Your Own Democracy
Nov 8, 2008 at 08:10AM 11 Comments 
I was born on May 18, 1967, one year and two days after Mao Zedong officially launched the tumultuous, bloody, and destructive Cultural Revolution. My parents fled 6 months after I was born, emigrating to the United States, along with most of my extended family (both sides) including my grandparents and about 10 aunts and uncles and their children who eventually settled in various parts of the U.S. and Canada. (There is an unverified family legend that my dad as a young man fled to Hong Kong across a river using a burlap bag float filled with hundreds of ping pong balls he accumulated over many years having worked in a games parlor in his tiny village in southern China - you can ask him, but he adamantly won't talk about it.)
It has probably taken me well into adulthood to finally and fully appreciate what my family went through and what they sacrificed to flee their homeland to start life anew in a completely alien country. But that's the great United States of America - destination for millions of immigrants from all over the world seeking the "American Dream" (at least as it is spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the unwritten manual of American capitalism) to have the freedom to pursue happiness, liberty, the right to vote, free speech, a fair wage, start a business, choice in education, a house with a garage, color television.
This past week I decided to sit down and concretize some thoughts on how to make democracy more transparent, efficient and participatory. I spent 5 days around the clock developing the designs for a new online platform called YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG, and submitted it to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. It embodies many of the ideas that I have been working on in the capital markets space, and I seek to merge that domain with my passion for politics and economics, as well as my favorite pasttimes of blogging and Facebook. Basically, I think democracy itself needs to be a really kick-ass app shared and "owned" by millions.
To bring this idea to fruition will require very real resources, but in my mind, is realizable today with the right mix of talented people, vision, and commitment to the values of democracy. Upon reflection, the intense work ploughed into this personal design charette is my way of returning the favor to a country that has given my family a good life. I want to help make democracy in this country even better.
>>>[Download the .pdf here] (6.3 MB)<<<
>>>HTML Version<<<
YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG is somewhat inspired by Buckminster Fuller's World Game:
The logic for the use of the word “game” in the title is even more instructive. It says a lot about Fuller's approach to governance and social problem solving. Obviously intended as a very serious tool, Fuller choose to call his vision a “game” because he wanted it seen as something that was accessible to everyone, not just the elite few in the power structure who thought they were running the show. In this sense, it was one of Fuller's more profoundly subversive visions. Fuller wanted a tool that would be accessible to everyone, whose findings would be widely disseminated to the masses through a free press, and which would, through this ground-swell of public vetting and acceptance of solutions to society's problems, ultimately force the political process to move in the direction that the values, imagination and problem solving skills of those playing the democratically open world game dictated.
“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
And inspiration for the name came from my wife Bonnie, who pointed me to this quote:
"But most importantly, I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again." --President-elect Barack Obama, 2008
Thanks to Bonnie Schwartz, Erik Josowitz, David Budworth, Dr. Elizabeth Tunstall, Hal Siegel and others for feedback during this week of latenighters. And thanks to my 2-year old daughter Willow, for whom I am vigilant in ensuring her generation's prosperous and optimistic future.
Please let me know what you think.
[Updated: Some shouts from Jen Bekman's Personism, Hal Siegel's Collapsing Dominant, Ellen Miller from Sunlight Foundation, Alex Kirtland's UsableMarkets, Michael Wiemeyer's Design Writing; Tweets from Tim O'Reilly and Sunlight's Greg Elin; Warm greetings from personaldemocracyforum's Micah Sifry, Participatory Politics Foundation and OpenCongress.org's David Moore, Jennifer Bell from Canada's VisibleGovernment, Meetup.com's Scott Heiferman]
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Reader Comments (11)
Let me know how I can help!
Gong,
Your project -- combining democracy with market mechanisms and making democracy more accessible -- reminds me of the book Predictocracy, by Michael Abramowicz. He suggests that important policy (and legal, and fiscal) decisions could be made using prediction markets, and that we only need to be imaginative in how we apply them. Perhaps worth a read.
The link: http://books.google.com/books?id=RH4XL6557kYC&printsec=frontcover&sig=joJMGRS6Jpt7Y7DJHoXnzO3w4Nw
~alex
thanks a,
book looks good - will look deeply. i thought a lot about PM's in this proposal, backing off somewhat after doing a non-at-all-scientific survey of how the mainstream consumes sentiment data, polling being about 90% of it. i also think PM's are pretty advanced in terms of the technical lingua franca. even my own proposal has some of these issues which i believe can be solved. it is also loosly based on the way equity markets function, and as you know the options market is the PM for equities. it is not hard to imagine options or futures being incorporated in this in parallel as they are in the equities markets. thanks again for the reference. i would like to continue to flesh out this topic further and welcome you to invite others to discuss. thx
Gong,
I hope your idea is what I am imagining it could be.
During this election cycle, I've seen several important topics raised among bloggers, networking sites, etc. with a common hope for action, but no concrete plan of action. Do you intend your site will be an action tool that is monitored by politicians? Is it a real time poll?
I am ready for a site that pulls people with shared vision into a network with strength in numbers.
I'll keep checking in... found out about you via Erik Josowitz...
Kathy Genet (wife of David)
both of us UTSOA '90.
@ jen - thx much - check back in, see whether or not there's any hubbub..
@kathy - thx for writing. it depends on what you imagine it to be...yes, real-time polling. that in of itself has huge value, if you can imagine something that can constantly measure how a population is thinking and feeling about a range of issues. action tool for politicians? many have asked about this - well, if you think about it, any politician is *also* a citizen, so it is possible for them to be part of this and they'll automatically see what's going on. i do intend on designing a politician's view into their specific constituencies, and allowing for 2-way communication. that would be cool, and with the underlying infrastructure described here, trivial to implement. barack's view is essentially the entire thing (!)
please feel free to refer this to the various blogs, networking sites that you mentioned. at this stage, i am just trying to gauge if this has legs. also please see the fine work of sunlightfoundation.org, who is a (the?) leader in the progressive transparency movement.
by the way, i think "strength in numbers" is a pretty cool name for this project as well. :)
best regards to you and david too!
First off - what an amazing piece of work created in 5 days. Almost biblical.
Second, I see the potential as enormous. I had a real rush of excitement as I explored the pages. That said, adoption is everything. Equity depends on numbers.
There are people who will eat this up, and for whom it will be a catalyst or booster, and people who are challenged to manage their bank accounts online, and would never bother engaging.
I wonder how universal the interface/modes of participation can be made.
I also would consider making the (dream) international versions in the personal form, not the polite one:
DEINEEIGENEDEMOKRATIE
TAPROPREDEMOCRATIE
...
If you think of a way in which I can help, please let me know.
Watch out, if this catches on, Obama may ask you to join his government.
Sebastian
Gong-
A great build on what I have always appreciated about you, passion combined with pragmatism resulting in cool tools that feel fun and worthwhile to use. I would suggest that you might investigate the latent gaming aspects of participatory democracy. How might you do a next rev which invites even more people into the process through this channel that you are setting up? (I know that the recent Obama campaign worked the MEDIA angle - eg shrewdly placing ads on major newspaper websites targeting ex-pats like me for example, knowing that the ex-pat vote was worth going after in swing states.)
But I wonder if you can create some sort of immersive democratic experience that marries both the politcal and gaming addictions into one potent cocktail? Sorry if this feels tangential, but this somehow feels like how we will be experiencing politics in our lifetimes - not through rhetoric and data, but through rhetoric and experiential models.
Best,
C-
@cordy,
it does verge on gameness, which if handled deftly, might be a direction worth exploring more fully. i have been heavily influenced by the santa fe institute's samuel bowles, who is an economist/anthropologist developing some awesome positions on the role of altruism in (the history of) society. SFI is a complexity theory think tank, and there is game theory modelling going on there. i should contact bowles and his complexity/game theory cohort to get their take on it.
basically, when you say game, you are talking about incentive design and innovation, an area where my knowledge is admittedly primitive. and in a participatory democracy that is expressed through an interactive system like this, i am sure there is some interesting work to be done. as for a participatory framework - yup. thanks for your comments, cordy. happy birthday to nika! congrats!
Overall, its an impressive concept and an important topic so I applaud you for making the proposal.
The pages all feel extremely data rich but maybe too rich? They start to resemble a trader's dashboard but traders views of financial data are always more complex than those found on consumer sites. I personally would prefer a simpler information display. Dashboards serve a useful purpose but below that, I think the majority of users would prefer a one-issue-at-a-time view that is simple and less dashboard like. The rhythm of rich but complex top-level pages vs. simple and clean (but limited) pages could be a key part of the overall experience.
On presenting the issues...
There are always a ton of propositions on California ballots. It becomes a huge task to first understand the proposition and then evaluate your position. Since the propositions often have misleading descriptions, we spend a lot of time reading the arguments for and against and the rebuttals to each of those. Maybe a feature that allows users to comment on issues and candidates and have their comments voted up or down (similar to Amazon's "was this review helpful to you?" feature would be nice). I could see something like this for evaluating candidates as well.
What if anyone could post a candidate's strength or weakness and then other users could vote those strenghts and weaknesses up or down in importance. I think that would be interesting. This would allow Sarah Palin's wardrobe debacle or Obama's association with Bill Ayers to be added to the debate but then (probably) voted down in importance. It might help surface the most important points to consider when evaluating each candidate. The same thing could be done for candidate platforms so you would have a read out of a user-ranked platform.
I like the map view on page 2 as it might be nice to see what issues are in play across the nation. Something like, "what other states are voting on gay marriage issues in this election.
I was wondering if the points system could be gamed by a group of individuals in favor or against an issue by feigning participation elsewhere on the network in order to accumulate enough points to stack the deck on their issue?
Looking forward to hearing the response from the Buckminster Fuller Institute. I agree with your comments about the World Game and the importance of insights garnered from somethign that's "just a game".
Hi, do you plan to make this application OpenSource (gpl?)?
If so, we might be interested in contributing to it, since we have been building this kind of application for a few years now and may share great ideas to improve both projects. I am also in contact with people with similar goals that can have valuable feedback.
Pls use the email address of this comment to contact me back.
cheers
giovani
Brilliant!
I recall Noam Chomsky suggesting something to this effect in a talk I heard years ago. He was actually dissing the current system of representative democracy in our Republic and suggested that a much better way to do this would require constant polling of everyone about a vast array of issues, all of which we would have to be educated about. he also suggested that companies could be run like this, thereby skirting the need for management at all and distributing the coss of management to the workers who actuallly produce products & services.
I think that this idea could be quickly implemented in small companies & municipalities anywhere in the world. This is a great idea, and I'd love to see how it fleshes out in the Real World.
I'm following you on twitter & will be keeping an eye on you & this awesome idea.
Who'd-a-thunk that the Russians launching sputnik (which led to DARRPA, then to the internet then to social networking) could possibly revolutionize how we apply democracy. OK, maybe I'm thinking too far down the road, but this seems like a helluva idea, and it does, at least, provide something concrete for people to rethink democracy.