
You have nothing to lose but your own limitations. You have the world to win.
You are already familiar with Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube,
Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and blogs. But
do you know Jive, Ning, Lithium, Cognizant, Rollstream, and CafeMom? Do you know that next year, 2010, you will be
protecting your civil liberties on a web 2.0 platform called YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG?
Two heads are better than one, but what about two hundred
million heads? Congregate wisdom is the
new best friend of democracy. Thanks to
a new breed of collaborative technologies being employed today by businesses,
non-profit organizations and government agencies, we, citizens of the good old USA, and
potentially other countries, will be empowered with intelligent political and
economic information filtered and organized to our own interest, with the right
to place a weighted vote. Democracy will
work like never before.
With the convergence of threaded messaging, RSS/XML Feeds,
wikis, blogs, file sharing, mobile web applications, intelligent search, and
application integration, businesses have been doing more with less while
fostering novel ideas. Companies and
Organizations like: IBM, SONY, Canon, Fox, CNN, GE, SAP, Nike, Bank of America,
Nestle, United Health Group, Toyota, Walgreens, McKesson, Lockheed Martin,
NASA, Department of Defense, and the CIA (Intelligence agency not the cooking
school). They are using social business
platforms to interface with customers, give better customer support, to connect
experts within an organization, to share resources between silos, to cut down
on replicating business processes, to help communicate projects, and to help
the corporation retain a personality and identity as it grows
internationally. 
On the business side the technology leader is Jive Software
with over 2,500 major customers. On the
non-profit, user group, and social media side, there is Ning.com with nearly
2MM communities and over 60MM users.
Rollstream, a much smaller start-up company, has a specialized niche
market focusing on trading partner community management mainly in a supply
chain arena. CafeMom.com is one popular
example of the uses of web 2.0 technology for a common interest community, one
million strong, which makes money from major advertisers on the site.

Gong Szeto, a professional designer of option trading
systems and the founder and designer of YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG, asks, "Is Democracy a Design Problem".


Mr. Szeto was born on May 18th, 1967; one year
and two days after Mao Zedong officially launched the tumultuous, bloody, and
destructive Cultural Revolution. His
parents fled 6 months after he was born, immigrating to the United States. Gong and his family have a strong
appreciation of the "American Dream", to have the freedom to pursue happiness,
liberty, the right to vote, free speech, a fair wage, start a business, choose
an education, get a house with a garage and buy a color TV. So he sat down with his thoughts on making democracy
more transparent and together with his day job experience in designing equity
and options trading system, designed a new online platform
YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG. He then submitted
it to the Buckminster Fuller Idea Challenge which he is a finalist. Gong states, "Basically, I think democracy itself needs to be a really kick-ass app
shared and owned by millions."
Since then, utilizing web 2.0 technology itself, Gong's
grand idea organically rose to the top, and was followed by conference speaking
engagements, private equity and venture funding. The system is now in development. Here is how it is going to look.
YOUROWNDEMOCRACY is a powerful new web-based application geared to
empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another
and their elected leaders on important issues on local, state, and national
levels.
KEY CONCEPTS:
- Apply today's social networking, multimedia, and financial markets
technologies to create a collaborative infrastructure that records and displays
a population's real-time sentiments.
- Utilize sophisticated, but user-friendly design to explain complex issues
and legislation to a broad voter base.
- Constantly measure and visualize voter sentiment data for the benefit of
the populace, elected leaders, and the media.
- Make all issues digestible and actionable, thereby increasing voter
participation in a complex democratic society.

Simple homepage with user login showing a map of the
country and icons representing types of legislative actions or "hot
issues" happening across the country.

MY VIEW is the citizen's personal dashboard that consolidates issues
that are important to them. This view captures real-time sentiment of issues
and legislation to give context relative to the rest of the country. MY VIEW
also displays the voting activities of a citizen's social network. All in
real-time.
1) Ever-present list of top issues, highlighted to show a citizen's
preferences
2) Updated list of user voting and democracy engagement statistics
3) Citizen Profile
4) Real-time voter sentiment on government branches down to local level.
Macro Indices.
5) Issues Tracking Panel. Voting Record. Updated MSM articles and blog posts
6) CitizenFeed: Chat with friends, see what your network members are voting
on

COLLABORATIVE BILL DEBATE VIEW allows citizens to view bills that
are in the process of legislation and to express views on the bill in favor or
in opposition. The user interface allows a user to vote on it at any time.
1) Bill title, sponsor and current voting statistics on a bill
2) Citizen comments in oppositional format
3) Bill displayed verbatim. Broken down into collapsible and indexable
sections
4) Visualization of citizen presence

MULTIMEDIA EXPLANATIONS are needed to explain highly technical and
complex legislative documents to the layperson. Local, state, and national
issues are presented in a familiar format utilizing the best techniques in
editorial design and video and multimedia technologies.
1) Editorial style explanation of the bill in layman's terms, extensively
illustrated
2) Current video content related to the bill's subject matter provided by
objective media partners
3) Relevant at-a-glance facts and statistics relevant to the bill

THE SHEER NUMBER of active issues and legislation and a means to address them all is overwhelming. Only through a simple and organized interface can a citizen quickly and efficiently browse through the many bills that are currently in play. By organizing these bills via the pre-configured issue categories and on national, state and local levels, a citizen can easily see the interrelationships between various initiatives.
1) Pop-open any of the pre-categorized bills in the list and see at-a-glance the current voter sentiment for that bill, and compare it to the sentiment of elected officials
2) The comprehensive and up-to-date list of bills is organized under House bills, Senate bills, state and local legislative actions. All categorized under the major issue categories.

ONE-VOTER-ONE-VOTE is what the Constitution confers as a
citizen's right in major elections. However, an interactive system such as this
can also allow a citizen to register the strength of one's convictions about an
issue. A user of this system accumulates points for every way he or she
participates in democracy: posting opinions, commenting on other opinions,
voting regularly and on many issues, favorable ratings from other citizens,
etc. The net result is a growing balance of "Citizen Points" that can be
applied to a vote to express the strength of a vote.
1) A citizen can easily apply accumulated "Citizen Points" to a vote to
register strength. The system records all votes as 1:1, as well as via
strength. Two ways of visualizing voter sentiment are always accessible to
all. This method captures a vote along with the passion of the voter.
An example of how the point-system works in a typical session:
1) User logs in...+10 pts. ----- Balance: 10 pts.
2) User comments (civilly)on a post she reads...+100 pts. ----- Balance:
110 pts.
3) User comments (civilly) on a dissenting opinion...+200 pts -----
Balance: 310 pts.
4) User flames someone...-200 pts. ----- Balance: 110 pts.
5) User receives 10 positive ratings...(10) x 200 pts. ----- Balance :
2,110 pts.
6) User reads 10 articles...(10) x 200 pts. -----Balance: 4,110 pts.
7) User votes on 10 bills...(10) x 500 pts. ----- Balance: 9,100 pts.
8) User applies STRENGTH to a FOR Vote....1,000 pts. ----- Balance: 9,100 pts: 8,600 pts. Available
(+500 for voting); 1,000 pt. Position in a FOR Vote
9) User applies STRENGTH to an AGAINST Vote....5,000 pts. ----- Balance: 9,100 pts: 4,100 pts. Available
(+500 for voting); 1,000 pt. Position in a FOR Vote; 5,000 pt. Position in an AGAINST Vote
And so on..."Citizen Point Balance" is always growing, unless a
citizen behaves like a total meathead and gets points deducted for being a bad citizen.
The purpose is to always accumulate points by interacting with the system.
By debiting points on strength-votes, a user has to parse the value of the vote
relative to her available balance (they have to think about it). If the
available balance is depleted, the only way to build it back up in to go
interact productively with the system again. The growing total Citizen Point
Balance, over time, will develop symbolic value as to how active a participant one
is in this system.
American Dream 2.0 Becoming Reality
I asked Gong what his revenue model was, and I got a ‘no
comment' from him. I don't know how he
plans or his investors plan to make money, but it's a wonderful idea and I look
forward to seeing it in production. With
$800B in Recovery Act funds out there, I hope some of those funds find the way
to make YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG property of US Citizens. There is a presidential directive for
collaborative and participatory government that crosses government silos,
engages citizens and partners with industry.
Also the 9/11 commission has concluded that "the system was blinking
red, but we could not connect the dots due to too many independent silos of
non-information sharing". The CIA is now
using Jive Collaborative Community Software.
Gong, if you need a pitchman to hit up the Oval Office,
shoot me an email. If you are
interested in Gong Szeto's company, you can find additional information on his
blog, GONGBLOG, http://www.gongszeto.com/ .
Points of Interest
There is an endless amount of information on the Internet
about web 2.0 technologies. I would
start with the companies that were mentioned in this article. There is also a new book out from Harvard
Business Press, Enterprise
2.0 by Andrew McAfee. It's not highly
technical and it's well written. I would
recommend it as a must read to any CIO.
Andrew starts with his own doubts about the 2.0 buzz. He asks if the benefits are that paramount to
require a new version number for the web.
He goes through multiple business case studies. He takes you through the evolution of web
collaboration tools. McAfee referenced
major sociology schools of thought, including a 1973 book by Mark Granovetter,
titled "The Strength of Weak Ties" and tied it right back to web 2.0
collaboration technology. McAfee makes
the point that companies that lack a system of weak ties, will be
handicapped. The last half of the book
goes into how to best implement a web 2.0 system in one's organization.
My two cents worth
Will the congregate wisdom of two hundred million informed
citizens be the new best friend of democracy?
Today, the feedback loop is of segmented efforts, of limited pools of
surveys, pools of special interest groups, and then there are a handful of
information gatekeepers that filter the data, place opinion, then disseminate
to the masses. Ultimately one's vote is
the feedback loop. But for immediate
voter sentiment on issues, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG is the purest platform for
coming as close as possible to finding the truth of the matter at hand.
I still see ‘Hubs' of political think tanks and special
interest groups using the system to rally votes from members that subscribe to
their opinions. But one of the values of
the system is to arm that member and citizen, in a user defined web 2.0
platform, of competing points of view coupled with system generated statistical
information, and allow them to make their own decisions. Isn't this what democracy is about?
The fear to this argument is that immediate sentiment from
the uneducated masses results in a mob mentality void of any long-term
strategic thinking. Perhaps a feedback
loop limited only to voting every four to six years is the best means that gives
the benefit of the doubt to a professional who we trust will perform in the
best interests of our nation. Looking
back over the last 40 years of the performance of our nation, the value of our
currency, and our nation debt level of biblical proportion, you wonder how much
long term planning really goes on.
Gong, perhaps you should add a couple of long-term widget
windows to the dashboard. Could you show
a debt clock or a budget meter that adjusts to show the monetary effect of each
voting issue (based on the CBO office)?
Will some of the charts expand to long term views, like interactive
stock price charts?
I wonder what the effect would have been if we had the
YourOwnDemocracy platform when members of the U.S.
government claimed that Iraq
was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
They insisted that all the prisoners held in Guantanamo prison were hardened
terrorists. They swore that the United States
does not torture its prisoners. What is
striking in all of these claims is not that we now know them to be false. Rather, it is that at the time they were
made, repeated, and accepted, facts already existed that showed these
assertions to be false. {from Harper's interview
of Roger Berkowitz} Could the
YourOwnDemocracy platform have influenced the direction our nation took?
As far as mob mentality goes, I look to an example that
Andrew McAffe brings up in his book, Enterprise
2.0, that is Wikipedia. If someone came
to you ten years ago with the idea that anyone, the masses, can update an encyclopedia,
and do it in an accurate and organized manner, you would not believe them. But in late 2005, the scientific journal Nature conducted a study comparing the
accuracy of science articles from both Encyclopedia Britannica and
Wikipedia. They found errors in both and
found Britannica to be more accurate but only by a thin margin. In Timo Hannay's, publishing director of
nature.com, opinion, "Wikipedia could surpass Britannica in quality, but we
have to wait and see." Founder Jimmy
Wales summarized Wikipedia's norms this way: "Our community has an atmosphere of love and respect for each other, a real
passion for the work , a real interest in getting it right. We make it fun and easy for good people to
get involved." {from Enterprise
2.0}
In my opinion YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG has great potential. Now, if we can just get those neophytes in Washington to use it to
listen to its citizens, we would all be better off.
Gong Szeto Summary
Democracy as an institution is influenced by the political zeitgeist, where
complex issues are not all agreed upon, much less their solutions. Another
troubling reality of modern democracies is corruption in government, leaders
enacting laws that are not necessarily in the best interest of their
constituencies, often influenced by corporations and their army of lobbyists
that seek their own competitive marketplace agendas using public policy as a
means to advance and protect their market positions.
Government is a very complex, multi-layered endeavor, and the political
climate du jour often determines the modus operandi on how policy is created.
Bills, legislation, and lawmaking is a highly technical pursuit, the issues and
language often beyond the reach of the average citizen. Even with the
Constitution's mandate for checks and balances between the respective branches
of government, there lacks a system whereby the populace is able to keep up
with everyday political forces and inertia of lawmaking.
There are several important grassroots initiatives (most notably the work
of the Sunlight Foundation,
among others) that address individual aspects of the system described here,
however, none exist that incorporates media and real-time measurement and
recording as this proposal describes. In addition to voting behavior feedback
loops, few or none of existing government transparency offerings seek to
de-mystify issues and bills to the layperson. The
participation-incentive/voting-strength algorithm featured in this proposal is
a new invention in this space.
Today's technology allows for innovative online collaboration, networking,
transactional, and information visualization. Integrated together in a coherent
set of solutions for the citizens of democracy, it is now possible to conceive
of a single-platform which is an independent non-partisan party whose sole
mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible
framework that will allow citizens the ability to stay informed about complex
issues and to register their votes in favor or in opposition to processes in
government. Transparency will lead to a stronger, more active and informed
citizenry and more accountable government.
The humble hope and ambition of this system is to give
the citizens of a democracy a robust platform to become more educated and
informed about our representative government and to be able to influence the
machine of government in positive ways. The end game is simple: By interacting
with this system over time, a user will automatically become orders of
magnitude more engaged with issues of society than before she had been before
becoming a user. On Monday, it was a normal day in Sally's life. Then she
signed up on Tuesday. By Friday, Sally connected with 100+ people who shared
her concerns about an issue, knows their names and their passions, voted on 10
active bills, made her concerns known, finally got a sense of what what
happening in her very city and community, and began building a "Citizen
Point Balance" which is the only known quantified measure of citizen
engagement in the world. In one week, the way she became more informed and
active in democracy grew a hundredfold. Now, multiply this single-person
phenomenon times 100 million registered voters. Wow.
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