What NEED does this meet?
People get to call a web referendum with much less individual effort that it takes to call a real referendum. People get to vote on these web referenda. If millions of people vote on a particular referendum then it can be brought to the attention of the government.
What is the APPROACH?
Build a web application to support web referenda and publicise it.
What are the BENEFITS to people?
It would build people’s confidence that the government is representing them properly. If people call a web referendum and few others vote, the proposer can see that their issue is not urgent. If millions of people vote, then either the government will take notice or it can be asked why it is not representing the people.
What is the COMPETITION?
google “referendum site:.uk” suggests in its first 30 hits that nothing yet exists along these lines
What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?
There are at least two big problems: 1) e-voting (i.e. how to provide confidence to the government that votes are genuine and valid), and 2) organising the many web referenda so that visitors can find issues they care about without being swamped by referenda on issues they don’t care about.
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April 8th, 2006 at 10:21pm
This has potential. But the name? Maybe e-Poll would be better?
We need good political action sites but they need to be well designed and lightly moderated so that trivia/vandalism is prevented – but without the kind of heavy control freakery which made it difficult to use the Pledge Bank for politics.
http://www.petitiononline.com is a similar idea.