Thoughts on Democracy: Then and Now

This is my starter post on open government. First I'll examine the idea that modern technology makes pure democracy an option. I don't know if anyone is even advancing this idea, but I guess reading about Descartes makes me want to examine the fundamental assumptions of an idea before going on the rest of it.

In the late 1700s the founders of the United States decided that a perfect democracy was a bad idea because:

• The colonies were too spread out (there was no way to manage every body's input.)
• Most people were uneducated
• Even educated people argue bitterly about how to run society

Flash forward to 2012. Now we have the potential to overcome the first problem, managing everyone's input. We either have the software or could develop it quickly if we put our minds to it.

Also we've made great progress on the second point; our population is fairly well educated and literate.

The third point is just as much a problem today as it was when John Adams was president. We are all see the polarization and gridlock of modern politics. Clearly we need to retain a representative structure and aren't ready for a full democracy (if 535 of us can't agree on how to run congress, 100 million of us trying to decide on something is altogether out of the question.)

Another reason we shouldn't have a perfect democracy falls on the principle of specialization. If Steve Jobs had to spent a big chunk of his productive time voting on local, state, and national resolutions, he would never have had the time or energy to design iStuff. 

So, assuming we keep the same legislative system, what open government options do we have?

One idea I've heard is to make bills publicly available in a read-only Google-doc format. Then people could make comments and suggest changes. Comments with the most likes would rise to the top of the comment stack and get high levels of exposure, and they'd have thousands of "likes" which would increase the comment's credibility. 

It's an idea worth fleshing out. Here are my initial concerns:

But which people?

Who has the right to make official comments on legislation? Will we let only U.S citizens register to comment or let organizations be a part of the process also? How can we be sure that citizens of other countries aren't logging onto our legislation? 

Whatever is put online is subject to attack by hackers, both private ones and teams from other governments. How can we protect the website and the data (especially sensitive because data on the web site may included a registry of U.S. citizens)?

What will stop people from creating dummy accounts so that they can "like" their own comments multiple times or otherwise artificially boost their influence?

Here is another approach to sorting through comments:

Klout is tech company that analyzes someone's online network and then assignes them a score that represents how influential they are online. (For example, the more people follow your twitter account, repost things you say, or visit your blog the higher your Klout score.) It's like your online street cred, except it's quantified. Click here for a good New York Times article about Klout.

Perhaps the government could use a similar service to assign scores to citizens that show how much people should be taken seriously. For example, if you're a governor, you get +25 cred, if you're a university professor you get +20 cred, if you're a lowly employee in a patent office, you get +2 cred (oh wait, we just seriously undervalued the comments of a young Albert Einstein.) This would bring a host of dilemmas itself, but it's an option. Maybe under that system the "common man" would have no more of a voice than he does now.