What problem are you solving?:

Nowadays still majority of decisions are originated by government and ministries. Only in certain cases (like changes in Constitution), when a voice of every citizen is important, government conducts referendums. This is a slow process where an ordinary citizen has no influence upon a topic of voting. Citizenry has very limited possibilities to initiate a public discussion around national-wide problems and can’t provide government with their consolidated opinion about on the topic in an efficient and reliable manner. Typically, initiators collect signatures of other people (on paper or as list of e-mail addresses) for supporting some idea and bring them to the government. The amount of signatures (or e-mail addresses) gathered should tell how considerable the named problem is. Unfortunately, this is extremely inefficient way, as it is impossible to trust nor to validate gathered data, as well as to draw a social-demographic portrait of people, who either supported or rejected an idea.

Describe your idea:

We see the solution as a website, where any citizen can rise his/hers idea to a public voting. The key difference of our solution from similar approaches is that Private Electronic Identity will be used for voting (in Estonia there is personal identity card, or ID-card). It ensures that every person has only one legitimate voice to support or reject an idea. Moreover, using ID-card provides information about personality of its owner: sex and age of the person and can optionally be expanded with additional information, like occupation, place of residence, level of income, etc. What is important, the name of the person remains anonymous. Metadata will help to reveal the actual mood trends, as well as to understand, what are the actual problems citizens are worried about. Voting results and social-demographic details will be free available through this website to all people interested in a true transparent democracy and will support dialog between government and people.

What country will this operate in?: Estonia

Who are you?:

We are a small team of individuals with strong competences in different areas: software development and e-commerce, marketing and sales, information processing and data analysis. We are open-minded and have active social position, but don’t belong to any of Estonian political parties.

We are running some internet commercial start-ups, and aimed to contribute into development of a new-age democracy in our country by means of modern Internet technologies.