Government 2.0
…you say you want a revolution….
 
10 folks in a small apartment in Egypt used social media and cell phones to start a revolution, and 17 days later the president of many decades is out of power.   Problem is now there is a power vacuum.  The People have no way to quickly establish a new government so the military is taking over.   It could end well, or it could end very badly with folks worse off than they were before.  Social media has proven it can create anarchy….will it also be good for spreading democracy?

Facebook and Twitter are great apps for inciting a riot to start a revolution.     We need the next app.  The app that lets the People gather together to quickly establish government of the people, by the people, for the people.    The app that prevents extremists from taking advantage of a power vacuum.  The app that enables quick restoration of the rule of law.  And allows folks to quickly get back to work.

The government2.0 app:
1. works on web, smartphone, feature phones, sms

2. works with the Carter Center or the Clinton Global Initiative to preload a structure for that country to have a clone of the US executive, legislative, and judicial branches.   who votes in which district, etc. While our system is far from perfect, it is at least a good starting point.

3. users come on to the app, confirm identity with facebook and/or cellphone and can run for president, senate, or congress.   candidates can link to videos on youtube, can answer FAQs, describe their stance on important issues, etc.

4. citizens can come on see who their candidates are, see videos, see their answers to questions, ask questions, see friends who have endorsed them, etc and place their vote by cellphone facebook login confirmed by cellphone.    with the ubiquity of cellphones, probably 95% of adults can vote in a low fraud way this way.   much better than a slow paper-based system that takes months to organize and probably ends up with much lower fraud and higher trust of the people.  and will drive much higher participation rate than we get in US elections.  perhaps think about a frictionless way for the other 5% to vote.

5. The citizens elect a president, their representative in the house, their senator.  

6. once elected, these folks come together online in the app and are able to quickly vote for a starter set of laws with templates loaded by the Carter Center.    The templates mirror the US constitution and laws and the representatives can alter them if desired and vote on them.   Early work involves nominating and confirming a supreme court, etc.

6. allow people from around the world to contribute money to the new government via the application.    with resources to pay the military, police, and government workers, the new government has a better chance of getting control and retaining/restoring order.

7. the president now has the will of the people by popular vote and becomes commander in chief and takes over the military.  UN and other countries stand by ready to be asked to help come in and secure important infrastructure (including nuclear weapons), to restore order, to fight back extremist groups who try to take advantage of the change in power.   the president can use this app connected to twitter/facebook/etc to help get the word out about what is needed, to encourage order, encourage folks around the world to donate to help, etc.

The newly elected government within a couple weeks can be highly-organized, with significant resources, and with the support of the people.    It may operate as a shadow government for a while until those in power officially cede control.   In egypt for example, in the 17 days it took for the president to step down, a completely new government could have been elected and organized to run the country.


The impact:
- Any country can now easily use social media to help themselves establish democratically-elected leadership

- Citizens unhappy in any country can use it to establish a shadow government to influence their elected reps.    We can use it in the US.   We can actually run a mock election of the house, senate, and president and those folks can operate as a shadow government.   No need for folks to be career politicians to get elected-if folks get elected to the shadow government, perhaps they try to run for real office later.    If the shadow government can come up with a balanced budget, perhaps the real government can as well.

- Fix the UN with this.    Setup a structure for the UN that mimicks our US system.  A country in the UN is the equivalent of a state in the US.  Each country gets two senators and a number of congressmen proportional to their population.    Folks around the world get to vote for the president of the UN and their senator and representative.   UN gets a supreme court similar to ours, etc.   if our system is good enough for us, we should be supportive of it for all the citizens of the world.

The impact:
Democracy spreads quickly around the world.   Countries around the world coordinate like the states did in the early days of the US for the greater good of the planet

May you live in interesting times….  *8-)

So technically how hard is this
- with the advances of the last 10 years, it is now possible
- facebook is a big enabler, already big coverage around the world, and most accounts are already cellphone verified.
- cellular infrastructure exists everywhere and is a big enabler.   in places like haiti there is no functional government, no functional homes, or clean water, but the cell phones work very well.    - voting would need to work via sms/text message and on feature phones.  lots of apis to help with this.
- plenty of scalable opensource frameworks to build on
- plenty of scalable platforms to build on top of

If one great CTO/architect/developer can be recruited who is passionate about it, the rest can come together.   Perhaps the open source community would quickly come together to help get this built.

Funding sources
- This can be self-funded.  Get the word out and folks around the world will contribute money to help get it built.

Getting the word out:
Perhaps Wael Ghonim would get behind it. Perhaps Tim O’Reilly will with his work on open government. Perhaps Robert Scoble will. Perhaps you will…