The White House’s attempts to gather input from citizens have hit some bumps, wrote Anand Giridharadas recently in the New York Times. This administration has done far more than its predecessors to let citizens provide input directly to government via the Internet, but they haven’t always received the input they expected. Giridharadas writes:
During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president…. They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing…
In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide wi-fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.
Once in power, the White House crowdsourced again. In March, its Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted an online “brainstorm” about making government more transparent. Good ideas came; but a stunning number had no connection to transparency, with many calls for marijuana legalization and a raging (and groundless) debate about the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate.
It’s obvious what happened: relatively small groups of highly motivated people visited the site, and their input outweighed the discussion of more pressing national issues. This is not a new phenomenon — there’s a long history of organized groups sending letters out of proportion with their numbers.
Now, these groups obviously have the right to speak, and the fact that some groups proved to be better organized and motivated than others is useful information for policymakers to have. But if that is all that policymakers learn, we have lost an important opportunity. Government needs to hear from these groups, but it needs to hear from the rest of the public too.
It’s tempting to decide that this is inevitable, and that online harvesting of public opinion will have little value. But I think that goes too far.
What the administration’s experience teaches, I think, is that measuring public opinion online is difficult, and that the most obvious measurement methods can run into trouble. Instead of giving up, the best response is to think harder about how to gather information and how to analyze the information that is available. What works for a small, organized group, or even a political campaign, won’t necessarily work for the United States as a whole. What we need are new interfaces, new analysis methods, and experiments to reveal what tends to work.
Designing user interfaces is almost always harder than it looks. Designing the user interface of government is an enormous challenge, but getting it right can yield enormous benefits.
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