Fixing Politics
Currently in Australia, the USA, the UK, Canada, Germany, Kenya, India, Japan and similar democratic countries we have what is called a representative democracy. Using Australia as an example, about every 3 years, citizens all go to a polling place to elect their representatives. Each area has a number of candidates available for selection and everyone tries to vote for the candidates that they like the best. If elected, your favourite candidate then gets the job of representing your area in the Federal parliament. Australia is divided up into 150 different electoral areas and so there are 150 politicians working in the House of Representatives.
That's just 150 people, whose job it is to represent the views of a population approaching 30 Million Australians (Calculated to be 24,699,265 as of 04 October 2017 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Population Clock).
The ideal of a representative democracy is that we should be able to elect individuals and groups who we think have similar views to us, who will champion our values and who will act on our behalf to give us what we need and want. But the reality is that no matter who you choose, they will do some things you like and some things you don’t. Politicians have their own values and their own point of view telling them what is right and wrong. They have their own reasons for wanting to have an influence on the political system. If they are a virtued politician, they might want to represent their people well but really they are individuals. They can only generalise. Even if you have a conversation with your local member of parliament, your words and ideas will need to be considered amongst hundreds and sometimes thousands of voices. So how could they possibly represent your views? Its impossible!
The Main Problem
The democracy part of our political systems was created to prevent individuals and very small groups of people from taking power and doing wrong things. Democracy provides a way for its citizens to change their government if they don’t like how they are behaving. It is often suggested as being a counter to dictatorships, communist parties, monarchies and other systems that rule by force, fear, ignorance or by a narrow view. In this regard, a democracy is definitely the favoured choice amongst thinking, free people. But our representative democracy is not a perfect system. The representative part and the public opinion part, both have their limitations.
The limitation of the representative part is that it is actually impossible for anyone to represent your views completely. The limitation of the public opinion part is that opinion should not be the only measure for making decisions. Different issues require different measures. Some issues need to be decided by the application of a metric, some by the scientific process, some by a majority vote, some by a consent vote, some according to the test of a social value or by the granting of a right, some by the application of a set of conditions or according to some other decision making protocol. And always, there needs to be a set of intellectual rules that define the logic of it. Yet in our system, opinion based voting, political posturing and the application of entrenched bureaucratic rule seem to be the only ways that decisions get made. Because of this, most thinking, knowledgeable people have become disillusioned by the political process.
It Gets Worse
Our Members of Parliament get together in the House of Representatives to debate topics they raise. Occasionally they may put forward a topic raised by one of their constituents (the people they are supposed to represent) but that is actually very rare. Sometimes they might raise an issue that a special interest lobby group have encouraged them to put forward. Sometimes a pre-existing bias to a type of management style will cause one group of politicians to behave one way and another group to behave another way. As a summary, if an issue serves the political aspirations of a member of parliament (political aspirations which include aspirations within a political party they belong to), they will raise that issue. If an issue doesn't serve their political aspirations or if it might hurt their political aspirations, they almost certainly won't raise the issue at all. This essentially makes political lobbying and visiting your Member of Parliament, mostly ineffectual.
Sometimes a government department will make a recommendation to parliament. This recommendation may have come about as the result of a lot of work, special consideration, expert consultation etc., all of which may or may not be appreciated at the time. Sometimes a government department may offer recommendations that contain a particular, institutionally defined bias. Because it is defined within the institution, this bias may be hard to change. Government departments are essentially bureaucracies which mean that they must follow a set of rules and procedures. Deviation from those rules and procedures is not permitted even when it is obvious to all involved that those rules and procedures are flawed. This essentially makes appeals to government workers ineffectual and can make calls for change from government employees ineffectual also.
Our parliament system was created to have a government and an opposition. Here, this is designed to bring an adversarial approach to the debates. It is thought that here you will get more issues raised but really what happens is that you get a government and a nay-saying, bash the policies of your opponents style of behaviour emerging. It is rarely constructive debate.
In response to the issues raised and the debates held, the House of Representatives may get together to vote for a particular change to be made or action to be taken. This change or this call for action then is given to one of a number of bureaucratic, government departments. It is the job of this government department then to execute the directive according to their internally developed policies and procedures. Often these policies and procedures have been developed with very little public consultation. Only when it is decided internally to be of benefit, will some of these departments seek out input from the public. The reasoning they use to decide to do this or not do this can be flawed. What they do with the information they collect from the public can also be less than logical.
A Solution Implemented Over Time
Right now we are building an Internet based system that will help to bridge the gap between our political representatives and those they are supposed to be representing. It will allow any person to contribute an idea, to challenge an idea or to ask a question. But more than that, it is a system that will use sophisticated reasoning tools and social interaction tools to help test ideas and to elevate the best ideas to the top. It will allow society to collectively solve complex problems by allowing individuals to contribute even small corrections to the ideas of others. Individuals can contribute single ideas which can be pulled together with the ideas of others to form complex, all encompassing political plans and actions.
Now this system won't immediately be a government system. We are creating it privately as a public platform that will allow you to have your say. Our government and our government departments won't immediately be obligated to use the system or to even read its content. But we expect that as the system is used, as it becomes popular and as it gains credibility, the output of the system will encourage its use. We expect that it will reach such a level within our social consciousness, that eventually it will be hard to ignore the reason, logic and good ideas being contributed by our very own citizens.
A Politically Neutral Platform For All
As a politically neutral platform, we invite all existing politically interested groups to be a part of Politify. To encourage political parties, individual politicians and government departments to get behind this system, we need lots of people to get involved. Although we have explained the need for other measures, our current political systems are still opinion based. Voting is still a measure of popularity and that popularity is what gets politicians elected. We expect that you and many of your friends, colleagues and family members will want to join so that you can have your ideas heard by your political representatives. Along with you wanting them to listen to your ideas, will come you wanting to give your vote to one or another of our political parties and hopefully you will choose one that understands what we are doing here with Politify. So long story short, we expect all of our political parties to want to connect with you through our system so that they can hear your ideas, act on them and win your vote.
Politicians and government workers are citizens too and will be invited to contribute their own ideas, their own challenges and their own questions. If they have right behind them, we encourage them to get involved and to prove their case with well reasoned, fact based ideas and arguments.
How it Will Work
The Politify system is based on the following principles:
"An idea should exist until someone finds fault with it...
But that fault is an idea and it should exist until someone finds fault with it... And so on.
As a society, we should all seek to follow and implement the current most fault free ideas.
When finding fault, one should state what is wrong, what defines it as wrong and where possible, they should attempt to suggest its correction. Here we turn negatives into positives.
And at any time, anyone should be able to contribute a suggestion or ask a question."
These principles are built into the machinery of the website.
Layout and Website Structure
Contributions will be limited to single idea sentences. This innovation ensures that every idea can be challenged independently without that challenge necessarily affecting other ideas. Ideas can be strung together to form larger concepts and larger contributions. Connections between the ideas and the relationships that bind them will be defined by context. Ideas will be arranged into categories which themselves have sub-categories and so on. Each idea will need to be contributed into a place where that single idea sentence makes sense. The result of this will be a tree structure of ideas and idea categories and related ideas and related idea categories.
The “Make a Suggestion” Function
If you want to make a suggestion, you move to the location where your new contribution will make sense. You click the suggestion button and type it in. You will be taken through an editing process to check the spelling and grammer and to make sure that you have reduced your contribution down to a single idea sentence. If you have several connected ideas to contribute, you will be shown how to do this. You then will be asked to recommend a method for your suggestion to be evaluated. Here we recognise that voting is not always the best way to decide the validity of a suggestion. For example, if you have submitted something which relies on a fact, then the method of verification might be an experiment or review by an expert. Sometimes voting will be the best way to decide something; there will be several voting methods available. Sometimes an idea needs to be reviewed by a special committee or it might be best to immediately open it up for public review and challenge. It all depends on the suggestion, the people it will affect and the context in which it is presented. When you press send, your suggestion is spell-checked and saved and then it goes through the assessment process that is chosen. Once processed appropriately, the result is opened for public challenge. If you have called for the involvement of others, then that call will be broadcast.
The “Idea Challenge” Function
If you want to challenge an existing idea, piece of information or assumption then you click on the challenge button. Here you must enter information in a sequence for you to say what is wrong and what defines it as wrong. You will need to select an appropriate test for the wrong that you have defined. If it is a social wrong, it might require an opinion poll to be taken. If you think that something is factually incorrect, you will need to cite a method for verifying the facts. You will also be encouraged to suggest a correction to the fault you have found. This correction will be issued as a type of suggestion. Then your challenge will be assessed by a similar review to new ideas before it is itself opened for public challenge.
The "Question" Function
If you think that you or your fellow citizens need more information, at any stage you can ask a question. Here you need to first make every attempt to seek out the information you need for yourself. There will be instructions to help you to do that. If you learn something of relevance when researching your question, you might then want to contribute that as a suggestion instead and you will be encouraged to do this. You will also be asked to consider if your question contains any assumptions or statements which might need to come before it. Also, sometimes questions can be statements in disguise. Mostly we want to convert questions into answers. The questions that you ask might be ones that you need answers to yourself but sometimes you can pose a question that will get others thinking. Sometimes it is important to have both a question and an answer so that those following the conversation can learn from it. We cater for all of these different scenarios.
The "Administrate" Function
If you need to correct some spelling, some grammar, a detail of reference or some other matter that does not directly affect the logic or the contained information then you will use the Administrate Function. You might also use this to help organise the information. Sometimes an idea will be posted, these ideas form category headings which will create a brainstorm of sub-categories. Once you have lots of information on a page, it can help to reorganise into smaller categories. The administration function will allow you to perform this type of operation.
Idea Qualifiers
Above you will have read about the different ways that ideas are evaluated. Here we use a set of idea qualifiers to test ideas. Because human thought and perception is complex, there are actually quite a few ways to qualify different ideas. To start with, we will be building the system to run these qualifyers manually by a set of instructions but later we will be building automated, idea qualifying tools.
Not all ideas can be tested logically. Many ideas are social in nature or opinion based. The Politify system allows the management of these as well. One problem in our society to date is that there has been a lot of confusion over which ideas should be tested by logic, by the scientific process or some firm qualifyer and which ideas should be tested socially. The Politify platform will bring these distinctions to the attention of those using the system so that we all can contribute to the creation of more informed and more robust decisions.
Making Debates Friendly
Friendly and Productive... Qualifying ideas is sometimes thought of as a taboo subject because the opposite of qualifying an idea is disqualifying an idea. People sometimes get attached to their ideas, even if they don't make a lot of logical sense. People sometimes think of their ideas as an extension of themselves and so they can become protective of their ideas. When their ideas are challenged, they feel like they themselves are being challenged and so they get defensive. By contrast, within Politify, we encourage conceptual detachment by externalising the idea qualifying process. In this way, debates are calmer, better balanced and more objective. The ideas become the focus and not the people behind them. And because everyone gets the opportunity to have their say, to put forward their point of view, they will feel better heard. If their ideas are challenged, they will be challenged fairly. Some ideas they contribute will be accepted and welcomed and they can feel satisfied by this. Those ideas they have which get challenged, will be challeged for cited reasons. Everything gets communicated, its all out in the open and we can all grow from the experience.
More to Come
Some of the elements of our system need to remain confidential awaiting Intellectual Property protection. Other parts are still being considered and decisions on those parts will be made in the course of the development process. Because we are still building the system, some of these details described here may change. Later when the system is built, you will have the opportunity to challenge some of the ideas and assumptions that have gone into its creation. We will be designing this to be a self evolving system. We describe this as a Total Democracy Portal. But here we want to give you enough information to let you see that we have most of the details worked out and that its operation is a logically done deal.
As metioned, this article is just to give you an overview of the basic operation of the Politify system. There is still more to come. We are looking forward to the day where we can invite you to our launch. Until then, you may want to Contact Us so that we can put you on our mailing list.