Furniture company, Steelcase turns 100 years old this year, and so naturally they’ve launched a website that has nothing whatsoever to do with chairs and sofas. Instead, they’ve corralled journalist John Hockenberry to front a site that canvases dreams for the next century, asking all sorts of dignitaries to describe their best hopes for the world’s survival. Luminaries include the likes of Deepak Chopra, Roger Martin – and my boss and Doblin co-founder, Larry Keeley, who writes about his dream of revinventing participative democracy. Here’s his essay.
Most people think of the United States as a very young country. Given the childlike way we often act this is a natural enough impulse, but they are wrong. The U.S. is the oldest participative democracy on our small blue planet.
So consider this: perhaps countries have a natural life span, and we are at the end of ours. I am not a Chicken Little alarmist saying we will suffer the inevitable decline of all empires before us. Instead my message is positive and deeply focused on innovation: let’s reinvent participative democracy for the 21st Century.
And not just for the U.S. This reinvention should be a gift to the world – equally valuable in any land and for any people; useful at any scale: team, firm, town, city, state, province, region, country, and continent. To live up to its own promise, the U.S. should create it and should adopt it first but, hey, it’s an election year, so the odds that our “leaders” will do anything useful and path-breaking during this period of national embarrassment verges on zero.
How might we do it? Three revolutions, elegantly integrated:
1. Change how we fund candidates.
Since every country does this more wisely than the U.S., there are many good models to learn from, adapt, and adopt. Lawrence Lessig has the most interesting proposals for reinventing U.S. election funding, including the simple idea that all donations should be anonymous (so that even the candidate can’t figure out who donated) and reversible, so an individual or a company can donate today and claw back the funds next week. This means that candidates will have no idea who they are supposed to suck up to – raising the odd possibility that they might actually focus on making good decisions for rational reasons. Crazy, huh?
2. Reinvent how we understand issues.
To get past tiresome sound bites and attack politics we should harness new approaches to journalism that emphasize analysis as much as news. We see bits of this all over the web, but an ideal system would harness the power of deep data, information modeling, and great information design so that we can make it easier for anyone to understand hard things: Does capital punishment reduce crime? Does gun ownership make us safer? Roll it all up through devices integrated with social media so you can deeply understand something in a few minutes – on your tablet PC or smartphone. And, hey, it gives journalists a great new role.
3. Transform how we do polling.
People are polite. Ask ’em what they think and they will tell you. For decades now, we have resorted to daily, inane polls to help our “leaders” determine what people think. Instead, using deliberative polling, we could create practices where we would learn how people’s opinions change in the presence of objective, factual information about a topic. This would help leaders know what sensible, representative groups of people believe when they are taught actual facts.
Imagine that.
takemeonback reblogged this from thoughtyoushouldseethis-blog and added: Omg. Please read this. This is how simple it really is. Specially the bit on campaign financing. Specially if you are a...
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