Lessig Bets On the Net To Clean Up Government

christian.einfeldt writes "Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig really 'gets it' when it comes to the efficacy of distributed open source code production. Now he is attempting to use distributed production methods to expose corruption in the US Congress with the launch of another 'CC' organization — this time it's called 'Change Congress'. CC (as opposed to cc for Creative Commons) would invite users to track whether US legislators are willing to commit to Change Congress' four pledges. CC will rely on users to record and map the positions of candidates who are running for open seats in the US House and Senate. Change Congress will use a Google mash-up to create a map depicting which legislators have taken the CC pledge, which have declined, and which have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform. The four pledges (which are not numbered 0 through 3) call for greater transparency in government, and less influence of private money in shaping legislation."

Comments

Re:Hopeful

[TheRaven64]

I had a simpler idea. Before the election, each candidate should fill in a 20-question multiple-choice exam about their policies. At the polling station, the voter has to fill in the same test. If the voter's opinions do not correlate with those of the candidate to a certain percentage, their vote should be ignored. An astonishing number of people vote for candidates who believe the opposite of what they do because their parents voted for that party, or they believed in that party's ideals a few decades ago when it still had some.

There would be nothing stopping a candidate from publishing their answers on flyers that voters could take into the polling station and copy, but at least it would encourage them to actually know what the candidate believes in. And then you'd have a legal, public record that could be compared against their track record at the next election.