"Your Own Democracy Concept" Project

[atomiota]

hello all,
i am relatively new to this group and thought i would introduce
myself. i am a designer based in santa fe, NM, and i just cranked out
a concept project last week as a submission to the 2008 buckminster
fuller challenge (http://challenge.bfi.org). it is an independent
project, time stolen from a rigorous career and fulltime parenting.

i work in the financial services space, specifically designing trading
systems for the equity options market. i am also a dyed-in-the-wool
progressive, and for my submission to the BFI Challenge, i designed
some concept screens for a new online platform for democracy that
seeks to capture and measure in real-time (not unlike the stock
market) real-time voter sentiment on issues important in our society.
a secondary concern is to also make legislation transparent...but more
importantly, to make them UNDERSTANDÅBLE (i have read my fair share of
bills, and find them hard to read and i have an advanced education).
it is different from a prediction market, although that model can
easily be integrated (i am just not convinced that anyone would really
use it except for trading-wonks...but i could be wrong).

i just posted a .pdf on my blog that summarizes my proposal (it's only
7 pages long, mostly pictures, nothing onerous), and i thought i would
share it with this group to get feedback. if it (hopefully) appears to
have legs, then i'd like to entertain the ambitious plan in actually
building it for real. i am very much into participatory design, so
please take my designs as purely hypothetical, and nothing concrete.
they are ideas and the sum of a bulk of this year's deep thought, in
between a full time job designing complex trading systems and raising
a demanding 2-year old daughter. also more about me in the /career
section of my blog. i blog a lot about design, economics and politics.

URL: http://www.gongszeto.com/journal/2008/11/8/your-own-democracy.html
(.pdf download link in post)

again, i'd appreciate any feedback at all, especially since this
amazing and thoughtful group is so invested in making governance and
our democracy great.

best regards and looking forward to hearing from you.

respectfully yours,
gong szeto
santa fe, NM
gsze...@mac.com
http://www.gongszeto.com/

[Greg Elin]

Wow, the interface design looks great! Use of color fantastic. Really interesting combination of graphs and human contact.  And exciting to see Sunlight Foundation mentioned.

You are definitely on the right track that making such a volume of information comprehensible is the great challenge.

One thing I did notice, the design does a good job with the hard problem of juggling issues v government agencies. Yet I couldn't see from the mockups how State/Local government v. Federal government is managed.  Did you see State/Local government fitting in?

--
Greg Elin
Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com)
Sunlight Labs (http://sunlightlabs.com)
ge...@sunlightfoundation.com
gr...@fotonotes.net
skype: fotonotes
aim: wiredbike
twitter: gregelin
cell: 917-304-3488

[atomiota]

greg,
thanks so much for the enthusiastic response. i studied the works of
sunlight and others a great deal as preparatory research before
starting to design this. as a matter of fact the sample bill content
is all cut and pasted from opencongress.org (great, great tool, and
constantly innovating..excellent).

the intent of the design, which has many things that are unresolved
(geez how much can you figure out in w week..) is an onion skin model,
whereby you can see bills etc organized under major category headings
(the main subnavigation, mostly cribbed from obama/mccain/nader's
campaign sites). i did this from the (big) assumption that most
average folks may only have 2-3 big issues on their mind, and would be
able to scan all nation, state, local actions underneath that single
issue, say "energy&environment", at a single glance. the purpose of
designing the subnavigation as a chinese menu of issues is the hope
that users will passively find a topic of interest, click on it, and
draw the conclusion of "hey, that's important to me too" etc.

the concept is simple - and as you can imagine, getting all the data
from not only federal goverment, but also state (50 of them) and local
government (ok, like *how* many cities in the US are there? holy
cr..) is a very very large endeavour. however, if you study the way
the capital markets have evolved, there are some good lessons on the
ways 3,000 stock symbols, 180,000 options contracts, etc are managed
at the various exchanges (NYSE, NASDÅQ, etc). plus there is a
standardized method in terms of how new public companies are formed
(IPO's), how they are listed as symbols on the stock market,
standardized metrics to look at performance (market cap, PE ratios,
shares outstanding, open interest, volume, etc), and suddenly you see
the power and relevance of the financial metaphor, ie a new "bill" is
a new "stock symbol", the content of the bill is the 10-K, and so on.
not only does this end-user facing system have to be developed, but
the underlying methods of getting data into the system has to be
developed, deployed, adopted. my hope is to leverage off the precedent
of the stock market to see best practices, to minimize the time it
will take to do something like this.

anyway - thanks again for your comment - it means a lot to me coming
from you and your position at sunlight, which at the end of the day,
was a source of much inspiration for this proposal. in fact, a comment
that a colleague made to me was, maybe all the disparate initiatives
at sunlight could be merged together in this social networking cum
market to create a holistic offering to the public that has joe
sixpack in mind - the more accessible the better.

looking forward to further dialogue on this.
gong

> > gszeto...@mac.com

> >http://www.gongszeto.com/
>
> --
> Greg Elin
> Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com)
> Sunlight Labs (http://sunlightlabs.com)
> ge...@sunlightfoundation.com

> g...@fotonotes.net

[Jennifer Bell]

I love to see new UI designs. Good stuff!

Some thoughts:

1. Point allocation is a terrific idea, and I've actually argued in
the past for allocating fixed resources as an indicator of
conviction. The problem though, now that I see it mocked up this way,
is that more bills in an area that I'm concerned about leads to a
watering-down of my resources. What if there were 3 pro-environment
bills, and I passionately agreed with them all? I wonder if a point
system might work better if it were set up around spending a personal
budget amongst issues, then being able to apply that budget to all
bills that meet your issue filter.

2. Flat, undifferentiated comment lists are not useful when you start
to get more than 20. See opencongress.org, with up to 15K comments
per bill -- most of which seem to have degenerated into flame wars.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h6867/show

One idea for a potentially more useful representation of comments
might be a histogram of some sort, organized along degree of support
for a bill. That way, you could quickly zoom in on comments from
people who support the bill, people who don't support it, and people
that are in the middle. It might even be nice to see a histogram of
comments overlaid on top of a support histogram, so that you could see
that, while not many people feel a particular way, those that do tend
to be extra-noisy.

Jennifer
visiblegovernment.ca

> gszeto...@mac.comhttp://www.gongszeto.com/

[Greg Elin]

Gong,
Thanks for the detailed replied. Very much agree about the financial markets being a good place to look for how to organize a great deal of information.

You fit a LOT in a week. I recognize also incorporating the state data is a big challenge. And you indicated you plan a year to work on the details. You are off to a big head start.

Sunlight has always viewed itself as a catalyst in the internet/government disclosure and accountability space. We certainly don't feel we know all the answers let alone execute on them.  But it is great to see people like yourself getting involved.

Greg

gr...@fotonotes.net

[atomiota]

@jennifer,

re: #1) there wouldn't be any watering down of resources. it is not
unlike a stock portfolio. for example: say your stock portfolio is
worth $10,000.00 and there is a mix of various stocks (like GOOG,
AAPL, MSFT, IBM, etc) all with various number of shares held. and
there's cash. each position has a value and in aggregate is how your
total portfolio value is calculated. in this example, you have earned
10,000 points as a good citizen. you "spend" 500 points voting up an
environmental issue - you now "own" 500 points worth of passion on
that issue (pro or con, doesn't matter). you then spend 1,000 points
voting down a military expenditure issue, you have "1,000" points of
vote value there. as you continue to vote-strength on issues, your
"cash available" does indeed diminish, but the whole system awards you
points for being a good citizen, say +100 for commenting civilly to a
post, +200 for commenting to a dissenting opinion, +500 for every
positive rating you get from the community...just in this example
you've accumulated +800 points just from doing what you normally do on
any SN site. not hard. i just make it explicit. overtime, the
portfolio balances become meaningful as a measure of civic
involvement.

if this is too complicated, then it is a flaw in my thinking, no one
else's. this can evolve, so i really appreciate the feedback. more
thoughts are welcome, always.

re: #2) i totally agree. there is an opportunity to invent something
great. histograms are a start. i really like how everyblock.com
handles it.

gong

[Greg Elin]

+1 for histograms of comments -- for any site with lots of comments.

[Eric Mill]

Hi Gong,

This mockup is great, it totally communicates the idea of the sort of
dashboard that a "power citizen" could have at his or her fingertips.
The only concern I have with it is that while it might be good for a
power citizen, for the average citizen it seems intimidatingly busy.
I expect information deluge is something you're completely comfortable
with, coming from a background in designing trading systems -- but I
think some would find a strong learning curve in such a rich design
and featureset.

Anyway dude, that's really cool that you submitted that to Buckminster
Fuller, and you are definitely pushing it in the right political
climate. Even if Buckminster Fuller doesn't pan out, consider sending
your submission to Sunlight as a grant proposal. Good work!

-- Eric

[atomiota]

@eric
thanks for the feedback - yes, most of the concerns i hear about have
to do with how technical it appears, and i do not disagree at all. for
the purposes of getting new ideas across, i exaggerated some things.
if someday it is able to become a reality, trust me, it goes back to
the drawing board and onto the focus group whiteboard. the goal,
afterall is to appeal to as many people as possible, like i'd like to
see my mom and dad use it. as it stands now, if i showed it to them,
they'd give me that same look when they look at today's television
remotes...one of consternation.
g

[BenTrem]

On Nov 11, 9:23 am, Jennifer Bell <visiblegovernm...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I love to see new UI designs. Good stuff!

See below

> 2. Flat, undifferentiated comment lists are not useful when you start
> to get more than 20. See opencongress.org, with up to 15K comments
> per bill -- most of which seem to have degenerated into flame wars.
> http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h6867/show

What I noticed happening with community discussions around GATT and
development aid in the 70s has been exactly replicated in the online
community. While some systems such as /. (SlashDot, yes?) have
implemented filtering systems the vast majority of sites (even today,
late 2008) still use very flact / linear comment / reply systems. This
is true even in blogs though some are using plugins that allow
threading.

My first attempt to work through this real obstacle to public
discourse came in the form of extensive trials using Dan laLiberte's
HyperNews (still on the web) but even with the flexibility his system
affords (that was his main aim) the root dysfunction remained: even in
the absence of flames, very good material tended to disappear from
sight while material that for whatever reason became "popular" was
promoted ever higher. (Yes, popularity leads to popularity.)

I took a lot of reading and mind-experiments to derive a solution ...
... it has everything to do with the nature of "discourse", and our
motives for participation.

In much the same way that much (most?) campaign rhetoric is
manipulative rather than informative, much of online communications
(most?) is primarily social ... making friends, insulting enemies,
establishing persona ... the actual exchange that is foundational to
true discourse is way down the list.

So, in the end, the drive for ever more elaborate and ever more ornate
Web2.0 sites has everything to do with entertainment value and esteem
issues ... while the nuts and bolts of decision making is relegated to
the time-proven techniques of scribbles on the back of envelopes and
napkins.

I have to celebrate work like that of gong szeto's, if only because it
will inevitably surface the real issues of usability and work-flow
("cognitive ergonomics", ehh whott? *grin*) but my heat sinks at the
prospect of a world so desperately in need of solutions subjected to
another generation of games'manship.

Ms. Bell you've put your finger on the nut of a very precious
matter ... not that most folk don't care ("self-reports" are
notoriously unreliable) but still, I personally find it heartening to
see that at least some do.

To my way of thinking the matter of dialectical exchange (The Socratic
method can be empowered in a way that sheds light on the subjective
narrative ... very dignifying, that is!) goes to the heart of what I
call "participatory deliberation. (Googling that term will bring you
to my work.) I was thrilled to find that a diligent and disciplined
system, "discourse-based decision making" not only gave real evidence
its right weight but also opened the door to an appreciation of how
things matter ... of why things matter ... of how this matters because
we are, finally, human individuals in community, social beings dealing
with their surround.

In short: I look forward to the day when expert interfaces such as
that designed by gong will include functionality that empowers
inexpert citizens.

-ben

p.s. http://groundplane.wordpress.com/gp-101/ is something I came up
with last spring that presents one aspect of my thinking

[Josh Tauberer]

I like that this list has developed an idea playground side to it. It's
fun. Anyway:

atomiota wrote:
> seeks to capture and measure in real-time (not unlike the stock
> market) real-time voter sentiment on issues important in our society.
> a secondary concern is to also make legislation transparent...but more
> importantly, to make them UNDERSTANDÅBLE (i have read my fair share of
> bills, and find them hard to read and i have an advanced education).

These are each quite large projects on their own.

Voter sentiment- If I had a dime for every time someone wanted to create
a website where users rate bills! This comes up usually from two
perspectives: as leverage to get Members to do what their constituents
want, and as a tool for *Members* to help them learn what their
constituents want. I think the former is a dangerous route to take. One
would never get a reasonable sample of constituents, tracking what
districts constituents come from is costly, and constituents aren't or
can't be well informed enough to make informed judgments about many
actual bills and votes. None of this is impossible to overcome, but it
makes this extremely difficult to do well.

Making bills understandable- How? Matt Burton tried this with a wiki.
The bottom line is that understanding bills is hard enough that then
getting individuals to share their knowledge, i.e. crowd-sourcing the
problem, hasn't worked very well. I now have a Q&A feature on GovTrack
where users help others understand bills --- it works at a small enough
scale (i.e. low-overhead to use) that participation is pretty good. But
it doesn't help to give users a big picture, or to document large bills.
I think the goal of making bills understandable *can* be done, but it
requires creating the right tools as well as finding the right audience.

Hope to see you continue in this direction.

--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)

[atomiota]

hi josh
thanks for your incisive observations and comments

my only reply at this point re: sentiment - liquidity is the key.
equal distribution of "informed-ness" i think is almost irrelevant if
you have a good distribution of informed vs less-informed. there is no
way to quantify that anyway, in the same way a stock price can move
with an individual buy or sell trade, but it is volume that makes a
market. there is also an entire market of options and futures that are
all about betting directionally on something going up or down. the
model i propose takes out several of the market metaphor variables and
merely seeks to find the differential between pros and cons. since
TIME is a significant variable here (polls are snapshots), it is my
humble belief that by showing sentiment over TIME, and allowing
mulitple votes and strength votes, this will yield behaviors in
citizens that are not one-off voting experiences, but rather a
constant monitoring of issue-performance, again, over TIME. the
financial market metaphor i am afraid i have not made clear enough and
hope to find the time to explain better. but for the time being, just
imagine a website that is living and breathing, but the performance is
not relegated to server logs that only the admin sees. the performance
is shown to everyone...as the mechanism to energize the feedback loop.
re: your many dimes - please point me to other examples...very eager
to see.

re: bill comprehension: my view has to do with which model you adopt.
1) wiki-style a la burton line-by-lineor 2) crowdsourced commentary
section-by-section or 3) editorial, ie somebody objective or 2 persons
biased simply write their take on the bill at a high-level in layman's
speak...this is the magazine/newspaper model.

all work. all have pros and cons. all attract different participants.
they are all relevant to the problem at hand. is one better than
another? no. should all be employed? yes. are there models that
haven't been invented yet? let's hope so and let's be the ones to
invent them.

regards,
gong

[Jennifer Bell]

Josh -- your pessimism re: quantifying voter sentiment, in general, is
surprising!

I agree that a dedicated tool, where people log in only to create an
opinion profile, is not that attractive for the reasons mentioned --
sample size, etc. However, if aggregating opinion is side-effect of a
tool being used for other purposes, things could get interesting.
Despite being a Canadian, I signed up for the Obama volunteer site the
other day, just to see what is was like. It warmed my heart that in
order to create my profile to start being a good Obama volunteer, I
had the chance to check a bunch of boxes of issues I cared about (Why
check boxes? Why not at least a slider?). So now the democrats are
starting to get -- for free -- data on what people who are rabid
supporters care about, along with valid profile information.

Inevitably, the Republicans are going to do the same thing. What if
the parties had a format for sharing the information they were
collecting -- better, what if they were using the same 3rd-party
widget for collecting it in the first place? Wouldn't the combined
data start to be representative?

My advice to Gong would be to embrace the idea that you're designing a
tool for the experts, not the masses. (Does the average person have a
buring desire to understand a bill? I'm not so sure.) Figure out a
specific target group, such as advocacy groups, who have an unmet
communication / analysis need, and design a tool that helps them do
what they want to do a little better. Provide ways that they, by
solving their own problems and adding value to their group, they also
add value to your system in ways that can be shared amongst groups and
benefit the public at large.

I appreciated the post on deliberative techniques, BTW.

Jennifer

[atomiota]

@jennifer

re: obama site pick your issues: as he has demonstrated his total
command of media mastery and production values, he is simply
performing conventional market research. a simple tactic worth its
weight in gold if done properly. the impulse? he is getting a very
primitive form of voter sentiment. proves the point.

re: "experts, not the masses" - may i offer a less binary way of
looking at the problem? this segmentation was done by the
designfordemocracy organization in their ethnographic research in
redesigning the butterfly ballot several years ago. there are not
merely two voter segments as you say, "experts vs. masses." it's even
finer grain than that.

according to their segmentation:

1) "Avid Voter":
• strong sense of
commitment to community
• feel empowered; ballot can
affect change
• evangelical—can convince
others to participate in
political structure
• feels responsible for
making the whole system
work for all (process)

2) "Issue Voter"
• strong commitment to
particular issue(s)
• empowered, but only in
small spheres of influence
• will be evangelical about
particular issue(s)
• feels responsible for
making the system work
for the issue(s)

3) "Civic Voter"
• strong sense of
commitment to community
• feel empowered
• not evangelical but voting
is important to self
• acceptance of current
political system as a
whole (symbolic)

4) "Excluded"
may not have a strong
sense of commitment to
community
• frustrated by inability to
affect change
• range of reactions to
exclusion from political
process
• desires system to include
them

5) "Apathetic"
• has weak sense of
commitment to community
• feels that he/she cannot
affect change through
political structure
• cannot convince self to
participate in political
system
• suspicious or cynical of
political system

my two cents: yes, my proposal is currently optimized for #1. but in
my humble opinion, so is nearly "established" grassroots/non-profit
platform out there - opencongress, even visiblegov't, govtrack. if you
test any of these solutions (including mine) against these five
segments, we all fail. no wonder the traffic and community numbers are
so tiny. that is not to say that they are not effective...it is really
saying they are only effective for a single segment. now anyone who
has read "crossing the chasm" this is not a disenfranchisement issue,
but rather a plain-jane "customer adoption" issue, and one only needs
to look at the 100-year old techniques employed by the desire-machines
of capitalism to see the various masteries of techniques to engender
adoption (of goods and services) in the private sector.

it is not about checkboxes vs. sliders. it is not about simply making
bills transparent and understandable. those are tactics, and UI
elements evolve. what i do see missing is a holistic embrace (your
word) of the experiential needs of all five of these segments in a
single platform. if i may be so bold as to say such a single platform
can exist - it must, repeat, must have a coherent experience construct
that addresses ALL five. otherwise, all these noble experiments in
grassroots opensource goodness, will not hit the adoption numbers for
real behaviorial change to truly make a robust interactive system for
100 million peoples (american example). the numbers shall forever
remain in the 10's or low 100's of thousands, which is no where near
saturation. and as we know as election wisdom has taught us, adoption
(ie a new black intellectual president for example) is a pipe dream
without *saturation*.

i am working on it. the absolute hardest one, whose reach is probably
well beyond the scope of a sophisticated interactive system, and we
should all think deeply about this...are segments #4 and #5.

i do not think, in my humblest opinion, that we as a group who is
invested in this technology + engagement schtick...have even remotely
begun to scratch the surface. the problem is not just a technology one
(hard). it is also qualitative (soft).

that being said, then explain to me the phenomenon of facebook signing
up 600K unique subscribers per MONTH.

there is much to be learned about what is working in the (crass)
commercial domain and how to leverage it into the public domain. this
to me, is the final frontier.

again, i am working on it. no easy answers, but in my book, these are
the best kinds of problems to crack. "how on earth do i get my mom to
use this?"