, but people can belong to multiple communities at once. Say an Iranian girl joins a Canadian organization’s online support group, dates an American friend over Myspace, and donates to U.K.-based Amnesty International. We can guess which community exerts authority over her rights and actions, but which community should?

Furthermore, the Internet fundamentally changes the relationship between a community and its elected representative. In the 1780s, direct democracy was out of the question. How could one corral millions of citizens into an assembly hall to vote on bills? How could one distribute information and arguments so that all 2.7 million Americans could make an educated choice, and how could one ensure that they vote responsibly? Instead, the Framers asked local communities to select a few trusted members to make these educated, responsible choices for them. Today, the Internet enables all Americans to educate themselves and to voice their opinions, and we are no longer content to let our elected representatives make all the decisions for us. We increasingly vote for candidates because they agree with decisions we have already made. I don’t want my senator to decide in her best conscience how to vote on the war or the environment; I want her to vote my way.

A similar impatience for delegation has revolutionized the encyclopedia. Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that all Internet users can edit and write, represents a democratization of expertise. No longer content to let a Britannica-hired zoologist tell us what a ringtail possum is, we have taken matters into our own hands. Does this mean that the next step for American democracy is to reclaim the legislative power from our legislators? Should we let the public vote online on bills? Wiki-democracy?

We hope not. If the only reasons for representative democracy were scale and access to information, then the Internet’s advent might justify direct democracy. But the Framers didn’t trust the average American to educate himself and make responsible decisions, nor did they trust the welfare of minorities in the hands of a majority. Instead, they relied on the elected representatives to inform themselves, study the arguments, and decide in the best interests of their communities.

A brief glimpse at California’s disastrous initiative system will vindicate the Framers’ decision. Every two years, the California ballot is bloated with initiatives from public finance to transportation, from civil rights to industry regulation. The airwaves scream with misinformation paid for by the multi-million dollar campaigns of pharmaceutical companies, unions, and Public Action Committees. Imagine if this were every bill in the legislature. Imagine if all one was required to do to decide a telecommunications deregulation bill were to click a button on one’s browser. Imagine American Idol America.

So why does Wikipedia work so well? Certainly, its articles are vulnerable to skewed information by interested parties (the neutrality of the “Palestinian territories” article will be disputed for a long, long time), and disparate attention is given to different issues (which explains why Battlestar Galactica’s entry is much longer than the article on ringtail possums). But Wikipedia has slowly accumulated a compendium of largely accurate, useful articles through the additions and corrections of the community. Its success owes a great deal to its combination of low stakes and high impact. The stakes are low enough to avoid the attention and capture of big-money interests, yet its impact as a free, informative resource is enormous. More fundamentally, there is something deeply inspiring about employing the collective resources of thousands of people to develop a joint intellectual project.

There is something happening with the Internet and democracy today that is also inspiring. Constituents use email campaigns and online petitions to sway governments around the world. Ordinary people raise millions of dollars together to support their candidates, send money to UN soldiers in Darfur, or fund New Orleans’ green reconstruction. This presidential primary season has seen a flood of user-generated campaign material. And when a politician makes a wrong or inconsistent statement, the blogs catch it, post it, and spread it across the web. There is a new potential for feedback and monitoring by this Internet-age electorate.

This potential emphasizes the difference between encouraging, enabling, and enforcing. For example, a city ordinance can tell people to recycle, provide convenient recycling bins, or it can throw them in jail for not recycling. The promise of the Internet-age electorate lies in these first two, but not in the third. The Internet allows the American public to influence and empower their lawmakers in unprecedented ways, but the Framers rightly rejected any scenario where a population can directly force others to act a certain way. The question is how today’s electorate can direct and empower their lawmakers through the Internet’s improved information and monitoring.

It is undeniable that a vote today is very different from the votes of 1789, and we are frustrated that yesterday’s political structure has not adequately accommodated this change. I may not be able to force my senator to block a certain bill, but I want to tell her how important that bill is to me, that even if I still vote for her, I like her a whole lot less because of that bill. And I don’t want to send an email that gets read by a staffer on Capitol Hill, tallied, and discarded, if read at all. I want my vote to reflect the granularity of modern political representation.
The Internet is not just a communication medium, but a computational medium as well, and we propose that the next generation of Framers rethink the vote with these opportunities in mind. With today’s computational technologies, we can experiment with voting systems that would have been infeasible in the eighteenth century, such as instant runoff voting, Condorcet voting, or cumulative voting. For example, in a cumulative voting system, I could vote 0.70 McCain, 0.20 Clinton, 0.10 Obama. It’s still “one person, one vote,” but one vote says a lot more. We could also try annotated voting: let’s say I attach a message to my vote: “I am very concerned about lobbying ethics, but I cannot support Mr. Obama’s stance on international trade, so he loses 0.10.” With today’s data-mining technologies, candidates could aggregate millions of voters’ opinions for analysis in a way that exit polls cannot match. Politicians could see the correlation between their constituents’ feedback and their votes. A president could talk about a “mandate” and make sense.

Most importantly, this data would not just be received and interpreted by candidates’ offices, but would be shared with the public. The only hope for the national dialogue we need is to wrest it from the pundits and figure out what our fellow Americans are thinking. Wikipedia provides a model whereby the aggregation of thousands of personalities tends to correct for the inaccuracy, misinformation, or sociopathy of individuals that other web tools (such as message boards) tend to showcase. Similarly, if we ask people to explain their votes and compile this data into a public resource, this aggregate can give a more accurate picture of public discourse than one-on-one exchanges between flamers and trolls. With this interconnected resource, we might better address the challenges of interconnectivity.

The Internet further allows for new experiments in political structure. For example, are there ways to make laws more rapidly revisable (like Wikipedia articles)? Could we structure political communities by issue and interest rather than geography? The opportunities are not endless, but they are real.

Like the Framers and Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the reFramers and the Wikipedists of the twenty-first understand the power of information, and how better information makes for better governance. The Internet is a tool to make information more democratic, to tear down the monopoly on information that well-funded interests, media outlets, and the government claim. So, log on, fellow Americans! It’s high time we talked.

I am not asking you to make a micro-donation to my campaign. I’m not asking you to join my Facebook group. I’m not asking you to submit a YouTube video. I’m not asking you to text me to receive updates. I’m not asking you to read my blog, and I’m definitely not asking you to email this to your friends.

All I want is for you to perform these actions on your own accord and to be educated enough to do so with confidence. Today, the convergence of politics and Internet is a place where technicians who are in touch with all the different ways to use the web to connect people meet with interested parties and campaigns. Their purpose is to bring you into their camp. I have attended panels of the leaders in this space. They talk about how bloggers have become part of campaign press strategies, how quickly speeches can get on YouTube, and who is more popular on social networking sites. But what is always absent in these discussions is a question of whether any of this – all this technology and opportunity – is improving our democracy at its core.

Not to say I don’t appreciate the ability of campaigns to utilize new tools – particularly social networking – to activate new audiences…because I do. A 2008 Pew study finds that 37% of 18-24-year-olds on MySpace and Facebook use the social networking sites to learn about candidates. Furthermore, about 10% of people under age 30 say that they have ‘friended’ candidates online - a number even higher among young registered voters.

So while we may be more connected than ever to campaigns, these technologies have not made us any more informed about the political landscape. “On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago,” concludes a 2007 Pew study. When it comes to electing public officials, all the available mediums have not made important information visible in a critical way. The citizenry is alarmingly uninformed on issues during election season. A 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey found that barely half of respondents could typically identify which presidential candidate (Bush or Kerry) stood for which position across eight major issues…mind you it is a 50-50 chance. What will happen then if we continue to become more connected to political activity, but fail to become any more informed? Thomas Jefferson warned of such a democracy, guided by ignorance. “An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy,” he said.

Notice Jefferson’s choice of words. He does not say an ‘affiliated citizenry’ or an ‘active citizenry,’ but an ‘informed citizenry’ is the foundation of democracy. The root of our concern as people who understand the power of this new global platform called the Internet should be not to lure citizens into our camps. Rather we must connect them with information that will empower democratic decisions. A starkly different path into political life than exists today.

Instead of bringing people into the political process through the explosion of communications technologies available today, and then indoctrinating them with the campaign’s mission, I propose the opposite as a new theory of political change for the 21st century.

Empowered by this model for rethinking civic engagement – I founded a nonprofit called Glassbooth in the summer of 2007. We leverage technology and media to promote our thesis: “Education + Opportunity = Vibrant Democracy.”

We use the Internet because it is two-way: it urges a ‘lean forward’ posture of inquiry and search versus the ‘lean back’ posture found in television and print consumption. Thus, it is a tool for exploration, and in turn, possibility. As educators, this is the characteristic of the technology that we must embrace most tightly. No longer can pedagogy support democracy when we have the tools for exploration. Using the Internet…

…we can reverse the course: Campaign communications, political coverage, your church or community organization. However you used to find your way into politics could not possibly speak to your precise interests and concerns. In contrast, the Internet allows citizens to seek and pinpoint the exact information they need. As Al Gore writes:

“It [the Internet] is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge.
An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.”

…we can network education: The information to support democratic decisions is out there, and if you are connected, it is at your fingertips. It is unbiased, it has integrity, but it is also disparate. Using wikis and searches we can put citizens in touch with fluid, aggregate resources of good and disinterested information.

…we can empower knowledge: You know more. You form opinions not from what you have been told, but from what you have learned. Now what? This marriage of knowledge and opportunity is the crux of our work at Glassbooth and highlights the potential of the Internet. Only after citizens have grown from a place of unbiased education can we begin to plug them into the myriad opportunities that exist for getting involved. Informing citizens not only brings reason back into the process, but it is also the catalyst for action. A League of Women Voters study finds that access to information activates civic life and suggests, “providing more unbiased information about the candidates and their positions would benefit nonvoters and voters alike.” Using the Internet, the whole process is seamless. The link to education is next to the link to get involved. From passive interest turns informed action.

The Framers chose democracy for the United States – and in so doing – made an investment in the power of citizens to make rationale decisions that reflect the interests of their selves and society. It is a relationship of trust. To reinvigorate democracy we must use the Internet to lay foundation – and that is in education first and connection second. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison:

“I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.”

So ask yourself: If Jefferson is right, who is going to inform “them?”

Ian Manheimer is the executive director of Glassbooth - an organization using technology and media to reinvigorate democracy.