Jimmy Breeze's Library tagged democracy →  View Popular

Even Scott Pack concludes Twitterstorms are "alright if they're basically about pointing out that someone has written something really, really out of order, and wanting to tell people about it". But some Twitterers, he says, published Jan Moir's home address. Others were plainly every bit as out of order as the journalist's piece: "It wouldn't be so good, obviously, if it reached a point where people were stopped from expressing an opinion."

The bottom line with Twitter, though, Pack argues, is quite simply that "I've got a way of saying something now. And if enough people agree with me, we can really make a difference." That, obviously, gives the site a mighty momentum – and be warned: a leaked internal document from Twitter suggests the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013. With that many Twitterers tweeting, the document reportedly says, "we will be the pulse of the planet".

One of the things design thinking does well is prototyping alternatives. How could that work for something as complex as health care policy?

TB:Design thinking brings experiments to life quickly to see what works and what doesn’t. It also lets us put more options on the table. Google does this all the time. Instead of making judgments based on some political agenda, we should try to make one prototype better than the last.

The Problem with Experts

In his award-winning book On Political Judgment, social
psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed the predictions of those
professionals who advise government about political and economic
trends. Pitting these professional pundits against minimalist
performance benchmarks, he found "few signs that expertise translates
into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or
‘discriminating’ forecasts." It turns out that professional status has
much less bearing on the quality of information than we might assume,
and that professionals–whether in politics or other domains–are
notoriously unsuccessful at making informed predictions.

There is a growing debate about the best successor model to commercial newspapers, with many contending proposals. I will mention three, each of which assigns a large role to an electronic public sphere: (1) private foundations or donors either provide endowment for newspapers or for nonprofits that employ political journalists (Propublica is the leading example, with editors and twenty-eight journalists who provide content to print and online media); (2) a public system that would extend the public broadcasting model to print media; and (3) a national endowment for journalism, with support tied to audience size (proposed by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres).

This is not the time or place to explore these alternatives. But in this fourth arena, cyber–utopianism—a celebration of the dispersed, decentralized, egalitarian, Jeffersonian, participatory, deliberative electronic public sphere—is not only misplaced but dangerous.

Gaurav Mishra of Vote Report India, also a Global Voices author, writes in his own blog:

Basically, users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.

We are hoping that Vote Report India will not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.