techPresident - Community Counts - Comments

Direct Democracy

Wegerje — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:45:50 -0500

I agree with the trust of your analysis that says the potential of the internet to mediate between us and our politicians is nowhere near met.

I worry that systems of direct democracy may become too burdensome unless further mediated by instant, durable and cascading proxies, another fertile avenue of approach for internet/computer technolgoies.

I look forward to meeting Micah Sifrey Nov 6 at the Al Giordano event.

Jeff Wegerson

support your ideas

cle50000 — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:13:30 -0400

good luck for your project, I like it and therefor linked to it in my blog entry "white house 2.0" http://is.gd/5l6r.

from my own experience in germany it takes a long way to change government and the distance between people and politicans feels to shrink very slowly (if at all) - but it is very encouraging to watch your passion. and I am glad that you mention the need of expertise and traditional media. best clemens, berlin

I think you're miss-reading this

David Colarusso — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:17:27 -0400

Dan, I share your concerns, and you'll notice that in my letter I am very careful to stress the importance of expertise, both in the media and in our public officials. Knee-jerk reactions are always a concern in democracies. Guarding against such "mob rule," is one of the goals behind the separation of powers.

What BigDialog is aiming to do, however, is about asking questions of the President-Elect. If we trust people enough to elect our leaders don't you think we should trust them enough to ask a few questions? If they are, as you worry, the wrong questions, isn't it better for us all to have that explained by the respondent? This isn't just about shaping the discussion it's about growing the number of people who participate and in turn educating us all.

this worries me

dmonasg — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:30:32 -0400

Sorry, but I'm not sure crowd-sourcing is a very good idea for making policy. It's too easy for someone to frame an issue in a way that sounds good, but might lack much wisdom behind it.

One of the questions I saw had to do with banning a certain neurotoxin from light bulbs, etc. Sounds like a no-brainer. But I don't know anything about it. Is this a widespread enough problem to merit government attention? How does it rate in terms of priority relative to other neurotoxins that might be out there? I depend on legislators and their staffs to get smart on these issues. And I fully expect that various issue organizations will devote effort to making their case. But I'm not sure I want to make it easy for hundreds of thousands of uninformed citizens to express their knee-jerk reactions to things. That sounds more like mob justice.

That said, this could be a nice start. But thumbs up/down votes on two-sentence policy proposals or questions are
not a good way to make policy. Their need to be links to other information, collective input to change the phrasing of questions, etc.

Dan Goodman
monazzji.blogspot.com

Rock the Debates

Nancy Hanks — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:14:04 -0400

Another "debate intervention" is a website Rock The Debates http://rockthedebates.org/ which interviewed many candidates during the early primary debates asking if they would debate third party or independent candidates should they win the nomination. The answers were candid and definitely worth taking a look at. This is "citizen journalism" at its best!

Live Fact-Checking and Rating of Candidates

porterbayne — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:04:29 -0400

At Ameritocracy.com, we'll be entering the moderator questions and candidate responses on the fly, and users can fact-check the content live.

It's a quick way to rate Obama and McCain quotes and sound bites for how accurate and relevant they are.

Using SMS - Bringing Soldiers Home

NextNowComm — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:34:47 -0400

Kucinich is using text too, and far more compellingly. Tonight he'll announce an SMS campaign to push for peace as an agenda item.
Americans can voice their opposition to the war by entering the word - PEACE - as a text message and then send it to number 73223 or p-e-a-c-e. The Kucinich campaign will send the messages to President Bush and the Pentagon.

Kucinich’s Text for Peace campaign is the first time text messaging has been used to try and change American policy. So issues have finally hit our mobiles. Text PEACE (73223).

It's all about live

shelbinator — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:13:08 -0400

If you want to peek into the spin room during and after the debate (before you go watch Edwards on CommunityCounts), I'll hopefully be streaming live from my shoulderstrap webcam from about 6:45 onward (till the battery dies 3 hours later).

http://shelbinator.com/2007/07/23/the-cnnyoutube-debate-spin-room-stream/

Looks like the "ask george" approach is catching on...

justin@justinhamilton.org — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:24:42 -0400

Josh,

It would seem that when you asked on July 17th, why John Edwards doesn't have a system, "that unites all of this disparate voter-generated content...á la George Miller's Ask George", that someone in his camp must've been listening to you.

Great job getting all of us to set the bar high and to keep pushing the envelope.

Indaba.org: An Experiment in Collaborative Expression

flywheel — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:07:56 -0400

Along the lines of how to compel candidates to answer voter's questions, I invite you all to have a look at Indaba.org.

Indaba is Zulu for important meeting.

Like CommunityCounts, the Indaba interface can integrate YouTube videos with a chance to vote. But Indaba's elections are more structured. Candidates (or candidate videos) are linked to a ballot. Votes are on the record.

Right now the site does IRV-style straw polls (using ranked, transferable votes), but the goal is to create a venue for massively scalable expression of converging and diverging opinion.

One of things it could do is this:

1) Let participants rank the top 25 issues that concern them.
2) Let each candidate create a video response for each issue.
3) Let the participants rank the responses seperately.

The idea is to give the public a chance to assess their own collective responses to the candidates' answers.

By the way, I hope the people at CommunityCounts will introduce a mechanism way to randomize the display and thereby encourage assesment from across the whole field. Their current system gives too much pride of place to front runners... just like the mainstream media.

Feel free to take a stand at Indaba.org.

http://www.indaba.org

Please check out my Dem/Paul intertube video!

Interevolution — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:51:25 -0400

http://youtube.com/watch?v=lRQTcQ13uKY

NOTICE: George W. Bush has issued Executive Orders allowing the National Security Agency to read this message and all other e-mail you receive or send---without warning, warrant or notice. Bush has ordered this to be done without any legislative or judici

Ron Paul has iphone application out already

Avery Knapp Jr — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:45:43 -0400

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/78119/Ron_Paul_on_Your_IPhone

Thought this was pretty remarkable to have this set up and ready to go already!

Avery J. Knapp Jr., M.D.