CS376 Project Proposal
Doug Wightman
Adam Kahn
A System for Online Governance
It can be difficult for the general public to affect government policy change. Because government representatives serve many people, it is difficult for constituents to effectively communicate their ideas and opinions with those who serve them, and it is difficult to determine both the reasons for, and one’s influence upon, policy decisions. The interests of all parties are never properly aligned, and there is a loss of transparency and accountability.
Currently, there are systems, mostly web sites, which allow for online discussion of political issues. Most are static and propriety, and limited to the general capabilities of blogs and wikis. Current systems are unable to set granular rules for the exchange of information, including code, which could dynamically improve performance. Finally, most existing systems store data centrally, thus bringing up privacy and scalability concerns.
Our goal is to create a tool for communication between citizensthat will empower them to govern for themselves and replace the need for policymakers. Oursystem will allow for granular sharing rules and shareable code. It will be peer-to-peer, so as to decentralize information. Information will be digitally signed, to facilitate privacy and authenticity. The system will be implemented as an open source project in Python andusing Zope.
With our system, “policies” can be voted upon. “Comments” are written by individuals and associated with policies. “Rules” indicate how an individual has set his or her machine to act. Users may choose to share proposed policies, comments, or rules. There will be ordering and linking of policies, comments, and rules, allowing users to easily browse for relevant information and create opportunities to influence the opinions of others. The system will allow for rule creation and maintenance (for example, who to share information with, the terms, and when).
We already have an initial design. Policies, comments, and rules will be visualized similar to posts in blogs, and will be linked to one another in a fashion similar to wikis and tag-based systems. Users will be permitted to associate ratings with policies, comments, and rules.These ratings will be used to order content.
Our plans for evaluation are still rough. We will compare our system to existing online groupwareand political communication tools through qualitative research and feature and capacity comparisons. We hope to find a relevant student group on campus whichwill use our system to facilitate its operations. We may also engage CS147 students to test our system by asking them to pretend they are individuals with certain issues that are important to them and specific opinions about these issues. We will ask users to fill out questionnaires about our system’s usability and effectiveness.