RE: [WDDM] Re: Have you taken the time to check out onevoicenow.org??

["Jim Powell" <autoinfo(at)acenet.co.za>]

Hi All,

Great way to market DD.

We have to be careful of manipulation of the emotional topics which would
swamp out the items that the politicians would not like aired.

The politicians are our employees, yet they do ot listen.

Regards

Jim Powell

-----Original Message-----
From: M. Kolar [wddm(at)mkolar.org]
Sent: 18 Mar 2008 12:34 PM
To: wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Cc: DAVID FRANK
Subject: [WDDM] Re: Have you taken the time to check out onevoicenow.org??

Frank,
What you suggest is OK. It is a variation of other similar proposals how to
involve media in democratic decision making. Compare e.g. my proposal to the

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of last summer attached below.
(My proposal is essentially based on the idea of the "proposal queue",
http://democracy.mkolar.org/toDonald.html in which all participants can rate

the merit of all submitted proposals to select those that will be discussed
further. You have instead the randomly selected groups of 10 participants
that
decide on the merit of individual proposals. The rest is very similar.
By the way, your random groups of 10 and their role resemble the Wisdom
Councils, e.g., http://wisedemocracyvictoria.com/.)

The problems are:
1. do you have a broadcaster who would be willing to implement this
scheme???
(CBC in my case has not shown much interest.)

2. How will you make sure that only registered voters for a given
jurisdiction
will register for participation in your TV/phone scheme if you do not
succeed
to secure a direct link to official voter list for that jurisdiction?
    The only one who is (to my knowledge) doing this correctly at present,
is
the team of volunteers who take care of voter registration for Mike Gravel's

National Initiative for Democracy online referendum, https://votep2.us/.
They
are validating the identity and right to vote of each online registrant at
votep2.us in the jurisdiction the registrants claim to live.

Mirek

----------------------------------------
Attachment: My proposal to CBC:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Proposal for a new democracy-building program
Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 14:01:20 -0700
From: M. Kolar <wddm(at)mkolar.org>
To:   @cbc.ca

I have entered this proposal into the Mike Wise Great Canadian Wish List
(GCWL)
blog as a comment (at http://www.cbc.ca/wish/2007/07/the_top_30_wishes.html)
(Posted July 2, 2007 04:37 PM).   I am resending it to you as I
want to make sure that it is considered seriously as a formal proposal to
CBC
for a continuation of the GCWL project under an improved format. To make it
a
permanent, ever-improving democracy-building project:

I have long believed that CBC as a public broadcaster should not only
passively
report news, but contribute more directly to the effort to introduce real
democracy to Canada. CBC could and should provide citizens with impartial
high-quality information on various important issues, and help them to
educate
themselves in public matters, and be able to participate more in all the
decision-making that effects their lives.

The "Great Canadian Wish List" project that has just concluded is a good
first
step in this direction.

I propose that CBC continues with a project that could have the following
format:

CBC listeners and viewers (Canadian citizens) would be able to nominate for
discussion (by phone, online; all the time) issues that are important to
them
or worry them most. All citizens would then be able to rate (again by phone,
online; all the time) the importance to them of all issues nominated in such
a
way. The issues would be ordered according to their current average rating,
and
dealt with in this order (when there is an opening to process another issue,
the one that has the largest support at that time would be dealt with next).
CBC would strive to have panels of experts and/or concerned citizens discuss
each issue and all their possible implications for a certain period of time
on
the radio and TV. This would be a great educational process to all, and
would
help us collectively make well-informed decisions. If a votable proposal
emerges from these discussions (to approve/disapprove a solution, or to
chose
from several possible solutions), it can be then put to vote to
listeners/viewers/citizens. The results of such votes would over time create
a
database of citizen positions that could not be easily disregarded by
politicians (at least they would have to pay some attention to them; the
weight
of each position could be determined by how many people participated in
discussion and voting on them; the results of votes could be further
verified
by scientific random polls).

Until one can ensure that each Canadian registered voter has strictly only
one
user account (one voice) in any online voting, the results of such votings
will
be in doubt. In this new project proposed above you should strive to ensure
this. It might be better to use your own technology than to rely heavily on
third parties such as Facebook. There are already other systems available
that
could serve as examples, or be even adopted for this purpose (one would only
have to add the on-air panel discussions, and more secure user
registration),
for example http://enitiatives.ca or http://www.myverdict.net.

Before the time arrives when for example Elections Canada will issue unique
digital signatures for Internet voting to all registered voters, it would be
important to ensure a sufficient security of the software used by the future
CBC democracy-building projects that the participants would not be afraid to
use their SIN or other such unique personal identification for registration
with these projects. It would also be important to prevent the misuse of
somebody else's SIN: a way must be found in the registration process to
contact
the holder of the SIN and get a confirmation from her/him that it was really
them who initiated the registration. These security features can be added
and
tested in steps. It is important to continue with these democracy-improving
projects as soon as possible. However more effort should be make on ensuring

that only Canadians participate and vote, and that it is much less difficult

for a person to create multiple voting accounts before the next phase
starts.
Until these security features are fully in place, the results of votings
will
not be considered credible by a lot of people.

Miroslav Kolar
http://democracy.mkolar.org