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.

cam

Interesting comment on Slashdot in response to Canada trying to pass legislation which would require ISPs to have interception capability (ie snooping) with any new technology deployed. The Bill would also require ISPs to hand over subscriber information when asked without judicial oversight.

The story wasn't what caught my eye, but this comment ;

Need a law to create "intercept legislation". Some of us techies know it as "packet sniffers" .

This is the Ratification Model that I have written about on SSR in the past. The Ratification Model would put sortitionists between Parliament and the Governor-General. They would be chosen, anonymously, from bill to bill. A kind of secret ballot for a jury of citizens for each piece of legislation that has to pass.

The Ratifiers would not be able to vote yes for a bill, they can only abstain or vote no. This is to stop repugnant legislation which majority and super-majority parties can push through parliamentary systems. It allows the citizens to halt truly and reject repugnant bills.

A deliberation poll is an opinion poll for consensus decision making. An advocate on metafilter of this technique essentially described it to be used in the same manner as the Ratification model which has been proposed on South Sea Republic.

From the metafilter thread;

... one of the really good ideas for governmental reform is the deliberative opinion poll, it would essentially be a trial by jury for every law passed by a legislature, congress, parliament, etc.

This would serve the same function as the ratification model. Ratifiers are chosen by sortition (lottery) and would serve as an anonymous jury for each bill that passes parliament. A ratifier would not be able to vote yes on a bill, but can only abstain or vote no. The purpose of the ratifiers is to stop truly repugnant legislation getting through to the Governor-general. Essentially it would be a citizens secret ballot on every bill, with approximately 1% of the population taking part in each ratification of a bill.

Deliberation Day

The Imagining Australia folks have borrowed from the deliberative democracy principle and advocated a Deliberation Day . This would be a national holiday before an election where the citizens can meet to discuss issues amongst themselves, or with representatives and candidates. They propose consuming the Queens Birthday holiday for this purpose.

They foresee these meeting places between voters to be community locations, for instance schools, churches, community centres. They propose that voters break off into small groups and discuss issues, with each voter having a timed period to talk.

While Imagining Australia shows empirical data to back up how even one day of focus on politics increases the knowledge of the surrounding issues. I really don't see this as being feasible. But if people want to do it, or try it, then I don't have a problem with the Queens Birthday being co-opted and renamed for this purpose.

I think that adopting a ratification model would be a better method for citizen participation in the political process and in political issues.

More on Ratification

• Ratification Model
• Tapping The Wisdom Of The People
• Ratification, Sortition and Crowd Wisdom
• Packet Sniffing Ratifiers
• Wiping Muddy Boots On The Senate

cam

Newspapers, magazines and other centralised media earns its trust quotient through the audience knowing there is a paid, professional and expert editors. With new emergant media, such as Wikis, Chris Anderson argues we give up microscale errors for macroscale efficiency.

From the article;

Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there's a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google's results. We want to trust what we read. When professionals - editors, academics, journalists - are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

As Anderson argues, centralised systems deal in errors of omission rather than commission. It is not unusual for news or talking heads to influence debate and accuracy on an issue by leaving out details. It allows their editors to sleep in bed straight at night as they have not bent truth - just portrayed a lop-sided version of it.

Emergant systems, such as Wikis, blogs, aggregates etc swamp the world in information. At the macro level they scale far beyond a small group of editors ability to convey information, or an elites' capability to control that information either. Anderson writes;

The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth.

Probablistic systems have a political role as well, ratification and sortition would improve the political process which is a highly centralised one and currently largely immune to wisdom of the crowds.

Hardt and Negri on Liberalism;

The arguments of Madison, who thought representation the key to breaking apart any monarchy of power, now seem merely like mystifications; Montesquieu, who advocated radical division of constitutional powers, has been silenced by the unity of the system; and Jeffersonian free expression has been monopolized by corporate media. The political lexicon of modern liberalism is a cold bloodless cadaver.

They continue;

Liberalism never really even pretended to represent all of society - the poor, women, racial minorities, and the rest of the subordinated majority have always been excluded from power by explicit or implicit constitutional mechanisms.

Today liberalism tends not even to be able adequately to represent the elites. In the era of globalization it is becoming increasingly clear that the historical moment of liberalism has passed.

Big statements.

Is representation purely liberal? It was a democratic advance for its time that connected the increasing equity of social and technological organisation.

On South Sea Republic we are constantly discussing post-representative forms of governance such as ratification and sortition . These technologies were not unknown at the time of the American revolution. Juries are an essential part of American Constitutional rights.

Juries are used to ensure that an individual is judged by the peers under the technical guidance of a specialist, ie a Judge. This was deemed the most efficient, and just form of judicial organisation.

There is no reason why modern liberalism cannot adjust those same principles to Executive and Legislative government. A Harpurian Republic reflects the most advanced form of social organisation that capable at the time.

Madison's beliefs on representation have been overtaken by advances in education, technology, health and enfranchisement. They have also been undercut by political organisation which seeks to increase the alienation and abstraction between representative and voter. Gerry-mandering is one such technique.

Our recent discussion on appointed or elected Ministers raised the issue of division of constitutional powers. The consensus was that factionalism has combined to make the government run pay party than by division of powers. Yet, many parliamentary systems, including Australia's, are specifically set up this way.

Australian government has no real recognition of division between executive and legislative responsibilities. Unicameral systems such as Queensland's and the ACT's have even less recognition of that separation.

Queensland's upper house was suicide squadded by Labor members, but the ACT and Northern Territory systems were created when people were more sensitive to separation of powers. Parliamentary systems are specifically set-up to ensure there is as little conflict between Executive and Legislative as possible.

Is that a failing of Liberalism? I think it is rough to throw that in its lap.

As to the corporate media being monopolised to such an extent that it is a statist mouthpiece, this is nothing new, and something that individuals have chafed under, even back in Jefferson's time. Jefferson himself, was an extraordinary muck-raker who would happily co-ordinate attacks on his opponents through the publishing media of the time.

But is the political lexicon of modern liberalism limited to representation, separation of powers and a free mass media?

It can be argued, rightly in my opinion, that sites like South Sea Republic represent modern liberalism as much as any other; and innovations such as sortition, independent constitutional review, abundant media, technology, etc are all part of the common lexicon on this site.

The American Republic had to update the responses in political science and philosophy to eradicate the ills they saw that damaged liberty and democracy. Republicanism is not static, nor is it conservative. It is an expression of the maximal political innovation and achievement of the time.

Today our list of ills is larger than in 1787 or 1901. The lexicon advances to innovations and technologies that can eradicate the attacks on liberty, democracy and justice.

cam

The most common form of sortition is juries. Recently in the United States anonymous juries have started appearing. The media do not like them, as they believe it fosters secrecy in the court system and violates the principle of being tried by your peers. But is there a role for anonymous sortition in politics?

The first fully anonymous jury in the United States was in 1977 when druglord Larry Barnes was tried in New York City. The reason for making the jury anonymous was fear of retribution from an organized crime figure's operation.

Political retribution can be a fear for ordinary citizens, and for many is a valid reason why they would never want to get involved in the political process. Unfortunately, the present state of politics and media means that the public and private life become one; with smearing a common tactic.

It is interesting to note, as the citizen commenteriat have increased in power and influence, this tactic has been used by opposing commenteriat as well. The Domenech and Armstrong scandals or affairs being good examples.

By sortition an individual can be thrust directly into the political process, which is a positive for the public process, but for many, maybe feared as a personal negative.

For small groups of sortitionists that would be taking a very public role, such as Alan's Citizen's Assembly who would appoint a President, or Adam's highly visible Queensland Legislative Council sortitionists , it would be difficult to promise any sort of anonymity.

The organised parties, using their wealth, influence and political knowledge, will most likely try to divide and conquer within the sortitionists.

Similar to the problem Labor found in the 1890s when it entered politics as the newly politically naive party. Labor responded by party discipline from the national executive being absolute. But what would sortitionists do?

It makes sense that sortition need not be compulsory. An individual needs to be able to opt out. This would allow them to be private, by avoiding public life.

The other option is to increase the franchise of the sortitionist body by using larger and larger numbers. This would dampen the statistical effects of a small body skewing the outcome, and not being representative of the people.

The problem with this is that it is impersonal. Obviously. Small bodies such as legislative ones, or committees deciding appointments, will need to be far more personal in their decision making.

An anonymous sortition body would work for the Ratification model I proposed however, where the ratifiers are an anonymous jury, chosen for each bill, and decide if the bill gets from the Parliament to the Governor-General.

The limitation being they do not make legislation, only judge it for its repugnance.

Political retribution and anonymity will most likely have an effect on whether individuals will get involved in political sortition. These issues will need to be explored in more detail.