How can we fix our government?

Last night I participated in a conversation on a Hacker News thread that helped me realize what I’ve probably subconsciously known for a long time, which is today more often than not people feel and express a lot of angst, anger and hostility toward the US government. The hostility surfaces anytime the government seems to be acting in a way contrary to our belief system, but we don’t always only attribute it to being a disagreement between educated human beings. In fact when our points of view are farthest from one another we will attribute it to “government overreach” or “government bureaucracy” or any number of labels that attack the intrinsic nature of the government’s (or a party’s) ineptness. One of the reasons I think this happens is people perceive certain critical events (namely new laws) as the equivalent of falling off a cliff where you will have little to no ability to correct your path should you recognize you’ve made a mistake. This is because these days the US government is gridlocked on an ongoing basis so even passing a bill is unlikely to happen, and when it does no one really cares for the outcome. While I understand and associate with the sentiment, I think letting our emotions get the best of us can be a somewhat misdirected use of our energy. That feeling is unlikely to go away, however, unless we can figure out what a more effective use for that energy would be.

I think that if people had a clear path / vision / mission for how they could actively participate, to help fix the systemic problems we all know exist, they would have a far less cynical and perhaps even optimistic view of what the US government could be. We also have to realize it’s not a sprint, but a marathon that will take time and results will not come overnight. It seems the overwhelmingly popular point of view in even some of the most highly educated people in the world (pulling from my experience of reading numerous related threads on HN) is that government will always be (to a degree) cripplingly bureaucratic and deadlocked, and unless you keep them on a ridiculously tight leash with overly detailed and verbose laws they will run amok and all of a sudden you’ll have <hyperbole>the US government run by [name your favorite dictator here]</hyperbole>.

What follows is a description of my journey toward trying to find a way to redirect that angst and sometimes empty / helpless or even angry feeling you get when your government seems to be doing things contrary to what you think they should be doing / standing for. Though this story is focused toward my experience trying to find a clear path, and insights into how I plan to contribute my time / energy toward improving the US government (mostly at city / county / state levels, but perhaps also at federal level), I think the same or similar concepts can be applied in any democratic country.

About a year ago I decided I wanted to start participating in some civically minded groups. So I decided to join a politically focused meetup group that I found online. I had no preconceived notions of what to expect. But I learned pretty quickly what I was going to expect had I accepted the status quo and remained active in that group. Now, to be fair, being that I’m in a very rural area I expect my experience might have been different had I attended a similar group in a bigger city, but I think I can extrapolate in general what a person can expect at meetups like this.

Now, before I go on I want to mention that I have a deep respect for anyone who either coordinates or participates in meetups like this. I think people, given their immediate situations, will try to do what they can in the best way they know how. With that said, from the first (and only) meetup I attended I realized this is an area that could use some thought and reflection to see if there’s any way these groups could be improved upon.

I feel I have a certain skillset. A very powerful skillset in that I’m a web developer. Sometimes we feel like we can move mountains, which is of course a bit of an exaggeration, but we can and do facilitate peoples’ ability to reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people around the world on a daily basis. And yet it appeared that if I were to stick with this meetup group I would be reduced to door-to-door campaigning, or making phone calls from a call center, or standing in a group of people with signs at so called “rallies” or “protests”. I thought, “why, with all the technology at our disposal these days, do we have to reduce ourselves to this in order to be politically active?”. It was obvious to me that political activism, just like politics and government themselves, are behind the times.

So a few months later, after thinking about how to improve on this idea of the “politically active meetup group” I came up with an idea and started a meetup group of my own. In hindsight the concepts were a little too abstract, and perhaps a little misdirected, so I never followed through on it. The number of people who expressed interest was insignificant as well which helped me realize what I was trying to accomplish was not “being heard” or maybe not understood by the people who came across the description of the group. And the idea was to hold the meetups in a larger city nearby so that just reinforced my recognition that it was not clear to people what the vision was.

I didn’t give up, but until I could clarify what I was after I figured I should put things on hold. Then last December (2014) after further reflection I feel I had some good insights into some of the intrinsic properties that need to exist in a meetup group of this type:

(1) The vision / mission needs to be crystal clear — I think alot of groups sidestep this just because these days people label / associate their identities with a particular political party. So the coordinator of the meetup group says broadly in an announcement “I’m coordinating a meetup group for [name political party here]”. Then predictably people who see the announcement say “Oh, I’m a [name political party here], that meetup group is for me”. This is what I was trying to avoid. Mainly because I don’t associate with a particular political party. Though I generally find I agree more with one of the two major parties in the US than the other, I don’t feel my identity is somehow inherently attached to that party.

(2) People need to be able to be productive toward the group’s objectives proportionally to what they’re bringing to the table. If they’re putting ‘x’ # of hours of their time toward the objectives of the group then at least they should be able to show for those hours of contributions.

(3) People should be enabled regardless whether they’re able to attend meetups or not. Once a foundation has been laid with a member, I don’t want their ability to contribute to the group’s cause to be attached to or somehow dependent upon whether or not they’re going to be able to attend a meetup. People have lives outside the group, and while I expect as a coordinator that I’ll be putting more time in than most, I can’t expect other members of the group to care as much nor to be as active as I will be. I want someone to be able to decide (for example: after dinner and before they go to sleep) that they have a few minutes to spare. If they decide they want to spend that time working toward the group’s objectives, it should be easy and straightforward for them to do so.

(4) Progress should be tangible. If I’m going to expect anyone to find an interest in helping me achieve the group’s objectives they should be able to recognize and understand when progress is being made. Now, someone could show a correlation between an outcome and the fact that we made an effort by making phone calls or campaigning door to door, but there’s no way to equate that to show there was any definitive causation. In fact the outcome was probably very likely before we even decided we were going to make phone calls in support of the issue / candidate.

(5) When trying to tackle something as big as trying to help improve your government, you need all the help you can get. It’s also a problem that I think many people from all political parties have an interest in fixing. So it was a no brainer that the group needed to be as inclusive as possible, and thus would have non-partisan objectives.

(6) This is not essential, but would be a nice bonus. Other groups should be able to take advantage of our learnings / efforts independently of whether or not they decide to join the group. This kind of thinking builds a potential for exponential growth into the efforts of the group. If we’re doing something that’s going to be useful in one form or another to other people outside of the group then all of a sudden a member’s contributions become just that much more intrinsically valuable.

Ok, so from the above I feel I have a relatively good foundation of properties I want in the group. We also have some good principles for deciding what kinds of stated objectives the group should have.

Then I realized I had another meta-problem I needed to answer. Even with all the principles laid out above, it still wasn’t clear to me how to go about deciding what the group’s objectives should be. Finally it struck me. What are a citizen’s pre-defined interactions / obligations with their local state and federal governments? So I laid them out: (a) pay taxes, (b) don’t break laws, (c) vote.

Ok, so the obvious choice was C, but still what are we going to do about voting? Finally the endorphins kick in and I realize I have my answer. Voter education.

One of the most annoying things about the voting process is that detailed information about the candidates and issues that will be showing up on my ballot in the next election are rarely readily available. If I really want to do my due diligence I have to do alot of work just to search for relevant information, and filter through all the noise to get to the meat of what a candidate or an issue is really about. It’s obvious that we need to make voter education so extremely easy that it would be almost inexcusable to not spend the small amount of time it would require for a voter to thoroughly educate him/herself on the issues / candidates they will be voting on in the next election. Our group’s objectives will be to aggregate, categorize, cross-reference, and index information about the candidates and issues in each voting district. This way a voter just has to visit their voting district’s page to gain access to a plethora of information dedicated exclusively to helping that voter educate themselves on the issues / candidates that will be showing up on their ballot in the next election. Notice I didn’t say “rate”. Being a non-partisan group we’re not interested in trying to sway a voter one way or another, but what I can say is this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Now that we’re going to have this large collection of raw data to help educate voters, imagine if there was an open api that other people could use to build services on top of the data we’ve accumulated. In fact it wouldn’t need to be an api, though this is a viable solution. And for those who don’t want to have to rely on an api, the data at it’s core should be licensed in such a way so as to allow free downloads with no strings attached for anyone who wants it.

Imagine if someone decided to build a social component on top of the data. Now all of a sudden you have people following other people to see what news stories / research other people in the community find useful or recommend about a particular issue / candidate.

There could be a news feed service where users could subscribe to topics / issues / candidates to be alerted if new information comes through about a particular candidate / issue. The possibilities really are endless.

You have to admit there is plenty of noise to go along with the useful information in the media, so it will be an effort for someone to get through all of it. How do we get the most relevant information to a user without showing favoritism? By allowing other services to be built on top of the data, we don’t have to be responsible for rating an issue / candidate or weighing in with our opinions. But we don’t have to worry that it won’t exist for the users who want a service like this. As long as we have a comprehensive aggregation of the data that we expose to the api, or make available for download, then all of a sudden not only do you have a bunch of raw data, but you have a potentially vibrant ecosystem of apps / services being built right on top, all with the sole purpose of helping to educate citizens on the issues / candidates they will be voting on in the next election.