After watching the documentary Hacking Democracy, I started researching how government uses voting technology to conduct elections. That’s how I learned about the work of Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.
I asked OSDV Co-Executive Director and Chief Development Officer Greg Miller to share what his organization is doing to make election software more open and secure and how others can help.
In the spirit of the "Web 2.0" and "Gov 2.0" movements, I've been noticing a new breed of website which leverages Social Media in redefining the whole idea of Representation in Governance. Most revolve around the idea of collecting information on specific legislative decisions and allowing voters to tell their representatives how they'd like them to vote. In other words, Direct Democracy but within the existing framework of Representative Democracy.
For lack of a better label, I've been calling this space "Representation 2.0." Please comment below if you know of others and I'll add them...
"It's very simple. Here's how it works. You sign a petition by tweeting it, and other people can sign the petition just be re-tweeting it. There's no need to go to the act.ly site, except to start a petition. If you are re-tweeted, you get credit for the referral, and will show up in the "Smokin' Recruiters" link on act.ly."
"Americans Elect is the first-ever open nominating process. We're using the Internet to give every single voter—Democrat, Republican or independent—the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012. The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates. And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state. "
"IDE want to implement direct democracy by citizens' control over the delegates chosen to represent them in parliament by the party within the framework of the existing political system of indirect democracy."
"OpenCongress makes it easier to understand, track, and engage with the U.S. Congress. OpenCongress combines official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, and participation tools to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress."
"a new project of Project Vote Smart, the non-profit, non-partisan research organization that collects and distributes information on candidates for public office in the U.S. VoteEasy, the brand-new, interactive tool, can instantly tell you what congressional candidates agree with your viewpoints."
Compare how your tax dollars are spent with how you'd LIKE them to be spent.
We hope to create an easy way for citizens to suggest legislative ideas, leave comments, and vote on other ideas. The hope is this will facilitate dialogue across the political spectrum and create comprehensive legislative packages created out of the best ideas melding all people from our beautiful country of the United States of America.
The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
representative democracy is a ‘lossy’ algorithm that produces fuzzy, pixelated images — we can do better.
- Get political news online – 58% of online adults looked online for news about politics or the 2010 campaigns, and 32% of online adults got most of their 2010 campaign news from online sources.
- Go online to take part in specific political activities, such as watch political videos, share election-related content or “fact check” political claims – 53% of adult internet users did at least one of the eleven online political activities we measured in 2010.
- Use Twitter or social networking sites for political purposes – One in five online adults (22%) used Twitter or a social networking site for political purposes in 2010.
I think we’re at an inflection point,” O’Reilly said, “where people recognize that government should be making data available, not just for transparency, but for utility.
Corporations have the wealth to flood our TV sets with uninformative, too-often deceitful, counter-productive ads. Research shows us that this also can depress voter turnout. How anti-democratic are we willing to let our campaigns become?
the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained.
