Digital support for gathering administrative ideas from constituents of democratic bodies

Digital systems have simplified the management, accounting, transfer, and dissemination of all types of information. However, they have not yet been often successfully applied to a very difficult and rewarding task of a democratic administration: facilitating the acquisition, evaluation and refinement of the ideas and opinions of large bodies of constituents. Consequently, administrative ideas from individuals, other than a predefined set of rule-makers are going to be lost, despite the fact that they may be substantial, novel, and provide solutions to significant economic, social or security problems. Some digital support already exists for assessing the opinion of the citizens: • Classic polls on the Internet. The problem is that the formulation of the well advertised polls can be shaped by only a limited number of people and can therefore miss important issues and variations. As follows, new ideas cannot be collected but only verified. • Comments sent to websites such as www.regulations.gov. The comments can only be directed toward a narrow topic that has been recently addressed. Also, some issues can draw hundreds of thousands of comments and there is no feasible way to score them. • E-Mails and Phone Calls to representatives. The main drawbacks are that they cannot reliably convey the amount of popular support, and important ideas can still be lost in large heaps of requests received. An enhanced way to support input from constituents in democratic organizations is via citizensourced & ranked polls and civic discourse, where debating participants can jointly formulate ideas. This article is concerned with investigation of techniques that will provide extensive digital support in gathering and refining ideas from citizens. The techniques developed will be applied and tested by obtaining administrative ideas and feedback at different levels of democratic bodies: student governments in high schools, committees in academic institutions, homeowner associations, and town administrations. We will investigate new levels of privacy that can be offered in the new framework, as well as techniques for fair management and presentation of large numbers of ideas. Each member of any democratic organization benefits if better feedback from citizens to administrations is set in place. 1 Status of the problem Digital systems have simplified the management, accounting, transfer, and dissemination of all types of information. Unfortunately it has not yet been often successfully applied to a very difficult and rewarding tasks of democratic administrations: facilitating the acquisition and evaluation of the ideas of large bodies of constituents. Consequently, administrative ideas from individuals, other than a limited set of rulemakers are going to be lost, despite the fact that they may be substantial, novel, and provide solutions to significant economic, social or security problems. Some digital support already exists for assessing the opinion of citizens: • Polls on the Internet are a common way of assessing citizens’ opinion. They are organized both by governments and independent institutions. The problems with existing polls include: – The formulation of well advertised polls can be shaped by only a limited number of people and therefore cannot serve for gathering new ideas from the large public. – Limited involvement (related to the fact that they are not discursive, having a very limited impact). • E-Mails, Phone Calls to representatives, and comments to websites such as www.regulations.gov can have an important impact. The main drawbacks are that: