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The Internet Blueprint Wants You To Crowdsource Digital Laws
will_edit_for_food writes "Are you fed up with anti-piracy acts that use scorched-earth tactics, like SOPA and PIPA — or secretly negotiated agreements like ACTA? Do you wonder why we the people don't propose our own laws, rather than just react whenever these bills slouch toward Congress to be born? Wouldn't you like a place where you and a few like-minded amateur lawmakers could get together and do it right? Public Knowledge has debuted the Internet Blueprint, a site for those technologically and politically inclined to gather ideas...and eventually submit them to sympathetic politicians."
Because more laws are just what the internet needs. /sarcasm
Really, I think we'd be happy with better laws. Even if they were more.
I have a feeling that the folks at InternetBlueprint.org have better intentions than Lamar Smith, too.
It sounds soo good. So... Why is this not an astroturfing project?
Why would the politicians bother to submit their bills without millions of dollars in donations to their re-election campaigns? I thought Washington was pay-to-play.
Those bills aren't slouching through Congress to be born. They're being bought by one-percenters who think buying congresscritters is cheaper, easier, and more profitable than coming up with a business model that works in the Internet Age.
(Heh, my .sig is actually relevant to the post.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So the common person still believes they have any say in government?
Nice delusion, keep 'em coming!
Sympathetic politicians? Wake me when you find one.
>a site for those technologically and politically inclined to gather ideas...
Aaaaand....
>and eventually submit them to sympathetic politicians.
Swing and a miss.
When I tried to do hyper democracy, I wanted to be like Digg/Reddit, but I wanted factional voting. Factional voting is allowing republicans to view only republican upvotes and democrats to only see democrat upvotes. We had a ton of other features too. This is why we failed. We didn't embrace KISS. By just going with facebook likes, this saves you from writing an entire voting system! This is an eloquent approach. The only problem is a lot of people don't like Facebook. I guess these are tradeoffs.
Another challenge we faced when writing a hyper democracy website was: How do you validate they're a US voter? It could be someone from the Ukraine trying to change politics. Worse yet, it can be a million computer botnet from Nigeria trying to petition congress on something. We couldn't solve this problem in an eloquent fashion. We were going to have people physically sign up at booths across the nation to be validated, but even that doesn't solve stuff. My biggest worry is that if Facebook gets ingrained with politics and identification of people, is that Facebook will be mandatory for those getting political and that lying on Facebook about a fake ID would be a felony down the road.
My hats off to the eloquent interface: Just use Facebook likes instead of your own database. But that can come back to bite you in the long run.
God spoke to me
So the solution to political corruption is a slew of undifferentiated amateur lawmakers churning out legislation even faster than the public can keep up with?
This smells hideously false flag.
We had a functional system. We need to restore it by reasserting it and enforcing it, not by Monsanto-ing up more bizarre legislation faster than we can track it. One of the underlying problems has always been a decreasing public understanding of the legal models in play. Without resolving that, this approach will only exacerbate it. What publisher solicits books from writers who are illiterate?
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Crowdsourcing proposed laws will not work. The laws that reach congress will not respect the rights of minorities.
I'll provide gay marriage as a non-digital example. Majority rule would determine gay marriage to be illegal, based on the most recent surveys. That does not protect the rights of the minority of people prefer to enter into a same-sex marriage.
Here is an easier example: Joe from Juniper bought and owns 100 acres of land. The other 9 residents of Juniper have only 1/2 acre of land each. A crowdsourced bill may be introduced requiring Joe to divide his land evenly among the other residents. It is likely everyone except Joe will vote up the up. While the bill may accurately express the desires of the majority of Juniper residents, a law requiring Joe to surrender his land would be wrong.
Oh fer cryin' out loud. Would someone please find a link to Tim Stryker's Superdemocracy and forward it to PK before someone tries to patent this idea? I'm too tired right now.
The font used on that website is terrible on the eyes.
After that some attention would need to be turned to carefully dismantling the mechanisms the two political parties have put in place to insure that no other party rises to power, and the mechanisms the very rich have managed to get written into law to insure that they remain very rich at the expense of everyone else. If we have to go back to banking and moneylending being sinful, that's fine with me. Lets start actually creating actual things again as the main value driver of our economy.
I don't suppose any of that would be very popular in Washington. And if I ever managed to run and get elected on such a platform I'm sure that Washington would corrupt me just like it's corrupted every other fresh-faced freshman ever to set foot in the place. Must be something in the water.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why deal with digital laws only? Time and technology are ripe for the citizens to compose their own laws. Enough with represantative bs.
This is the funniest thing i've read this month. By far.
You are a completely deluded fool if you think any 'crowdsourced' laws will ever even be considered... We're not all lobbyists throwing money at politicians..
THAT'S how laws get passed. Not common sense and good ideas.
Now if you perhaps wanted to start a fund we could donate to so we can bribe (lobby) politicians ourselves... That might actually work. If we could give them enough.
But even then you're competing aginst very wealthy businesses who can come up with far more money and perks than we can.
Thanks for the laugh. Blueprint for laughter. And an excellent example of how clueless people really are. Hilarious. In a pretty depressing way.
Whenever some entity says that they are the authority of the Net and wants to represent the users of the Net, I can't help but think of ICANN
Decades ago when ICANN was first organized they had a "crowdsource" campaign - they actually let the public at large to "register as members" and yes, I still keep the "ICANN membership card" that they sent me
But what is ICANN today? Do they care about the millions of "registered members"?
I don't think so
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Easy, here's your tort: "Copying stuff is allowed - sell boxes in the supermarket with no licence agreement, copy protect or number. Anyone who forces online registration will be written off!" :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
There is a major flaw in the thought framework underlying the entire initiative - which is, BTW, excellent and a nice illustration of the principle "if you can't beat 'em, embrace 'em" - IMHO: the idea is totally US-centric, In the minds of the initiators, law-making = US law.making = US Congress. As a European I vehemently protest. So would most Asians, who form by far the most numerous subset of internet users.
QFD.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
What the Internet Blueprint project needs to do is create single draft law with supporting documentation. The draft needs hundreds of qualified voting advocates in all 50 of the United States.
The question put to people seeking elective office needs to be "Are you for it or against it?" In every race, the advocates for a sane reform of copyright and patent law need to educate each candidate and get each candidate to answer "Yes or no" whether they will vote for the measure in Congress. The hundreds of advocates need to use the answers they hear to affect who is elected in their district.
Representatives serve for 2 years and Senators serve in three staggered groups for 6 years. November 2012 is the deadline date to have a draft law that can be used as an election litmus test. In 2012, only 1/3 of the Senate will have faced the "For it or against it?" question. By 2014, 2/3 of Senate. By 2016 all of the Senate.
The "For it or Against it" approach requires the draft law and the supporting documentation to meet a high standard of fairness. The balance struck needs a quality economic analysis.
The law may be inspired by thinking from distinct ideological backgrounds (like Linux open source was) but the proposal should not be of a distinct political tone. But there is nothing wrong in giving it a distinct name like: "The American intellectual freedom advancement and copyright and patent revenue balancing Act."
I think we should look for some kind of folding motion to create a relationship where the rights holders and users both benefit, (like automatic, cheap, easy, non-cumulative, distributive and time limited patent licenses.) The present system of building cartels and charging all the market will bear and stealing designs and secrets is a sleazy combative mess. A change in the licensing system will definitely need a quality economic analysis.
Unless these laws only specify rights, and not restrictions, then creating laws will only create further restrictions on freedom.
Let freedom be access to all values in a set. Let a law define a subset of freedom. Laws do not define additional freedom, but rather restrict it. If laws are added continuously, without removing laws, you are left with the intersection of all of these laws, which will get narrower and narrower (smaller subset). Advocating the creation of laws should be frowned upon. We should advocate the removal of laws and addition of rights.
That's exactly what's happening in Iceland ! After the 2008 crisis, the people didn't want to pay for the banks to be saved. Then they forced the government to leave and ditch the current consittution. Now, they are not just writing laws, they are writing a whole new crowdsourced constitution !
They selected a few people who are in charge of making the new constitution, and then everybody can comment on what they propose on FB, Twitter, on their website... When it makes sense, they merge the suggestions into the draft and iterate again.
And in the end, the new constitution will have to be accepted in a referendum and the "government" won't be able to change it. This is really "for the people, by the people" !
And it's not a surprise that our leaders (in any country you could live in) don't talk about it...
Eloquent: 1. able to express oneself clearly and well. 2. clearly conveying a special meaning. 3. very dignified in form, tone, or style.
Do you wonder why we the people don't propose our own laws, rather than just react whenever these bills slouch toward Congress to be born?
No, I DO NOT wonder why people don't do this. How can you ensure a democracy if everyone participating is anonymous? How can you ensure that one person has exactly one vote? How do you prevent criminals from influencing policy by voting hundreds of times for their own laws?
As it is now, wealthy people can make any laws they want, but it still requires the complicated process of bribing elected law makers with high-paying consulting jobs. If you take money out of the equation, anyone who figures out how to game your voting system will easily pass any laws they want by simply creating a huge number of sock-puppet voters.
I hate how money, rather than common sense and compromise, has more influence over law, but a digital democracy simply won't work unless you can uniquely identify voters with sensitive personal data which no one wants (nor should they have to) provide to anyone anyway.
The real problem is that democracy as currently practiced in the West simply does not work.
Elections are not free as you need massive amounts of cash to participate and have to be selected by a party. Combined together this has effectively captured representation to a narrow band of individuals from a particular social class who are wholly subject to unseen paymasters.
A far better system would be that individuals that wish to volunteer to represent their county/state/fiefdom would register their interest. A random lottery style draw would then take place to pick several representatives from each county/state/fiefdom.
This would hopefully produce a legislature free from entrenched vested interests and produce a broad enough spectrum of views that it would produce an actual representative legislature.
Yes such a legislature would contain fruitloops.
Yes it would be messy.
But it would be *infinitely preferable* to the utterly failed, unrepresentative system(s) we have now.
And finally everyone has a chance of having their voice heard.
People thinking they can affect the government.
In all seriousness though, as good as an idea as something like this is, I don't really see it getting too much done.
Without accountability.
are now better than what is being preposed.
We might need one new law per century not law writing 24 hrs a day 365 days a year for hundreds of years we been at it over 200 years its coll we got enough.
If you keep at it much longer even computers wont be able to figure out what they all are or mean. even the supreme court cant agree now what they mean.
Its a bit foolish.
No, online crowd sourcing for bills could never be taken advantage of. Never have unintended consequences.
Golly
Maybe it's Chrome, but that website is very visually unappealing.
How about if the elected folks actually try writing some laws instead of "introducing legislation" written up by industry. That's what they're supposed to be doing right? Take input from everyone, figure out (not be told) how to tweak things to make the country better, write up a bill, build consensus and get it passed. They're currently introducing some 200 bills per month because it's industry writing them, not the "law makers". It's no longer just lobbying but "here get this passed for me".
They should have revision control with public read-access. That way we could see who's making the edits.
I said "We must be on eternal guard for some group that would attempt to co-opt it and pre-empt it.", but I should have added for nefarious purpose. I thought my intent would be obvious at the time of writing, then later realized in horror that it could have been misconstrued.
Wouldn't you like a place where you and a few like-minded amateur lawmakers could get together and do it right?
We already tried that. The result was Congress.
The problem is that one group thinks they know how to "do it right" and wants to impose their vision of right on others. That will always be the problem with this idea. That was the problem in 1789, and that is going to be a problem with this proposal today.
For some stimulating thinking about law, read Whatever Happened to Justice? by Richard Mayberry.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Money is used to try to convince the constituency to do something, mainly vote for the politician. But if the constituency already believes some way, then it's wise for the politician to do what they want for risk of losing office. The problems are getting a chunk of the people to believe one way, and then convincing the politician that this like-mindedness exists. And that usually takes money.
most sane well adjusted rational human beings would never have the sociopathic narcissism required to want to make laws that have drastic and negative impacts on millions of people they have never met.. making laws is just creating new reasons to point guns at people, steal their property or put them in cages
Whenever a story like this is posted, about people who are trying to actually fix our broken legal system, it collects tons of comments explaining why the idea can never work: politicians won't let it, the new idea will just get subverted by entrenched interests, the public isn't really competent to write laws anyway, etc. etc. etc. And then those same people go back to complaining about how the current system is broken and just serves the wealthy and powerful.
It's time to actually do something useful. This is a group of people who have recognized the current system is broken, and are trying to actually do something about it. Will they succeed? Maybe or maybe not. Perhaps the odds are heavily against them. But they're trying. Can you say as much? If no one tries, then failure is guaranteed. If you don't like the current system, you need to do something about it. Don't tell the people who are trying that they'll never succeed and should just give up. You're wasting your time, and more importantly, you're wasting their time. If you want change, you need to work for it, not be an obstacle to it.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Another similar crowd-sourced legislation that shows a lot of promise is: http://www.youlaws.org/ They cover all policy, not just internet policy. They are currently looking for paid developers (python I believe).
check out www.soylentnews.org a community-driven alternative
Might work better if the site were readable.