Chris Van Buren at Internet & Democracy Blog has an interesting post today about how social media is being used in India to help ensure that country’s general election that kicked off last week is fair, or as fair as an event involving 700 million voters can be. Vote Report India is a “collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform” where users contribute direct SMS, email and Web-based reports on voting irregularities and other problems. The platform then aggregates those reports with news stories, blog and Twitter posts, photos and videos on an interactive map.
The idea is that this effort will bring more transparency and accountability to the month-long, five-phased election, dubbed the “worlds largest democratic event." Vote Report India’s inspiration is Twitter Vote Report, which monitored voting problems and irregularities during last fall’s presidential and congressional elections. Our friends at TechPresident were instrumental in developing Vote Report, which just won a Golden Dot Award from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet at George Washington University.

Change.gov has released another ground-breaking feature.

This time, it's "Open for Questions", a digg-like feature for voting up questions for the administration-to-be.

Somewhat similar to the example set by the British mysociety.org, No. 10 Petitions, Open for Questions is part petition, part comment thread, and part internet press conference.  By allowing anyone to submit questions, and then allowing votes on the best questions to rise to the top, the transition team is experimenting with one answer to the question "What are you going to do with all of those comments?"

This is a real question, since the healthcare conversation, as of this writing, has racked up over 5,000 comments.  A reporter asked me today how one can possibly benefit from an overwhelming number of comments.  My answer was that it can be a challenge, especially as the response increases.  More important than initially designing a perfect system, though, is to experiment with what might work.  Expertise and knowledge are distributed throughout the country, and no matter how extensive the team's outreach efforts, tapping into all of the ideas is impossible.

Tools like Open for Questions are at least one step toward solving that problem, of creating more meaningful interaction between citizens and government.

As Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry wrote on TechPresident this morning,

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the lesson of the story is we collectively need much better tools for mass collaboration than we now have. How do we scale up relationships of trust and accountability? Are we bound by what our brains are capable of--face-to-face relationships with a few hundred peers at best? Or can we develop effective communications and reputation systems that would enable much larger groups to connect effectively?

Agence France-Presse (AFP), France’s largest news agency and the third largest agency in the world, published a great overview of the power of the Internet as played out in the 2008 election. Not only have the candidates embraced Web tools to reach voters, the voters themselves have dove into the online world to lend a hand, organize and find out information on the candidates and news about the latest twist or turn of the election.

They article centers on an interview they conducted with Micah Sifry, Sunlight consultant and co-founder of TechPresident.com. "There are a lot of great non-partisan sites that have all kinds of information, not just about the presidential candidates,” Micah said. "For sheer self-education there's a great deal available out there on the candidates on the local, state and national level." Micah gave a shout out to OpenCongress.org as a great site looking into the records of congressional incumbents.

The AFP article also highlights a new study by the Pew Research Center that shows how the Internet has become a major source of campaign news. Television remains the dominant source, but the percent that say they get most of their campaign news from the Internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now), Pew reports. While Web traffic has skyrocketed, Americans usage of TV and newspapers has remained virtually the same as in past years. Amazing only to those who haven’t been paying attention, the Pew study found the Internet now rivals newspapers as a main source for campaign news. The use of online video such as YouTube has really taken off during the election season, with an incredible 39 percent of voters report having viewed or otherwise using online video in October, up from 24 percent in December. Record numbers of visitors have gone to independent news sites such as The Huffington Post and The Politico, and blogs such as Daily Kos and RedState.com, according to the report.

Zephyr Teachout (former Sunlight colleague and continuing great ally) had an interesting post at techPresident last Friday: airlines have started using mass emails in an attempt to influence Congress. Friday morning, she received an email from United Airlines asking her to visit a petition site, "which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my (member of Congress) to ‘Stop Oil Speculation' and lower energy costs." Zephyr reports Tracy Russo told her that she received the same email from Northwest Airlines. (I have heard nothing from either of my most frequently travel carriers - USAirways or United.)

Calling it big news, but not in the good way, Zephyr says that it looks like corporations are starting to use their huge databases to try to leverage their users to lobby Congress. She suggests that potentially tens of millions of emails could be generated, since airlines are among the biggest owners of email/databases in the country. She speculates that in a few years we'll see many more corporations leveraging their databases to advance their agenda. "As someone concerned about concentrated power in any form, this is not a great development," she writes.

She outlined a theory: "There were three powerful forces in modern society--civic democracy, corporations, and religion--and which ever of these learned how to harness the collective action power of the internet would, in effect, win--would define the basic framework for society for generations to come." She says that one hopeful sign is that corporations have been slow to leverage the Internet for collective action. "They're getting faster," she warns.

A disturbing trend. And I wonder where the lobbying is reported.

Micah Sifry (our strategic consultant and editor of techPresident) highlights another government transparency experiment coming out of the UK. The Power of Information Task Force is a British government agency working to improve the way government shares information with its citizens.  Yesterday, the Task Force launched "Show Us a Better Way," a contest that asks citizens to identify what they would like to see done with public information. If they like the idea they will help fund it, to the tune of £20,000 to develop the idea to the next level. Here are some examples of ideas they are looking for.

The Task Force itself just launched in March, largely because of the vision and efforts of Sunlight friend, U.K. Cabinet Office Minister and Member of Parliament Tom Watson. As Micah wrote back in April, "Watson is part of a new vanguard of political leaders who understand that the real gains are to be had in enabling people to connect to each other to identify common concerns, come up with solutions, and organize on their own behalf."

Can you imagine a similar task force in operation in our federal government?  This is such a terrific idea. The whole sentiment is so different from that of the US Government where the burden of getting information from government rests with citizens. I really  like what the contest site says, "Public data is your data." Congress and the Executive Branch could learn quite a bit from the likes of Minister Watson.