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Recrafting Government As an Open Platform
itjoblog writes "How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive? Technology has revolutionised the way that we do business, but the public sector has traditionally moved more cautiously than the private one. Now, a report from the Centre for Technology Policy Research in the UK has made some recommendations for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government."
I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a wiki with full history.
"How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive repressive?" Great! Thanks for asking!
How about a permanent demotion that causes your maximum level of office to be restricted? Lose a senate seat, you're in the house (if elected). Lose the house, you're in the state congress, lose that and it's city council, etc. Forced permanent demotions would prevent bad politicians from remaining in government at a level they can continue to do harm. A further stipulation would be that you could no longer be in-line for the presidency should disaster strike.
Can you be more specific? I certainly see the negative effects of feedback in high-speed trading (volatile reactions, etc.), though there are some benefits to having all those day-traders and millisecond traders (liquidity, closing price gaps, etc.).
In the case of governance, I can't really see what kind of problematic feedback loops would be generated. Obviously some government data needs to not be open (e.g. military secrets), but having the lawmaking process open and transparent (clear, easy to access information on who supported/didn't-support a given law (perhaps even on a section-by-section basis), revision histories, public debates, etc.) seems like a good thing. Obviously there will always be some amount of "off the record" conversations between politicians (which can be bad, e.g. backroom deals; or good, e.g. frank discussions). With respect to feedback, the main danger I see is that "voter fickleness" could get amplified, where elections (and thus important lawmaking) end up turning on trivialities. (E.g. with more and more transparency and record-keeping, it's almost certain you'll eventual find a sound-bite of your opponent saying something that seems stupid or wrong or evil.)
But I would argue we're already deep into the territory where such fickleness is having an effect. Commentators and voters who have already made up their minds already have enough specious data for their confirmation biases. As such, increased information to voters is a good thing because those voters who want to actually be informed and make reasonable choices will have the ability to do so (and won't have to take the word of a commentator).
Damping effects are still necessary, of course. But the inherently long-term voting cycle serves that purpose nicely, preventing voters from changing their representative on a daily basis or on a whim. This averages out many of the spurious and pointless "scandals" while allowing data (if available!) on important issues and voting records to build. I do indeed agree that other damping effects should be considered in a transparency roll-out, but to me that is just a matter of "doing transparency right"--the case for transparency itself is quite solid.
(Incidentally, one change that I've often thought about, which would serve both transparency and damping, is that any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.) This would give the public/voters/media/commentators time to examine it in detail, identify problems, and make their voices heard to their representatives. Having representatives act as a smoothing effect for the (sometimes irrational) public can be very good... but the way in which proposed laws currently mutate so rapidly and are modified at the last minute, so that the public isn't even sure what is finally put into law, is corrosive to democratic and transparent society.)
You want to give people a heart attack? I had to read the Federal Register and my state's Register as part of one job I had. Thank whatever deity, power or force of luck you hold dear that not everything that gets proposed makes it out of committee. Not just anyone should be exposed to that knowledge. The horror. The horror.
You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.
From all I gather, that is hardly the case in most districts, and even where it appears to be, you can't be certain. I know over here in Germany it took the founding of a new party (the pirate party) before I considered voting to be a possibility to express my preferences properly at all. All the others are either bought scumbags (major parties) or lunatics (minor parties) or both or somewhere in between.
I know the solution is to go and do it yourself. Thank you, I've held an elected office for several years (and stepped down on my own), I've had enough of politics for life. Anyone who enters that arena with good intentions and manages to keep them has my respect, and if I can, my vote.
But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic. My personal choice was to step down just before I became the later, but it was damn close (and as you may have noticed, I did take a good share of disillusion with me).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
All laws - ALL of them, even the obvious ones - must expire. 10 years max, say. That way, congress must spent time re-instituting laws we know we want, and won't have time to keep piling on more and more and more obscure, conflicted, special-interest legislation. The law should evolve, but the competitive nature of evolutionary processes requires the less fit to expire.
The constitution and bill of rights should not expire. Or at least the term should be much longer.
I'd love to be able to control where my tax dollars go... so I'd be able to say, "30% to education, 10% to research, 20% to paying off national debt, 0% to the DoD". Congress can still fight over what's left.
Hell, they could even phase it in slowly... maybe let people earmark even just the first $100 or $1000 of their taxes, so everyone gets a nearly equal say, and it would serve as a great data collection tool as to the political priorities of most people... better than anything else I can think of.
Perhaps make the law accessible via a wiki. But most wiki revision control systems aren't very sophisticated.
Keep the law in git branches. If people wish to amend the law, let them branch the law, make their amendment, and propose it for merging to the master branch. What the proposed changes are become very easy to track, as does the person responsible for each and every line.
Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...
That's pretty much the point: seems like nobody notices that America is moving towards what Europe is moving away from.
Congress isn't increasing the size of the government, it's moving governmental functions from the state/local level to the federal level. The total amount of government is remaining the same.
As for why they do it, well, you can blame progress for that. As I write this over the internet, I am interacting with people in many states, and even some countries. Sorry, states cannot regulate this at all and the federal government has to step in. Progress intertwines us all.
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but they are right on-target when it comes to how large and wasteful the government is
I claim that is largely a myth.
Please show actual evidence of the government being large and wasteful. I mean evidence as in hard numbers, used in proper comparison. All such that I've seen so far were deeply flawed and clearly manipulated. For example, many state-run companies are labeled as "inefficient", and privatization at first seems to prove it. But in almost all cases, a few years down the road you suddenly realize that the state-run company offered secure, adequately paid jobs instead of minimum wage, it invested in sustainable infrastructure instead of short-term growth, and its prices were more long-term realistic than the private competitors who undercut them at first, only to raise them later.
I know one market here in Germany where privatization really worked largely to the benefit of everyone. In all other areas, there are many cases where it looks like it works, but only so long as you don't look too closely. For example, in the privatization concepts of the german train system, all calculations looked great - and completely ignored that the value to be given away had been built up over a hundred years with taxpayers money. As soon as you priced it at a realistic market value, it turned out that the concepts proposed could not possibly provide a sustainable train system. In fact, in the years leading up, the management had already made the company "ready" for going public, and the deterioration of quality, infrastructure and workers' rights was so bad that when bad markets delayed the initial plans, and all the crap slowly floated to the surface prior to instead of - as probably planned - after privatization, public outcry forced even the government party that had pushed for privatization the hardest to put a hold on the plans.
It was government entities that put men into space and on the moon, not private corporations. Sure, today, they can get someone into orbit for a tenth the cost of NASA. It's impressive, but while NASA did it at 10 times the cost, they did it more than 40 years ago. A lot of things in technology have dropped further in price than factor 10 in those 40 years.
So, in summary, please do provide actual hard evidence. To me, the claim that government is large and wasteful is largely (there are small areas of exception) a myth. And worse, a myth that is being spread with bad intentions.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org