TechPresident posts on change.gov, a website the Obama campaign has created to encourage a more open, participatory governing process. The site contains the standard fare, like a “share your vision” site where you can post your vision for the country. The site, of course, also has a blog where I’m sure the president-elect will comment on the latest spat on The View or who Miley Cyrus is dating.
What concerns me about this site is that it is set up to provide the appearance of a participatory culture without much of an infrastructure to deliver on that promise. How do you go from collecting “visions for America” from random posters to leveraging the “wisdom of the crowds” to produce better policy outcomes? There are innovative ways to get citizens directly involved. One exciting example of this is publicmarkup.org, a wiki site that allows users to markup legislation as if they were committee members. This process of self-aggregating public input is more likely to lead to direct citizen input. Another interesting experiment is the Future Melbourne project (HT: TechPresident). Where citizens were asked to contribute input to the Australian city’s master plan directly by making changes to it on a wiki.
These projects do not guarantee direct citizen input, but if the campaign is serious about being more collaborative in its governance, and there’s no reason to suggest that they aren’t, there are more sophisticated tools they could be using to leverage the power of citizen input.
Comments 2
Don Waisanen — November 7, 2008
Jose, I'm churning over your comment about "the appearance of a participatory culture without much of an infrastructure to deliver on that promise." I wrote my Facebook post above largely to start thinking more along these lines, which concerns less about the messages on places like Facebook, and more about the online structures which help or hinder deliberative impact/s. Time will probably tell, as we keep an inductive eye out for what we're seeing on these types of sites.
Still, this "appearance of participation" part is critical. It's going to remain open to what degree these online structures can segue issues from the concerns of those on the political periphery to the center of the democratic process.
Blogroll » Links for 2008-11-08 [del.icio.us] — November 9, 2008
[...] Thick Culture " Aren’t We the Change We’ve Been Waiting For? There are innovative ways to get citizens directly involved. One exciting example of this is publicmarkup.org, a wiki site that allows users to markup legislation as if they were committee members. This process of self-aggregating public input is more likely to lead to direct citizen input. [...]