Digital Democracy

And Zachary Liscow, former Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget, proposes ample “front-end civic participation” in exchange for reduced back-end litigation. That is, do the democratic work upfront then get on a fast track, rather than use the fast-track to avoid the democratic work and then suffer the blowback.

However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for gover... See more

Ultimately, the essential work of creating systems that genuinely work for everyone requires us to redistribute resources and grant power to those who have been denied it—something that deliberation can help to achieve alongside other political organizing. Deliberation alone will not create a more equal society, and the outcomes of such processes a... See more

Thus, the effectiveness of deliberative processes is threatened by what British political theorist Marit Hammond describes as “processes that may have the appearance of empowerment, but only serve to pacify democratic demands without actually submitting to their bottom-up force.”

Technology cannot fix the fact that freedom is an endless meeting, but it can make the meetings shorter and less painful with new collaborative tools and by automating the worst of the bureaucracy

With technologies that can now facilitate discussion and decision-making among groups both big and small, we must ask if we can build new kinds of intermediating digital spaces, ones that provide perspective, attention, and action on shared rather than personal problems, while at the same time accommodating discussion and deliberation at local as w... See more