Scenario: "New Athens"

 

With 60,000 residents, New Athens has become a model for civic involvement around the country.  As a city, it has the usual trappings of a standard municipality:  a mayor, a council, and other government organs.  However, the key to its success is largely based on a remarkable communications platform that does something that most political systems have never been able to do before -- dynamic, ad hoc synthesis of public opinion!

 

Like most tech-savvy communities, the residents can go online see the latest news and information related to their city.  But now, from the privacy of their own home, any resident has the ability (and therefore the right) to raise an issue of their choosing among their citizenry.  As succinctly as they can, they are allowed to post the reason as to why it should be discussed.  In order to foster the most open communications, their submissions remain anonymous to everyone, including the city council of New Athens. 

 

At a designated time, participants are alerted by an electronic method of their choosing of the start of the review phase of the issues submitted.  By receiving an alert from a now ubiquitous desktop application, citizens see that they have been given the right to review six anonymous submissions out of a total of 6,000 from other residents. They now have three hours to score them.  They are also allowed to attach an anonymous comment to explain the reason for their score.  Once finished, they await the next phase of the contest.

 

Many factors where used to determine the transmission pattern of who receives what anonymous submission:  city location, tax rate, age, sex, etc.  This is meant to raise the chance that citizens will get to review the issues raised by less like-minded residents.

 

A sorting algorithm retires the lowest scoring submissions, leaving 1,000 submissions still in the running for Prime Issue of the month for the residents of New Athens.  The submitters of the least interesting issues are not notified of their scores.  Like everyone else, they will still believe that they are in the running.  The next day, all participants get to review and score 6 more anonymous submissions that each hasn't seen before.  Once the sorting engine retires the next batch, only 165 submissions remain.  Two more judging periods will complete the review of issues.

 

In a matter of days, the results are posted on several web sites, including the local newspaper.  All of the issues of the city have now been neatly prioritized with a "grade on a curve" score by their fellow citizens with the participants’ identities still listed as publicly anonymous. However, each participant is able to see how she scored and also read the comments left by her anonymous reviewers.

 

Now that the issues have been prioritized, participants are encouraged to register in order to offer their opinions as to how the city should address the issues.  Utilizing the same system that was used to prioritize the issues, new individual exchanges are created to propose solutions for the top 20 issues prioritized by the citizens. 

 

In deference to the popular appeal of these virtual deliberations, the submitters of the highest ranking solutions for each issue are allowed to formally address the city council during an open session.  If they do not wish to speak or identify themselves, they are allowed to have someone else speak in their place, or to allow a councilperson to address it for them.  When the speaker arrives before the council, they will give the access code given to them by the system to verify their selection.

 

A "hyperpolity" is born.  Citizens normally separated by class, gender, age, income and status are starting to develop rational critical dialogue with each other about the issues, concerns and perspectives of their fellow citizens.  For the city council, managing their citizenry's passive ignorance is being replaced by managing their expectation.  It's not utopia, but it's far beyond politics as usual...