A lot of initiatives and ideas are blossoming these days in the scope of eDemocracy. With the advent of recent technological advances, the pervasive use of Internet and social networking in the population and in mainstream media, it has now become mostly a matter of (political?) will to build true tools of eDemocracy.
This post will not describe and theorize what eDemocracy should be; check references at the bottom for that. Rather, it will try to sketch concrete solutions to tackle a recurrent problem : citizens are not given the facts and figures to make their own informed opinion on their representatives' actions, nor can they get their opinions or suggestions to directly reach them. This causes many people to lose interest in political involvement, and - what is worse - makes them receptive to simplistic and misleading messages from a certain class of politicians.
So below are described three concrete solutions (Representatives Tracking, Budget Tracking, Crowd-sourced Proposals) that are technically achievable today, and that would help making eDemocracy (or some flavour of it) a reality, by making us better informed and involved citizens.
1. Representatives History & Tracking
Briefly, this tool should help citizens find information on their political representatives, both in terms of who they are, what are their mandates, what are their past and current actions, and what are their past and present positions regarding specific issues. Ultimately, such a tool should be a repository of material that helps framing political discussions and grounding them in reality.
Concretely, the goal would be to have a platform where :
Briefly, this tool should help citizens find information on their political representatives, both in terms of who they are, what are their mandates, what are their past and current actions, and what are their past and present positions regarding specific issues. Ultimately, such a tool should be a repository of material that helps framing political discussions and grounding them in reality.
Concretely, the goal would be to have a platform where :
- a clear status can be obtained for any political representative (mandates, votes, parliament attendency, personal actions)
- articles, statements and interviews of representatives can be tracked, cross-referenced and kept for permanent reference
- discussions about major or recurrent issues can be tracked, and a clear report of representatives positions can be obtained (with evolution over time)
- political journalists can find reference material to ground their interviews and analyses.
- to be free of any political bias
- who should be authoring ? (even though authoring is limited to referencing external material)
- who should be financing the tool ?
- to provide material that is verified, reliable, unquestionable and cannot be turned down easily
- to be accepted by journalists and political reviewers as a reliable source
2. Budget Tracking
The goal here is to provide a way for any citizen to know where goes every cent of his tax money. That means collating incomes and expenses of administrative entities, and be able to provide a comprehensive and understandable view on that data.
Although it may sound obvious and easy to do, it doesn't exist, and the main challenges to implement it would be:
The goal here is to provide a way for any citizen to know where goes every cent of his tax money. That means collating incomes and expenses of administrative entities, and be able to provide a comprehensive and understandable view on that data.
Although it may sound obvious and easy to do, it doesn't exist, and the main challenges to implement it would be:
- getting the data : although most of it is freely available, it is seldom in a readily exploitable format (and no, pdf is not an exploitable format)
- there's a need for a true open data strategy in our administration, along with publication standards
- to offer a truly usable and intuitive interface. That's the key. Lambda citizens must find answers easily without having to browse obscure csv's or 50dpi scans of printed documents.
3. Participative platform for crowd-sourced proposals
This is the kind of tool that many people are working on already, and is the building block of deliberative eDemocracy : a platform where any citizen can submit ideas, debate on issues and their potential solutions, to end up ideally with a set of elaborated proposals that can be used by political representatives.
The goals is to have a platform where
Please note that the above description does not imply any constraining value for the political representatives : they are free to follow the proposals or not. However, the platform and its outcome should provide a level of quality and relevancy that shields them from being turned down on the account that they would be unrealistic or unargumented.
There mare many challenges to get there :
This is the kind of tool that many people are working on already, and is the building block of deliberative eDemocracy : a platform where any citizen can submit ideas, debate on issues and their potential solutions, to end up ideally with a set of elaborated proposals that can be used by political representatives.
The goals is to have a platform where
- anyone can
- file and track issues
- suggest and argument ideas
- vote for others' issues and ideas
- ideas can emerge (through voting), so as to build a citizens "prioritized action list"
- ultimately, where political representatives can find relevant material to build relevant proposals
Please note that the above description does not imply any constraining value for the political representatives : they are free to follow the proposals or not. However, the platform and its outcome should provide a level of quality and relevancy that shields them from being turned down on the account that they would be unrealistic or unargumented.
There mare many challenges to get there :
- there must be some filtering/moderation, to avoid 'noise' (be it naive irrelevant suggestions, or deliberate pollution to discredit the platform)
- but then, how to choose moderators to avoid political bias ?
- how to avoid e-exclusion ? there are still a lot of citizens that don't have access, or don't have the knowledge to use such a tool. For the platform outcome to be of any value, they cannot be excluded from the process
- municipalities must provide access and training to get everyone who wants it involved
- one person, one vote : there must be a reliable way to ensure that any citizen cannot have multiple accounts on the platform
- make use of electronic ID ? how possible is that outside an official administrative website?
- make it popular : there is a critical mass to reach in terms of citizens participation, to achieve credibility in the eyes of the political world
There are remaining questions to be able to start the work, though :
- who should host these tools? a political, non-governmental or private entity?
- where's the budget? who would be willing to finance such tools?
- what administrative levels are concerned by such tools ? municipal, regional, national, european ? All i would say.
Related work
- A Belgian platform that aggregates representatives RSS feeds : http://www.agorati.be
- An actual initiative in Bristol, UK : http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/content/Council-Democracy/Consultations/e-democracy.en
- A paper on the goals and challenges of eDemocracy tools : http://www.scribd.com/doc/14390278/Building-a-Path-to-eDemocracy
- Presentation and analysis of eDemocracy models :http://www.coe.int/t/dgap/democracy/Source/EDemocracy/CAHDE%20II/Presentations/Saebo_eDemocracyModelsTools_en.ppt
- http://www.legese.org
- http://pep-net.eu
- http://forums.e-democracy.org
- http://www.edemocracyblog.com
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