Idea for future direction of this project.

[howardroark]

I live in Canada where have a parliament, you vote for the party which you ultimately want to fill the seat of the Prime Minister's office. The person you choose to represent your local area also ends up influencing which party controls the Prime Ministers office. What ends up happening is that everyone involved basically winds up being protectionist towards their party and logic takes a back seat a great deal of the time. The parties are also largely influenced by people who will never really grasp the potential of technology. I think most democracies face this issue in one way or another. Anyway, here is the idea...

The system is designed to verify where people live somehow, maybe someone signs up and gets mailed a verification code. You then canvas a riding which is very populated with younger generation home owners, likely urban with leaflets that explain the idea. The idea being that anyone can sign up and explore with their own curiosity. People could find new confidence that they might actually be able to offer something constructive.

The application would work something like Reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit. With a focus on letting everyone go through a miniature democratic process where folks can really get to the bottom of what the best direction to go is.

You would then hold a vote of people in the riding to see who would like to run as the MP in the next election. Call the party something like the "Alien Party". The legal aspects would be somehow so that when they went to the capital for work they could only directly represent the exact wishes of the people of their riding in as real time as possible. A focus would be put on ensuring that technology could be used where ever possible to connect them with the people in the home riding. It would have to be something that people could interact with at the same rate the interact with reddit or twiter.

All in all, it would be really fun to see if the principals of Reddit could be applied and evolved to make democracy a bit more efficient. All the code could be open source so that anyone anywhere could take and and attempt to apply it where they live.

[megamattron]

Sounds interesting, but I think I'm slightly confused, are you suggesting to use the site to participate in a real country's election, or using that as a model for what to add to the site?

[howardroark]

Haha, I got carried away there a little bit. It's sort of an idea that I thought would have potential in my neighbourhood. I realize it is a big leap.

The idea is that the system would be designed to let people have a more democratic control over what their representative would pursue in the Capital. From a legal sense it would be a person being elected in a traditional way but with a new experimental layer of democracy following them into government. It would let communities anonymously connect and explore options with a few less layers of bias. The experiment would be to see if logic could start to find a better place in government and push back against party protectionism.

I will close this as it is probably a bit too specific for the nature of this project. It may be a good link to have posted to the site though :P