Making Local Government Relevant Again

I've always agreed with the principles of the American founding fathers.  Unfortunately, the United States was established over two hundred years ago, and much of their methodology is now obsolete.  One piece that's been bugging me lately is local government.  It seems that in this day and age there's really not a huge point.  It has some relevance in cities, but even then individual ordinances really just don't matter much to the average American.

Now, perhaps there is merit to that.  Government should just keep things in order and stay out of the way.  The problem with that line of thought, in my mind, is that it simply does not work that way.  Local governments are tasked with maintenance, policing, etc, and often have little to no money to actually do what they are supposed to.  They wind up doing the minimum amount required and can't raise taxes to compensate because they're viewed as irrelevant.  It's a bit of a catch-22.

But does it matter?  I think so.  Ideally, local governments should be representatives of the community, sticking up for the people in it and connecting them.  Now, I could go into why community is important, but that is long, involved, and largely irrelevant for what I want to discuss.  For now, I'll just write under the assumption that community is important.

The other major issue with local government is that it seems so divorced from the lives of most people.  How many people have actually gone to a town meeting when not required to?  I've personally never had any desire to.  Not only is it an inconvenience, but I honestly do not believe that my attendance will give me any real impact.  I have no reason to believe that these politicians (and I say that with the utmost venom) care at all about my opinion.  They've never given me reason to.

I must admit, there's the possibility that I have my head up my metaphorical ass.  I'm the first to admit that I could be simply wrong, and perhaps there are quite a few people who care a lot about their community and are civic minded enough to dutifully attend most town meetings.  But I've simply seen no evidence to that accord.  Sure, I don't doubt there are some, however I'm willing to bet that the majority of people agree with me.

Why is that?  Why does nobody care enough to act?  Well, I'd be willing to bet that it's the same issues that plague all forms of government.  People don't think their voices matter, they think that the politicians are in it for themselves, and most are blinded by partisan thought.

How do we break out of that?  I see two main goals: community building and transparency.  Community building is a goal for obvious reasons, though perhaps transparency could use some explanation.  As it stands now, people largely view government as an opaque blob that tries to mandate from on high.  People don't see where these laws are coming from or the thought processes behind them.  As such, accountability is virtually nonexistent and bad politicians are allowed to continue.

With those two goals in mind, how do we change local governments?  I personally see a huge opportunity for growth by embracing the power of modern connectivity.  Now, what I don't mean is the crap that passes for most local government webpages at the moment.  The best case scenario is something like Boston's website.  Informational, useful, but still largely the "dictate from on high" mentality.  There's either no real concern for the principles above, or no creativity in addressing them.  I'd like to lean towards the latter, if only because I'm somewhat naive and I want to believe that people are trying their best.

So what specifically should we do?  I'd like to see several things.  The first major goal is the community aspect.  I want to cover that first because the transparency (and other goals) will build upon that.  To build community, we need to make people feel more involved, give them the impression that their opinion will be heard.  The easiest way I see to do that is with something akin to a forum.

Now, I very specifically don't say a forum because that's only a small portion of it.  Ideally, I'd like every citizen to have a real, government-sponsored online identity.  Now, before anyone freaks, hear me out.  This ID would be unique and verifiable, it would be your key to your local community site, and would have a significant amount of personal information.  On a basic level, I see it containing your name, address, some form of unique ID (perhaps SSN, but those are already overused), community information, and a government provided email address.  Sounds scary, I know.  To help mitigate that, the vast majority of it could be easily hidden (in fact, hidden by default), and I would want the option of using a pseudonym.  This would protect you from people who didn't like your ideas, but not from your ever-benevolent big brother.

Protection from above would be much trickier, and technologically more difficult.  In principle, I would like this to have near-perfect freedom of speech, limited only by sane moderation to keep things civil.  Open discussion is critical, and as such anything said should be protected from persecution or prosecution.  If someone wanted to admit they were attracted to little children and it was relevant and added to the discussion, I'd say they should be encouraged and protected.  Free speech is critical in an open society.  To encourage this, we need a combination of policy and technological protections that I'm not really sure of yet.  It's food for thought.

Putting aside the potential security and privacy issues, there are a lot of potential gains to this system.  Each person would have a verifiable identity, so informal votes could be trusted.  Each policy and upcoming bill should be open to vote, which should have some level of influence on the outcome (I'm undecided how much at the moment, but I would like some formal significance behind it).  I'd like a commentary system to encourage discussion on all topics.  Community moderation and meta-moderation would further increase involvement while decreasing the maintenance time needed from the government itself.

The site could include a multitude of other facets to the community aspect.  I envision general forums, a Craigslist-like system, perhaps even careers pages like some cities already do.  It should have IRC or something similar, easily accessible through a web interface (ideally without the use of any plugins, or options for several plugins, to increase the viability to everyone).  This would be of primary use to allow people to chime in during town meetings and the like, but it could theoretically have channels open constantly.

This is where it starts to tie into transparency.  Posting of transcripts of all events and meetings would be mandatory.  All vote counts, budget changes, hiring decisions, everything the government does would be readily available.  On a local level there is no reason for this to not be available.  There's no state secrets, no defense issues, nothing that would justify keeping this out of the public eye.

Perhaps one of the most game-changing possibilities for this would be a government bill wiki.  All bills would be posted to and edited on a wiki.  This wiki would only be editable by those with the business doing so, obviously, so direct community involvement would be limited to discussion pages.  The real benefit from this would be access monitoring.  All edits would have a name associated with them, a name that could be verified and that person held accountable.  Now, it would be possible to game the system slightly by forcing someone else to edit it for you, but that would really only be viable in the short run.  After a while the trends would become visible, and accountability would continue.  Ideally, I'd like that implemented on a national level.  In the short run, though, it is immediately viable to local governments.  This would prove its viability and it could then be pushed up the ladder.

There are plenty of other possibilities that I haven't touched on, but this is long enough for the moment.  Perhaps later I'll add more.  Thanks for reading.