Okay, I'm trying to bring together some of my private bipartisan talking, and yesterday's Transparency Caucus, along with exploring networks of trust and reputation. Also, I've learned a lot about identity and accountability in my day job.
I hear both Republicans and Democrats talking about finding a new way to have Americans set the agenda for the forthcoming elections, with a focus on social media/networking, and they're serious.
Tools already exist for this like IdeaScale, pioneered in current Open Government efforts.
The hard part? That's preventing people from stuffing the virtual ballot box, that is, having people pretend to be many people by creating many identities to vote or comment. That's like the old "vote early, vote often" thing, but scalable into very large numbers.
We need to be reasonably confident that people are who they say they are, and they get only one vote.
Here's the deal: we have the tools for large scale agenda setting now, but if we're serious about 'em, we need to make sure that we minimize abuse. We can't fully prevent the problem, but we can reasonably control it using emerging tools. Since this isn't real voting, we can live with a reasonable solution soon, while getting a much better solution later.
There are at least two serious (though imperfect) large scale providers of identity, that do the job well enough for November.
That's Facebook and Google, via the profiles people already have. They really aren't perfect, and there are other providers, (I'd like to hear about them), but these will probably do the job. There are also standards to make profiles interoperate, which should also mean you own your own data.
So, if the online stuff will be seriously used in the elections: I propose that whatever tools are used, that they rely on identity provided by the best systems we have, and as much as possible, we own our own profiles.
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More egregiously, they're the party of 'the line ends after me' and 'us vs. them'.
They'd even vote 'No" on "Yes!"
I think the problem lies in effective scalability. The structure has to be "organic" in nature. If you were to be in a stadium of 100,000 and simply asked for opinions, the result would be a massive cacophony.
As HuffPo has realized, top down large scale moderation is faced will all sorts of challenges. So what about allowing people to build representative groups that are self moderated? When something is said that is out of line, it is up to the group to censor the individual. If the group fails to act, then the larger community can opt to censor that entire group for failing to act responsibly. In this manner individual voices can be heard, there is incentive and self-interest for individuals and groups to maintain civility, and there is no "supreme" moderator.
These groups could be arranged by any or all demographics: political ideology, age, race, gender, race, geography, etc. It could be a live forum for discussion, but also in a sense it could serve an enhanced live poll that could not only deliver feedback, but engage in dialogue.
Let's use what we have, Birth Certificate (only God and Barry don't have one), drivers licenses, voter registration ID's or On-line SSN verification!
Firstspeaker, what you advocate never works. That's basically what happened in 1994, for instance, and the Republican Congress elected dismantled the financial safeguards that soon sabotaged the American economy, and its members took the lead in starting and supporting the Iraq War. Maybe you shouldn't vote at all since you don't want to apply any thought to your vote.
That Republicans don't really WANT to win, as if they did, they wouldn't know what to DO. They don't have answers (surely they would have implemented them during the Bush Administration), so instead their strategy is simply to obstruct to be a nuisance and energize their base, but not really push for a big win in November since they don't have answers to the myriad crises we're facing.
If they truly wanted to win, would they keep Michael Steele in place? It all makes sense to me.
Just sayin'. ;)
Craigslist is a cesspool and its owner now wants to brign the cesspool to our political system. How cool is that.
Anyone who thinks technology is going to solve what are essentially moral and spiritual problems is naive and deluded, as is anyone who thinks that technology is going to elevate a decaying empire.
What has all the computer technology given us? A nation of porn addicts, a nation full of obese and dumb young people who will live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. Computers primarily serve to make the stupidity of the dominant culture more efficient.
I'm genuinely curious. :)
If people choose to use this freedom to find sex or sell themselves as prostitutes, it hardly makes Craig Newmark a pimp. I used craigslist to get a great deal on a used dehumidifier recently, my moral and spiritual condition wasn't much of a factor.
We make a mandatory to ask ID. NO vote is far better than an illegal or duplicate vote.
BUT,
Electronic Voting/Polling would be very helpful to third party candidates, by proving they are viable.
no paper trail, no vote. and make that paper trail observable online in real time, not including the face of the person voting.
While our current system is essentially broken (I support campaign finance reform, getting rid of the electoral college, etc.) , things don't seem to be in place to be able to rely on online voting. Not yet.
If there could be a TRULY reliable media source -- not anything tainted by opinion which is essentially what our media has become, rather than facts -- that would be a huge step in engaging the populace. As it stands, media is like white noise, a distraction.
If there were a way to provide one resource where only facts are provided -- and how to interpret those facts is up to the reader/viewer -- that would be a start. Something different from FactCheck and Snopes We have access to unlimited information nowadays, but too many people don't realize it's often distorted by opinion. CAN we believe information isn't slanted in some way, to further someone's agenda, any longer? Truth in advertising is long gone.
We need to get more facts and truth "out there." No edutainment....just the facts, ma'am. Then the voting process (once the process itself is changed) will have more integrity.