(Gong Szeto is a Sante Fe-based designer and inventor whose recent submission [pdf] to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge sparked our interest. We're thrilled to have an abbreviated version of his submission posted here. Note: What follows are screenshots of one possible way of fleshing out Szeto's vision. These are not (yet) actual working web pages, but are instead prototypes meant to spur discussion and further refinement. -- the editors)

Democracy is defined as a form of government in which the supreme power is held completely by the people under a free electoral system. The system in the United States and other countries is known as a representative democracy, whereby the eligible voting populace elects representative leaders in government to develop and enact laws that serve the best interests of the people.

However, democracy as an institution is influenced by the political zeitgeist, where complex issues are not all agreed upon, much less their solutions. Another troubling reality of modern democracies is corruption in government, leaders enacting laws that are not necessarily in the best interest of their constituencies, often influenced by corporations and their army of lobbyists that seek their own competitive marketplace agendas using public policy as a means to advance and protect their market positions.

Government is a very complex, multi-layered endeavor, and the political climate du jour often determines the modus operandi on how policy is created. Bills, legislation, and lawmaking is a highly technical pursuit, the issues and language often beyond the reach of the average citizen. Even with the Constitution’s mandate for checks and balances between the respective branches of government, there lacks a system whereby the populace is able to keep up with everyday political forces and inertia of lawmaking.

There are several important grassroots initiatives (most notably the work of the Sunlight Foundation, among others) that address individual aspects of the system described here, however, none exist that incorporates media and real-time measurement and recording as this proposal describes. In addition to voting behavior feedback loops, few or none of existing government transparency offerings seek to de-mystify issues and bills to the layperson. The participation-incentive/voting-strength algorithm featured in this proposal is a new invention in this space.

Today’s technology allows for innovative online collaboration, networking, transactional, and information visualization. Integrated together in a coherent set of solutions for the citizens of democracy, it is now possible to conceive of a single-platform which is an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework that will allow citizens the ability to stay informed about complex issues and to register their votes in favor or in opposition to processes in government. Transparency will lead to a stronger, more active and informed citizenry and more accountable government.

The humble hope and ambition of this system is to give the citizens of a democracy a robust platform to become more educated and informed about our representative government and to be able to influence the machine of government in positive ways. The end game is simple: By interacting with this system over time, a user will automatically become orders of magnitude more engaged with issues of society than before she had been before becoming a user. On Monday, it was a normal day in Sally's life. Then she signed up on Tuesday. By Friday, Sally connected with 100+ people who shared her concerns about an issue, knows their names and their passions, voted on 10 active bills, made her concerns known, finally got a sense of what what happening in her very city and community, and began building a "Citizen Point Balance" which is the only known quantified measure of citizen engagement in the world. In one week, the way she became more informed and active in democracy grew a hundredfold. Now, multiply this single-person phenomenon times 100 million registered voters. Wow. 

[THE PROPOSAL]

YOUROWNDEMOCRACY is a powerful new web-based application geared to empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another and their elected leaders on important issues on local, state, and national levels.

KEY CONCEPTS:

• Apply today’s social networking, multimedia, and financial markets technologies to create a collaborative infrastructure that records and displays a population’s real-time sentiments.
• Utilize sophisticated, but user-friendly design to explain
• complex issues and legislation to a broad voter base.
• Constantly measure and visualize voter sentiment data for the benefit of the populace, elected leaders, and the media.
• Make all issues digestible and actionable, thereby increasing voter participation in a complex democratic society.

Simple homepage with user login showing a map of the country and icons representing types of legislative actions or "hot issues" happening across the country. 

MY VIEW is the citizen’s personal dashboard that consolidates issues that are important to them. This view captures real-time sentiment of issues and legislation to give context relative to the rest of the country. MY VIEW also displays the voting activities of a citizen’s social network. All in real-time.

1. Ever-present list of top issues, highlighted to show a citizen's preferences
2. Updated list of user voting and democracy engagement statistics
3. Citizen Profile
4. Real-time voter sentiment on government branches down to local level. Macro Indices.
5. Issues Tracking Panel. Voting Record. Updated MSM articles and blog posts
6. CitizenFeed: Chat with friends, see what your network members are voting on

COLLABORATIVE BILL DEBATE VIEW allows citizens to view bills that are in the process of legislation and to express views on the bill in favor or in opposition. The user interface allows a user to vote on it at any time.

1. Bill title, sponsor and current voting statistics on a bill
2. Citizen comments in oppositional format
3. Bill displayed verbatim. Broken down into collapsible and indexable sections
4. Visualization of citizen presence

MULTIMEDIA EXPLANATIONS are needed to explain highly technical and complex legislative documents to the layperson. Local, state, and national issues are presented in a familiar format utilizing the best techniques in editorial design and video and multimedia technologies.

1. Editorial style explanation of the bill in layman's terms, extensively illustrated
2. Current video content related to the bill's subject matter provided by objective media partners
3. Relevant at-a-glance facts and statistics relevant to the bill

THE SHEER NUMBER of active issues and legislation and a means to address them all is overwhelming. Only through a simple and organized interface can a citizen quickly and efficiently browse through the many bills that are currently in play. By organizing these bills via the pre-configured issue categories and on national, state and local levels, a citizen can easily see the interrelationships between various initiatives.

1) Pop-open any of the pre-categorized bills in the list and see at-a-glance the current voter sentiment for that bill, and compare it to the sentiment of elected officials

2) The comprehensive and up-to-date list of bills is organized under House bills, Senate bills, state and local legislative actions. All categorized under the major issue categories. 

ONE-VOTER-ONE-VOTE is what the Constitution confers as a citizen’s right in major elections. However, an interactive system such as this can also allow a citizen to register the strength of one’s convictions about an issue. A user of this system accumulates points for every way he or she participates in democracy: posting opinions, commenting on other opinions, voting regularly and on many issues, favorable ratings from other citizens, etc. The net result is a growing balance of “Citizen Points” that can be applied to a vote to express the strength of a vote.

1) A citizen can easily apply accumulated “Citizen Points” to a vote to register strength. The system records all votes as 1:1, as well as via strength. Two ways of visualizing voter sentiment are always accessible to all. This method captures a vote along with the passion of the voter.

An example of how the point-system works in a typical session:

1. User logs in...+10 pts. ----- Balance: 10 pts.
2. User comments (civilly)on a post she reads...+100 pts. ----- Balance: 110 pts.
3. User comments (civilly) on a dissenting opinion...+200 pts ----- Balance: 310 pts.
4. User flames someone...-200 pts. ----- Balance: 110 pts.
5. User receives 10 positive ratings...(10) x 200 pts. ----- Balance : 2,110 pts.
6. User reads 10 articles...(10) x 200 pts. -----Balance: 4,110 pts.
7. User votes on 10 bills...(10) x 500 pts. ----- Balance: 9,100 pts.
8. User applies STRENGTH to a FOR Vote....1,000 pts. -----
   
   Balance: 9,100 pts: 8,600 pts. Available (+500 for voting); 1,000 pt. Position in a FOR Vote
9. User applies STRENGTH to an AGAINST Vote....5,000 pts. -----
   
   Balance: 9,100 pts: 4,100 pts. Available (+500 for voting); 1,000 pt. Position in a FOR Vote;
   
   5,000 pt. Position in an AGAINST Vote

And so on..."Citizen Point Balance" is always growing, unless a citizen behaves like a total meathead and gets points deducted for being a bad citizen.

The purpose is to always accumulate points by interacting with the system. By debiting points on strength-votes, a user has to parse the value of the vote relative to her available balance (they have to think about it). If the available balance is depleted, the only way to build it back up in to go interact productively with the system again. The growing total Citizen Point Balance, over time, will develop symbolic value as to how active a participant one is in this system.