My Own Pirate Radio

One of the pet projects I’ve wanted to work on for a while is a site that would guide political policy by directly polling all citizens — rather than just elected representatives — on how a government ought to spend its resources. Let’s call it Citizens in Charge… CiC.

Here’s how it would work:
1. Upon registration you are given 100 “policy dollars” to spend.
2. You get to tell government what issues you want government resources spent on. For instance, “I want $15 on health care, $3 on the military, and $20 on public transportation.” You can also nominate new issues if they aren’t already on the ballot, e.g. “Spend all the rest on skateboard parks”.
3. You can change your allocation of policy dollars at any time.
3. The service continually aggregates participants’ responses and calculates averages and other useful statistics. So we might discover, for instance, that the average spend across all participants on skateboard parks is $22.
4. The service continually communicates the results to the public and to government officials.
5. Optionally, you could also use the service to do simple one-off polls, e.g. opinion on participation in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.

With a few thousand citizens participating I think you would get, at minimum, a public opinion poll that demands attention.

I got to thinking about CiC again after stumbling across a site called ConvinceMe.Net. ConvinceMe bills itself as, “A new way to argue. Debate online, vote online.” In a nutshell it’s a service that hosts online community debates on issues proposed by anyone. ConvinceMe seems more geared at entertainment than serious policy-making, but it is nevertheless the sort of building block you’d need to make the CiC vision come true.

CiC implementation challenges:

• Who gets to frame the issues, and how many issues should there be? For instance, should the issues be worded as “spend $X on issue ABC”, or “spend $X on issue ABC by taking actions X, Y and Z”? I prefer the former, at least as a start, because it’s simple. You could begin with the list of top-level budget headings from the existing government budget, plus an option to propose new issues at the grass roots level.
• How can issues be framed in a relatively unbiased way, with actionable results? This is always a problem in a referendum, where much wrangling occurs over how to word an issue before it is put to a public vote. ConvinceMe suffers from abuse in this regard.
• How to encourage broad and representative participation? (Lots of people dislike polls, or feel they are a waste of time. And would this be a service that only the computer-savvy make use of?)
• How to discourage anti-social behavior such as multiple voting, false impersonation, hacking, and so on? And how to protect participants’ security and privacy in case the service does get hacked?
• How to ensure only people who are allowed to vote can vote (e.g. only citizens of country X can vote on issue Y), and that their vote counts only once.

It seems inevitable to me that at some point such a service will exist, at least as a research tool if not a tool to inform public policy. Any computer science and politics experts out there willing to partner up and take a crack at it?

Springwise has a post on a company called CrowdSpirit that’s doing “crowd-driven” product development:

How it works: inventors submit ideas for innovative new products and contributors submit problems for inventors to work on. Members vote, define a product’s specifications, and can invest money to finance development. After a first prototype has been created, selected members test and help fine-tune in cooperation with manufacturers. Once the stage of product development has been completed, contributors continue to be involved, for example by acting as a product’s ambassador and promoting it to retailers, or by providing product support, like translating instruction manuals.

Neat. Collective intelligence and decision markets strike again.

The Springwise article speculates, and I agree, that it will be hard to convince people to generate valuable intellectual property for free. Giving contributors a share in profits would be a suitable incentive. Update 4:40pm, Dec 13: Lionel from Crowdspirit explains in the comments that contributors will indeed share in the profits.

It’ll be a powerful day for democracy when this sort of approach manifests itself in politics. Imagine real citizens actually having a direct voice on policy, rather than being forced to filter it through self-interested politicians.

If you’re interested in the shifting line that demarcates human and computing capabilities, check out this podcast from Jon Udell. It’s a conversation with Nathan McFarland and Benjamin Hill, both of whom are working on so-called “collective intelligence” projects that farm out tasks to ad hoc networks of people. According to Jon, “Nathan runs CastingWords, a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to distribute and coordinate [transcription] work to people. Benjamin’s project, Mycroft, packages up puzzle-like tasks in ways that people can interact with on web pages.” You can find the text transcript of the interview here.

Amazon launched Mechanical Turk late in 2005. It really got me thinking about what types of tasks are undigitizable, the interplay between collective intelligence and outsourcing, and related ethics and economics issues including worker conditions and incentives. It’s interesting to see concrete examples of people working in this area and exploring all these issues in great depth. For example, here is how Benjamin Hill approaches the space:

BH: …We’ve started to think of the whole knowledge workspace as divided on one axis along people’s opinions all the way to things that are absolute. Like people’s opinions would be “tag the image”, absolute would be “OCR check this one line of text”. There’s one correct answer versus “it really matters what people thing” and then along another axis we’ve got everything from easy where it just takes a few seconds of time, all the way up to very difficult where it takes a longer amount of time. If you can imagine both Mycroft and CastingWords occupying different bubbled areas of that knowledge workspace, so actually we’re going after different targets and I think both have a lot of value at that point.

Here Jon Udell gives some examples of the types of work that can be tackled in this way:

JU: …I’ll just read through a couple of the kind of examples you give in your commerce net paper. … “is this image inappropriate for children over seventeen”, “annotate this image with descriptive text”, “what is the text in this captcha image”, “how much do you like the clip from this new pop song”, “which hairstyle makes you trust this politician more”. So actually a whole lot of market research survey kind of stuff would seem to fit really nicely into this model.

Both organizations are still experimenting with how to incent workers. In Mycroft’s case it sounds like the work is sometimes purely voluntary and sometimes in exchange for non-monetary rewards. In CastingWords’ case workers are paid small amounts per task completed:

NM: …I think almost all of our workers are people picking up a job here and there. A lot of them have indicated that they are working at the same time as they are working on our stuff at something else, some other job that doesn’t require anything more than a physical presence for whatever reason. A lot of the other ones are stay at home mothers or something like that. This is just a subsidiary income for most of these workers, and there are a lot of them which is part of the reason I think. Our workflow isn’t, we don’t have so much that we can maintain a steady flow for the huge number of workers we have.

It’s interesting stuff. Ultimately I believe technologies like these will change the nature of work, provide work opportunities to more people around the world, and even open up entirely new lines of employment by making certain kinds of tasks much more malleable, portable, and tractable.