The Open Lobby
Contents
Background
The infrastructure of our world-famous democracy is outdated and crumbling, and the devastating consequences of this sad state of affairs are all around us.
Fortunately, recent technological developments offer new hope of tapping into our collective intelligence and passions, in order to craft a better foundation for our society.
Talking about technology and society may bring to mind electronic voting machines, endless blog battles, pervasive advertising, and the like; but this is not the point. Grafting new technology onto outdated systems can be useful at times, but it can also result in problems being "fixed" with surface gloss, or simply obscured by a new layer of expectation.
Systems that are based on new technology – specifically, wiki-based systems – have proven successful beyond expectation. Wikipedia, an encyclopedia built entirely by volunteers, has yielded some excellent articles. Many of those articles are on topics that are deeply controversial (find good examples) where one might reasonably expect passionate disagreement to prevent meaningful consensus. And in a more specific example, New Zealand set up a wiki-based web site to capture the public's views on what a new Policing Act might look like; by all reports, it yielded innovative ideas, and was a resounding success.