I just attended a BOF called Happening: Emergent Democracy at the Emerging Technology conference. Some quick notes...
I have to admit I have not yet read Joi Ito's Emerging Democracy paper and I'm disappointed because Emergent Democracy appears to be something other than what I thought. I was hoping for something that was proposing a fundamental change to democracy (or at least some serious modifications) because I feel that the current systems have failed us. But from what I could gather it seemed the focus was on allowing people to more effectively operate within the existing political structure.
It seems to me that the current democractic systems (which are rapidly becoming difficult to distinguish from plutocracy) have already become too corrupt to be brought back under control within the existing political structure, or at least none of the proposed technical solutions are immune from the corruption. It doesn't really matter how easy we make it for a citizen to contact his or her representative because the citizens are already controlled by the plutocratic powers that be who have a more fundamental grip on the citizenry at cultural, economic and educational levels.
I have a feeling that Evil is an emergent behavior encouraged by misconceptions and lack of common belief systems and that corrupt anti democratic powers are employing misconception (propaganda/spin/lobbying) to further their power. I think that perceptions and shared misconceptions must be the essential target of effort. Lately I've been trying to put some thought into how to attack misconceptions.
If you look at a statement made in a debate, you can say that the statement can be repesented as a logical extension of other statements. One can imagine a branched tree of statements in this manner. Often when people argue, especially those split along party lines, they are arguing different branches of a tree without realizing it. Branches that often are somewhat virtual, like superpositions or the branches of the level IV multiverse over time. The thing is that if both debaters follow their belief tree back far enough, they can identify the point where their belief system diverges.
If we could build a system that can represent knowledge and allow people to intuitively and easily identify their belief systems and locate the divergent point, they can focus their debative energy on the point that really matters. I think that this would result in great progress in shared belief systems as a whole, and that superior political systems will emerge from this practice.
Working on such a system would be complex (social networking, reputation systems, authentication, human computer interaction, visualization, distribution, etc, etc) , but I feel like it's a much better use of resources than trying to make it easier for citizens to participate in a game that they can't win anyhow.
