When I was up in Newcastle, I often listened to Karl Kruszelnicki's science show on JJJ . He is an obviously intelligent and knowledgeable man, who doesn't suffer from the arrogance that often comes with it. One of the features of his show was the ease by which he admitted he didn't know, and would either go off to research it so he had the answer next week; or people would ring in with the answer to the question which stumped him. I recall Karl saying once on the radio, after someone calling in helped him, "There is much wisdom in people".

The Federal and State governments are populated by professional politicians who are become more and more entrenched each year. They are managing the media in such a way, that they can make decisions with impunity, and only have to take notice of the electorate in a short period prior to elections. This is leaving us with inferior outcomes. Our government institutions lack vitality, vigour and relevance. This can be amended partly by greater participation of non-professional politicians in the government process. Basically tapping the profound wisdom that, as Karl commented, can be found in the people.

Non-elected Cabinet Ministers

The Imagining Australia folks in their book have a section on expanding eligibility for the Executive Cabinet. In the Westminster system the formal power of the Executive is spread across the Executive and Legislative. By the Constitution, the Executive is the Queen of England. Her representative in Australia is the Governor-General, who is constitutionally guided by Parliament.

The Governor-General heads the Executive Council. This contains the Governor-General and the Executive Cabinet. The Executive Cabinet is a collection of the Prime Minister and other Senior Ministers, such as the Treasurer, Foreign Minister, etc. The Prime Minister heads the Executive Cabinet and by convention guides the Governor-General. The real power of the executive lies in the hands of the Prime Minister, no matter how ambiguous and obtuse the Australian Constitution is in this area.

The Imagining Australia folks call Australian Government, "responsible cabinet government". Built as it is on the British tradition of responsible government. Even though self-government has survived in Australia since the 1850s to provide a relatively stable political structure, the Imagining Australia folks ask if it can be improved. They see one area of improvement being in opening up the Executive Cabinet to non-elected appointees.

There are two issues surrounding this. The Prime Minister through the wielding of absolute party discipline has become the dominant member in parliament, and has warped the cabinet system to a presidential style of singular executive. Another issue is that those that make up the numbers of the cabinet are often professional politicians with little experience of private industry, or of a non-political speciality. For instance, John Howard was last in private industry in 1974. Since then, a total of thirty-two years, he has been a professional politician.

The Imagining Australia folks write;

We propose broadening the pool from which ministers can be drawn. The prime minister should be able to appoint Cabinet ministers from outside of parliament. Any Australian with the appropriate expertise and experience should be eligible. These people need not be experts - after all, policy experts are often best situated in the public service. Rather they could simply be individuals who have been successful in relevant fields and who, by virtue of their political and managerial skills, would excel in a ministerial role.

As the authors note, it is not a radical idea. The US Executive Cabinet is entirely composed of appointments, rather than elected officials. The President and Vice-President are the only ones elected in the US cabinet. The danger in this system is that individuals who have been rejected in an election will still get appointed into powerful positions. A good example of this is former US Attorney-General John Ashcroft. He failed to win election in Mississippi, yet was appointed into a senior position in the cabinet despite being rejected by voters as unfit for public office.

Another issue that is not covered in the Imagining Australia book, is how the appointments would be approved. In the US system the Senate approves the Presidents appointments. This often means that those who appear unfit for an appointment are closely scrutinized. For instance Alberto Gonzalez, who had given legal opinion on Guantanamo Bay and the practices that were condoned there. Another is the current appointment of John Bolton. It would be in the interests of separation of powers that the Prime Minister puts any outside appointments to the Executive Cabinet through the Senate first, where they can be approved or rejected.

The Imagining Australia folks write;

Such people [those that may be suitable for an appointment to cabinet] could inject new life and ideas into policy-making, informed by sustained practical engagement with particular issues. In a nation of just 20 million people, governments should draw on talent from all walks of life - and should aim to produce a Cabinet that is representative of Australia in all its diversity.

While that is a nice sentiment, nowhere in their book do the Imagining Australia folks seek to draw on anything but specialists. The Imagining Australia book follows closely a doctrine of increasing the number of non-elected specialists into Australian government, economy, policy and culture - with a decreased level of accountability to the public. This is the weakness of the book in my opinion.

However I am comfortable with appointed cabinet ministers as long as the appointments are known well in advance of an election, and that they have to be approved by the Senate - and maybe Ratifiers and a People's Chamber too.

A People's Cabinet

Nicholas Gruen in a recent post to troppo armadillo, advocated a People's Chamber . Nicholas based it upon the shallowness, and homogeneity of political culture - the same base from which the Imagining Australia folks worked from in proposing appointed Cabinet members. In proposing a People's Chamber Nicholas instead saw inspiration in the original democracy itself, Athens . Athenian democracy incorporated aspects of sortition and direct democracy. Sortition is the process whereby officials are chosen through lottery, rather than election or appointment. Unlike post-enlightenment democracy, the Athenian model did not incorporate the principle of separation of powers, nor universal franchise.

The People's Chamber would be a third house in the parliamentary system. One where its representative would be chosen by sortition from the population to participate in government. The chamber would be approximately one hundred people. From a later thread, Ken Parish tentatively agreed with the principle once he determined it didn't require physical presence in Canberra to be effective. It should be noted Nicholas made no determination on any requirements in the physical presence of the chamber in his post, or subsequent comments, but Ken thought small periods of face to face meeting for the chamber were acceptable;

Maybe it could work if the People's House met for (say) 3 or 4 fortnight blocks each year. Any more than that and too many people would be precluded from membership, not only people in my position but single parents, most small businesspeople (including trades), and anyone who is still carving out a career where 3 years absence would adversely impact promotion prospects. That sort of length of time ought to be enough to work, although any shorter wouldn't. And I guess you could turn over the membership every year rather than every 3 years.

The important aspect of this proposal is that there is wider recognition that there is no legitimate voice of the people despite Australia's reliance on proportional voting. Pluralism has largely been destroyed by the parties, absolute party discipline and professional politicians.

Citizen's Representatives and Citizens Auditors

Scrymarch in the past has proposed sortitionists being injected directly into parliament. Chosen by lottery, and serving alongside elected politicians to be involved in forming government, opposition and independents. I cannot find a link for it, as much of Scrymarch's political philosophy is spread across comments rather than articles, but IIRC a considerable percentage was proposed - in the order of twenty-five percent.

Again this was to inject the people directly into the process and take advantage of their wisdom, ability to excel, and their non-political experiences while they are fresh. From a comment ;

I like indirect democracy, and community representatives; but the current mob are not representative. Which is where sortition and ratification comes in. Sortition puts people representative of the population in Parliament. Ratification ensures the consensus reality of the parliamentary village does not become too detached from the people. I see the process of ratification as a final referee, similar to a presidential veto, but with a clearer and less factional mandate.

I think the pace and detail of legislation is inherently too great to be sensibly weighed by a large electorate. Some delegation is required, by sheer division of labour. Mencius made the same point 2300 years ago.

Direct democracy mechanisms can be used well. The Swiss use Citizen Initiated Referenda to great effect. I'm a fan of that system. But the Swiss are pretty civic minded, and that takes time to cultivate. The number of proposals are also an order of magnitude less than legislation.

Another proposal of Scrymarch's was Citizen Auditors. These are spontaneous citizen groups which rise up to audit government - a kind of flash-mob for government auditing. I think this would bring superior solutions, not in government waste, but in identifying expensive, ineffective and impractical policy - which ultimately has to be funded to be implemented. This would definitely take advantage of the wisdom and application of the people and in my opinion would bring some of the fastest returns and improvements.

This proposal would require supporting legislation, which I doubt parliament would implement - government prefers acting privately and avoiding the public space as much as possible. This is also used to avoid criticism. Given the slow oscillication of the Australian system in the change over of government, the incumbent needs to be exposed to more pressure and criticism so that they take responsibility for their actions.

A Ratification Model

In an article titled, "The Fourth Estate" , I proposed a ratification model of parliament for an Australian Republic. In this model the Ratifiers exist mainly to kill repugnant legislation and bills that are not in the public interest. A good example of this would be the US Patriot Act, or Copyright extensions and DMCA like clauses that came with the Au-US FTA.

The Ratifiers would be a flash-mob chosen by sortition for each bill that passes the Senate. They are like jurors for legislation, and only exist for a single bill, in the same way jurors only exist as a group for one case before disbanding. Each group of Ratifiers will consist of approximately one percent of the population. I wrote;

The Ratifiers;

• will have its members chosen by sortition.
• will consist of at least 1% of the population to vote on a bill or a judicial nominee.
• will not be allowed to excuse themselves from the process, however an abstinence will be counted as no.
• will require a greater than 50% no vote on a bill to send it back to the Senate.

Note that the Ratifiers are intended to be anonymous - a secret ballot for each bill. They are also not intended to meet face to face, nor to offer policy suggestions as Ratifiers on a bill. Though they may comment as citizens or affected individuals as part of the normal political discourse. I constantly write on the inability of Australian Government to adhere to legislation that respects our rights and liberties. This would address that issue.

Conclusion

The above article contains four different innovations on the parliamentary model, but all come from the same standpoint; tapping the profound wisdom of the people, and the knowledge that the people know what is best for them - consequently injecting them directly into the political process will only benefit the country above and beyond the current system.

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Steven Pearlstein has an article in the Washington Post titled, "Aid Recipients Might Have the Best Ideas About Allocation" which covers alternate methods to allocate aid funding to needy states. The article challenges the orthodoxy that a small group of specialists are the best to determine what to do with donor money. Instead, GlobalGiving is using technology and the "wisdom of the crowds" to produce outcomes that are more efficient. This methodology has political implications, especially for models which incorporate ratification and sortition .

GlobalGiving

Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi have set up GlobalGiving to connect individual and institutional donors directly to to projects around the world. They claim this gives higher impact as the donors know where their money is going and it avoids the donors money being lost in bureaucratic overhead of non-profit organisations.

The GlobalGiving site has a Donation Wizard which can identify projects that need funding. it is remarkable how little money some of these projects require. For instance this project in India to provide computer education to the rural poor involves a total cost of $5,000 of which $1,840 has already been donated. Another is the founding of a Women's University in Afghanistan which needs $10,000 of which $3,106 has been donated thus far. There are numerous variations in the projects, from Child journalists in the Congo , lead contamination in Peru or rural micro-credit in Honduras .

GlobalGiving recently conducted an experiment on their website;

On its Web site, GlobalGiving provided brief descriptions of 112 development projects, asking site visitors to rank them on a scale of 1 to 10. About 50,000 individuals generated 200,000 evaluations. Simultaneously, a much smaller group of several hundred aid experts was asked to perform the same task. Of the 12 projects chosen by the experts, nine were also chosen by popular vote.

Part two of the experiment involved allocating $100,000 in prize money among the 12 finalists. Hundreds of wealthy donors at a conference in Palo Alto, Calif., were given five-minute presentations on each project and asked to immediately divide the pot. At the same time, a jury of nine of them was told to spend several hours reaching consensus on how best to allocate the money -- a proxy for the committee-driven process by which most grants are now made. Again, the choices made by the more deliberative jury were strikingly similar to the collective, seat-of-the-pants choices made by the larger group.

This has been called the "wisdom of the crowds" by James Surowiecki. More often this is seen from a market point of view, where decentralised groups, made up of individuals, acting in their interest, and from information they can discern; make more accurate decisions than small groups of knowledgeable specialists. A good example of this is Index Funds beating managed Mutual Funds for returns. Another example is Bryan Palmer and Andrew Leigh checking any polling data against Centrebet .

Surowiecki places some caveats on what makes a crowd smart however;

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

He also sees it important that the crowd not be biased, in Surowiecki's opinion this is why specialists fail as well - they bring their bias with them, that leads to inferior outcome. The groups must be truly decentralised, and genuinely diverse.

Democracy

Political parties are the casting of political bias into the representative system. I have made the comment in the past that people are pretty much the same all over the world, the difference is in the quality of government which runs from bad to suckitude. Part of the reason for government's inferiority is that it is inherently biased by the political parties which inhabit it, entrench themselves in it, gorge themselves at its trough and project their bias onto the people.

To temper this skewing of the system from inferior outcomes, and the bias of political specialists, the wisdom of the crowds can be used instead to make policy decisions. These would be anonymous ratifiers, chosen by sortition for each issue; and casting secret ballots on their policies or ordering of priorities.

This would not exclude the professional politicians, policies would still need to be made, even if ratifiers line item vetoed them, or voted on prioritising different aspects of different policies. This would also not exclude citizens, who could present their own policies and legislation to compete with that of the professional politicians.

Gary Sauer-Thompson asked the question whether the internet had transformative power in the area of democracy. Gary quoted Mark Poster while exploring this issue;

The Internet seems to discourage the endowment of individuals with inflated status. ...If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate.

I would argue that the decentralised data networks will flatten the present system of status entirely, making us all equal, and wiser for it. Gary comments;

If this is so, then it represents a rupture with the old politics of the active expert addressing a passive audience and which only grants the space for the audience to ask a few questions at the end of the speech.

The challenge is to adapt our system of government so that where ratifiers and sortitionists provide superior outcomes to representatives, parties, factions and professional politicians, they are injected into the process. I suspect the present politicians, who enjoy their ability to spray bias at a passive audience from the pinnacle of Australian power will have to be brought kicking and screaming into the new decentralised democratic era.

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Adam Bosworth is one of technology's fulcrum people having been at Microsoft to develop Access; BEA to develop Websphere; and now at Google to ride their wave. He makes a comment on the internet, which is the worlds largest co-operative endeavour to date, and the positive effects of crowd wisdom.

From the article titled, Learning From The Web ;

The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well. Successful systems on the Web are bottom-up. They don't mandate much in a top-down way. Instead, they control themselves through tipping points.

For example, Flickr doesn't tell its users what tags to use for photos. Far from it. Any user can tag any photo with anything (well, I don't think you can use spaces). But, and this is a key but, Flickr does provide feedback about the most popular tags, and people seeking attention for their photos, or photos that they like, quickly learn to use that lexicon if it makes sense. It turns out to be amazingly stable. Del.icio.us does the same for links (and did it first, actually).

Google's success in making a more relevant search was based on leveraging the wisdom of crowds (PageRank). RSS 2.0 is taking off because there is a critical mass of people reading it and it is easy to read/write, so people have decided to leverage that when publishing content. It isn't that it is a good or bad format for things other than syndicated content (for which I think it is very good). Rather, it works well enough.

While it is undoubted people have used these systems to create crowd wisdom, specialists (technologists) were required to put those systems into place. It will be the same in politics, politicians will still have a role, but in areas where crowd wisdom provides superior outcomes to politicians, and political parties, the politicians role will be limited to establishing a virtuous system where crowd wisdom can excel. This is very much inside the philosophical boundaries of a Harpurian Republic.