Everywhere in America, at around 6pm on a weeknight, you can witness a ritual of complaints punctuated by occasional dramatic moments. These are pubic hearings required when local government makes decisions about which citizens have a right to be informed and to comment. Unless the complainant has a large political following or enough money to spend on a lawsuit, these statements fall on deaf ears. If the city council members wanted to know what people think, they’d ask.
People who “have a dog in the race” get 2 or 3 minutes to state their case before a quadrennially-elected panel of their peers votes on the matter. How they each will vote is often known before the meeting, when alignments are negotiated between the panel members and a few “connected” citizens that have more than average access. This is called, democracy.
After the vote is taken, those who disagreed wander away celebrating and/or complaining. They may appeal the vote or circulate a petition demanding that the matter be subject to a public ballot. They may raise money and file a lawsuit. Popular issues sometimes lead to protests and a litany of rants that roils social media for a while. These votes often determine livability, affordability and the carbon footprint of a community.
Local government hearings make good copy for local news outlets because of proximity.
Decisions by local boards are also involved in creating and opposing development that dramatically impacts quality of life everywhere. Public administration may be more competent in the United States than Mexico and Camaroon, but people in most places now have lost trust in government. And, though our lives are much more affected by local government decisions than state or federal, fewer people vote in local elections.
Campaigns promote personalities, not solutions. Historically, replacing elected officials produces little change.
$1.7 trillion federal budget and we’re flooded with daily email asking us for money for campaign media, but not about solutions, for personalities, dog whistles and problems far away that we nor our government can act to change.
Or so it seems…
As Marshall McLuhan put it, “the medium is the message”. Put another way, “all roads lead to Rome”. What to do?
We created Own Your Government to use AI and cloud technology to expand everyone’s ability to control things that impact their lives, especially existential problems like global warming. We started with three simple propositions:
1) AI and cloud technology can make it possible for more people to have a say in decisions that affect their lives.
2) Organized groups of people have an exponentially greater voice than individuals.
3) Communities are a pre-existingl grouping of people who share some mutual interests in survival.
Many complaints are global. We decided to build an app that gives anyone that wants to use it, an ability to organize the collective power and resources of their community to influence government and implement solutions.
We called this app, ownyourgov.
– DESIGN PRINCIPLES OF OWNYOURGOV–
In a community, everyone has a shared interest for survival
AI can empower media that accurately informs and gives everyone a voice and a vote
Values, vulnerabilities and local conditions affect all community members
Inclusive consensus reveals common perceptions and shared interests within a community
People in a community are in various ways, interdependent
Interpersonal problems in a community may be resolved in communication
A community platform on cloud technology can be a safe medium for communication
With community cooperation, AI can be trained to mitigate differences
Success of the AI empowered medium depends on acceptance and thus, a rewarding user experience