How Technology could Empower Democracy

An always-on assessment platform for politicians and their decisions — utilizing blockchain and AI

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

‘Professional politicians’ are usually optimized to play the ‘media game’ and often, they only focus on manipulating the public opinion rather than delivering value according to their commitments and official plans.

We need a way to empower the public opinion as a single voice, criticizing in a constructive way political actions, statements and decisions. Politicians must continuously feel the pressure as the result of their actions (or lack of) — not only via the established media networks and relationships with ‘journalists’, but also directly from the general population.

‘Running a country’ should be a measurable ‘project’ with predefined success criteria: there are well-defined micro and macro-economic metrics, social well-being KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), quantifiable strategic goals, global performance rankings, and measures of prosperity.

Countries could agree on a universal government performance assessment matrix or similar evaluation system, as a set of carefully selected KPIs — possibly with the right weight factors to reflect the priorities for each country. Imagine if — as part of formal political campaigns — party leaders had to commit to goals and impact on certain KPIs, in what time frame and what cost.

Imagine this commitment being ‘written in stone’ (or better, on the blockchain); politicians and parties could be then easily evaluated and tracked based on progress, against their fully transparent, objective, and immutable political commitment.

Moreover, a solid visualization and articulation of the KPIs, the political commitment, and the significance of any deviations would make the evaluation process easy-to-understand by the entire population. It would, in the long run, make citizens use more logic and less sentiment when making political decisions.

A ‘barometer’ for politicians

Moving this further, we could establish an always-on channel reflecting not only the progress of the government and each politician against the pre-election political commitment, but also what people think for certain political actions, decisions, and behaviors: an online tool accessible by anyone on the planet, anytime, as often as needed — presenting the contribution and impact of every single politician and political party.

We need to empower the voice of citizens; to enable them assess and constructively criticize any politician, at any time; to contribute by submitting comments, ideas, suggestions; to question specific actions, thoughts, decisions and political attitudes

Technology can enable these scenarios, also with the use of analytical techniques and artificial intelligence to make sense and automatically summarize the massive continuous feedback by citizens.

This could take the form of an intelligent system able to visualize critical aspects of the performance of a government and each of its members; a modern system overcoming the complexity and noise of our legacy media world, by communicating growth, progress, prosperity, and governance in an objective, comparable way.

While this ‘feedback from the citizens’ would never be representative or allow statistical inference (bias, non-randomness, sentiment, and bad intentions will always be there in such scenarios), if at scale, it could send a clear message back to politicians and political parties: You are all exposed, continuously assessed for your political actions and decisions. An ‘on-going, large-scale social-assessment’ of the political world.

Massive adoption of such a platform would make the political system work in a better mode; it would encourage citizen participation and enable multiple voices of constructive criticism to politicians — also to promote the good ones still out there.

A performance dashboard for each politician of the world summarizing popularity, consistency, effectiveness and other key performance metrics: A more objective assessment for politicians and their parties.

Politicians to get empowered as well

Each politician could have his/her own political timeline and powerful tools to communicate statements, decisions, thoughts, and intents. The timeline could also visualize trending metrics — what people believe and how they react on particular decisions, actions, statements made by the politicians.

Politicians would be able to promote their vision, thoughts, ideas, goals, and objectives and effectively communicate with citizens. Both citizens & politicians would be able to analyze trends and social discussion patterns in a unique way.

‘Named opinions’ for politicians and their decisions

The platform could also support closed loops of named public figures expressing opinions on particular politicians and their decisions — also including 360 assessment — among politicians, within or between political parties, etc.

A single point of reference regarding politicians

APIs to offer ‘politician’s performance’ at any time — to embed in news sites, blogs, etc. Social media platforms when referencing a politician could enrich the user experience by integrating assessment metadata — the politician micro-dashboard.