rebooting democracy - "Professional Politicians Beware!"

As I continue to read "rebooting america: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age" I keep finding even more interesting ideas. The next one comes from the essay "Professional Politicans Beware!" by Aaron Swartz. 

This essay presents the idea of participatory politics or ParPolity. Aaron's idea is that we should have nested councils at each level of government and each council should have about 50 members. So you would get together with 50 of your neighbors and talk about the issues. Then you would elect one representative to go to the next level where that person would meet with 50 other neighborhood representatives and so on. I love the idea of direct, face-to-face interaction with policy makers. 

Here's how Aaron describes it:

"So, to begin with, let us imagine a council of you and your 40 closest neighbors—perhaps the other people in your apartment building or on your block. You get together every so often to discuss the issues that concern you and your neighborhood. And you may vote to set policy for the area which the council covers.

But your council has another function: it selects one of its own to send as a representative to the next council up. There the process repeats itself: the representative from your block and its 40 closest neighbors meet every so often to discuss the political issues that concern the area. And, of course, your representative reports back to the group, gets your recommendations on difficult questions, and takes suggestions for issues to raise at the next area council meeting.

By the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people. But—and this is the truly clever bit—at the area council the whole process repeats itself. Just as each block council nominates a representative to the area council, each area council nominates a representative to the city council, and each city council to the state council, each state council to the national council, and so on.

Shalom discusses a number of further details—provisions for voting, recalls, and delegation—but it’s the idea of nesting that’s key. Under such a system, there are only four representatives who stand between you and the people setting national policy, each of whom is forced to account to their constituents in regular, small face-to-face meetings. Politicians in such a system could not be elected through empty appeals to mass emotions. Instead, they would have to sit down, face-to-face, with a council of their peers and persuade them that they are best suited to represent their interests and positions."

rebooting democracy - "Small d Democracy"

I have read about half of the collection of essays called "rebooting america: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age." You can find it here for free. Each essay presents an idea for improving our democracy based on the tools made available by the Internet and new technology.

The first idea that I found worthwhile is from the essay titled "Small d Democracy" by Susan Crawford (page 92 of the pdf, if you are following along). Ms. Crawford's idea to improve our democracy is to develop a website that would track all the upcoming decisions being made by local government. We would then be able to read about these decisions and share our opinions with our leaders and with our neighbors. In this way we would know what was going on and our leaders would know how we feel about it. She does not mention it, I assume it is implied, but I would add that we should also be able to see how our leaders decided and then track how often we agreed/disagreed with our leaders. This would give us some basis to know who we should vote for in the next local elections. The website associated with this collection of essays allows you to comment on each of the essays, so I have made my suggestions to Susan Crawford. 

In her own words:

"If it were possible to pay attention every once in a while, between elections, to what our representatives or agency heads were about to do in an area of interest to us—and register our reaction to that proposed action—that would be useful.

This is a modest goal. Americans want to feel that our lives have been made more significant through participation in governance. Voting in elections is important, but it is not enough, and it need not be the ceiling for participation. With a little experimentation, we could be doing much more for ourselves.

For example: localities could generate radar-screens of issues coming before the city council or the mayor. With the weather report (something everyone seems to be interested in) on a local page could come a small radar visualization, with pulsing dots showing what matters were likely to have an effect on your neighborhood. If you were interested, you could click through and do a short amount of reading—perhaps just Twitter-length—about what was about to happen. And then act in some effective way (such as sharing the information with others, writing about it, or showing up at the meeting), with feedback showing how your action had been assessed/aggregated by others."