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Gov2.0 Federation in Pursuit of Crowd Wisdom

An argument supporting the development of an open, comprehensive candidate database and participation in an open, federated opinion sharing network. @everyvoteorg - contactus@everyvote.org - www.everyvote.org SUMMARY: Today it is impractical for average Americans to cast a well-researched vote for every office in every public election they are eligible to vote in. Fortunately, Gov2.0 technologies are making the task of being an informed citizen easier than ever, but a great deal of innovation is still needed to make it practical for Americans to research all candidates in each of their elections. This essay is an argument in favor of two such innovations that could dramatically improve US civic engagement: (1) developing an open, comprehensive candidate database, and (2) establishing an open, federated opinion sharing platform (OSP) network. An open, comprehensive candidate database would allow websites to provide users with factual information on every candidate for every election they are eligible to vote in on a single page. OSPs can allow people to share their opinions on any kind of government issue, and to see how their opinions compare with those of candidates, officials, organizations, and anyone else. A federated OSP network would offer users more freedom and convenience, would support OSP innovation, and would provide an environment that supports Surowieckis 4 requirements for crowd wisdom. The last section of this essay is an introduction to EveryVote.orgs principles and its current proposed OSP design. If youd like to help accomplish (1) and/or (2), please read this essay and/or visit www.everyvote.org/youcanhelp (not yet functional)

Table of Contents
Gov2.0 Federation in Pursuit of Crowd Wisdom 1) The US Needs Gov2.0 Innovation 2) What are Gov2.0 Opinion Sharing Platforms? Votes vs Stances Existing OSPs 3) Building an Open, Comprehensive Candidate Database 4) Open OSP Federation for Freedom, Convenience, and Innovation OSP Open Standards - How We Achieve OSP Federation Ways You Can Help OSP Federation Succeed OSPs Are Uniquely Suited for Federation 5) Open OSP Federation to Support Wise Crowd Conditions Surowieckis 4 Requirements for Crowd Wisdom and OSP Federation

Surowieckis 5 Challenges to Crowd Wisdom and OSP Federation 6) Introduction to EveryVote.org EveryVote.org Principles VIDEO: Proposed User Interface Design for the EveryVote.org OSP

1) The US Needs Gov2.0 Innovation

The US debt is $16 trillion, and US debt as a fraction of GDP is the highest it has been since recovering from WWII. 23% of US children live in poverty, the 2nd worst rate of child poverty in the developed world. The US unemployment rate has doubled over 12 years. U.S. income inequality is at its highest since the Great Depression. 2012 is on pace to be the warmest year on record for the United States, and US drought conditions hit their worst levels since 1956. Earth's human population has doubled since 1972, and is on pace to triple in 30 years. The U.S is home to 5% of Earth's human population, but has 25% of the Earth's prisoners, and consumes 25% of Earth's energy resources. Meanwhile, China is home to 19% of Earth's population and has more than doubled energy consumption since 2001. [more concerns?] In August 2012, the US Congress tied an all-time low approval rating of 10%. If 10% of your company approved of your work, would your job be secure? If your job was US Congressman, it probably would be. Over the past 50 years, US Congressmen have been re-elected 87% of the time, and despite record disapproval this past year, 90% of incumbent US Congressmen were re-elected on 11/06/2012. So whats going on? Are Americans happy with their government and want it to stay the same as much as possible? Or have they never been more disappointed and looking for change? Are they confused? I know Im confused at least. Living in Cook County, Illinois, Im eligible to vote for 79 public offices1, and that doesnt include voting on judges, over 30 of whom were present on my Nov 2012 ballot. With an overwhelming number of offices and candidates to keep track of, maybe other Americans are confused too. But theres good news: the internet is changing everything, and Gov2.0 technologies are making the challenge of being an active, well-informed citizen easier than ever. Within this decade, thanks to Gov2.0 it may finally become practical for average Americans to cast a wellresearched vote for every office in every election theyre eligible to vote in.

2) What are Gov2.0 Opinion Sharing Platforms?

1

USA Executive - 1, USA Legislative - 3, State of Illinois - 8, Cook County - 10, Metropolitan Water Reclamation - 9, Township - 9, Municipality - 10, Park District - 5, Elementary School District - 7, High School District - 7, Community College District - 8, Township School Trustee District - 2 = 79 public offices

Gov2.0 is a broad term that describes internet-based tools designed to improve the efficiency, efficacy, and integrity of government. Gov2.0 technologies make it easier for citizens to learn about and participate in their government, and enables governments to draw on the wisdom of its citizens to address issues. Gov2.0 technologies are being used to help with: Crisis management Ushahidi Crisis Commons Non-crisis management 311 Service Tracker Adopt-a-Hydrant Citizen sourcing of government policies Finland San Francisco Government data tracking OpenCongress POPVOX MapLight Election information sharing ISideWith LoveGov And many other issues... [another example?] This essay focuses on a particular type of Gov2.0 technology: opinion sharing platforms (OSPs), which include sites like OpenCongress, POPVOX, ISideWith, and LoveGov. Basically, a Gov2.0 OSP is any site that allows users to declare support, disapproval, and/or another position on a government entity or issue. Government entities include officials, candidates, legislation, committees, organizations, and constituents themselves.

Votes vs Stances
There are 2 basic types of opinions that OSPs track: votes and stances. Votes only allow Yes or No responses, although the user may select the strength of their vote (e.g. Yes +5, Yes +2, No -5, etc.). In general, votes are used when sharing an opinion on a government entity. Some situations where vote responses would be appropriate include: Would you vote for or against this legislation? Do you support or oppose this candidate running for office? Do you want to upvote or downvote this users comment? Stances are used in instances where a range of qualitatively different responses is permitted, which may include Yes or No, but could also include Yes in the cases of..., No in the

cases of..., or any other answer. Whereas votes provide opinions on government entities, stances provide opinions on more abstract government issues. Some examples where stance responses would be appropriate include: Should the United States end the war with Afghanistan? Yes No Yes and only approve future wars through Congress No and send more troops What is your stance on abortion? Pro-life Pro-choice Pro-life including in the cases of rape or danger to mothers health Pro-choice unless beyond the first trimester Let each state decide abortion policy itself2

Existing OSPs
The Gov2.0 and government transparency movement is rapidly growing in the US, but there are only a handful of major OSPs that exist today. They include: OpenCongress.org possibly the longest running, most used (until ISideWith debuted last year), and most comprehensive OSP. OpenCongress allows users to track and vote (Yes and No) on US federal-level Congressional legislation and Congressmen, and facilitates communications between constituents and Congressmen. Non-profit; open-source (Affero General Public License version 3) OpenStates.org only partially functional, but when it is finished it will be nearly identical to OpenCongress (they are both created by the Sunlight Foundation), except OpenStates focuses on US state-level data. Non-profit; open-source (Affero General Public License version 3) POPVOX.com allows users to track and vote (Yes or No) on US federal-level Congressional legislation, and facilitates communications between constituents and federal-level Congressmen. POPVOX also allows organizations to share their opinion on legislation. Forprofit; may have advertisements (but the creators of POPVOX receive no pay for their work); is not open-source. LoveGov.com debuted in Summer 2012, and allows users to share stances on government issues, and automatically compares your stance profile against the profiles of US Presidential and federal Congressional candidates, displaying the result as a % match. LoveGov also allows you to vote to Support a candidate, but does not give you the option to Disapprove a candidate. The stance questions are created by LoveGov, and the assessments of candidates stances are performed by LoveGov. The website also allows users to share news, questions, discussions, and petitions with other users. For-profit; may have advertisements; promises to never sell
2

These examples of stance questions were taken from the 2012 Presidential Quiz on ISideWith.com.

information; is not open-source. ISideWith.com debuted in Spring 2012 and is probably the most used Gov2.0 OSP to date, with the site claiming 5.8 million voters have used ISideWith to find their candidate as of 11/ 06/2012. ISideWith allows users to share stances on government issues, and automatically compares your stance profile against the profiles of US Presidential candidates, displaying the result as a % match. The stance questions are created by ISideWith, and the stance evaluations of candidates are performed by ISideWith. For-profit; may have advertisements; may sell user information (?); is not open-source. reddit and Digg are 2 OSPs that seem outside of the Gov2.0 domain, but as all American students learn in US History class, the free press is the 4th branch of the US government. Both sites are social news sharing platforms that allow users to submit links (news), and users vote for which links will receive the most attention, with the most popular links appearing on the sites home page. Whereas Digg only allows users to vote Yes on links (Digg them), reddit allows users to vote Yes or No on links (upvote or downvote). Also, reddit allows users to submit and vote on comments, but Digg does not. reddit = for-profit, has advertisements, may sell user information (?), and is open-source. Digg = for-profit, as of this year no longer has advertisements, may sell user information (?), and is not open-source. [Another currently functional OSP?] We should also note the data providers that make some of the aforementioned OSPs possible. Each of these sites offers their data free-of-charge to any site that wants to use it. VoteSmart.org supplies candidate data for US federal and state elections. GovTrack.us supplies US federal legislation data. SunlightLabs.org supplies US federal and state legislation, Congressional data, and campaign finance data. FollowtheMoney.org supplies US federal and state campaign finance data. MapLight.org supplies US federal and some state campaign finance data. OpenSecrets.org supplies US federal campaign finance data. [Another data supplier?] While each of these previously mentioned OSPs and data suppliers have their own strengths and limitations, what is true of all of them is that too small a fraction of the US population is using them. According to the OpenCongress About page, the site has grown to become the most-visited government transparency website in the United States, with approximately one

million visits per month and a user community of more than 150,000 members. OpenCongress is a cutting-edge, insightful resource, but 150,000 members = 0.07% of the adult US population. ISideWith had great success attracting users in advance of the November 2012 US elections. If we assume that the 5.8 millions users who used ISideWith were all different US adults, then 2.5% of the adult US population used ISideWith to learn about their presidential candidates. In order to reach a larger percentage of the US population, OSPs will need to offer people more incentive to use their services. These next two sections will discuss two ways we can give people more incentive to use OSPs: by creating a public, comprehensive US candidate database, and establishing an open, federated OSP network. I will then argue in favor of establishing an open, federated OSP network to support wise crowd conditions, and in the last section Ill provide an introduction to EveryVote.org and a tour of its current design diagrams.

3) Building an Open, Comprehensive Candidate Database

One of the greatest services we can offer American voters today is the ability to learn about and connect with every candidate in every election they are eligible to vote in---federal, state, county, and local---all through a single, easy-to-use webpage. As of Dec 2012, Gov2.0 OSPs provide data for federal and state level elections, but have no data on county or local level elections. In order for you to see all of your candidates on a single page, someone will have to make a comprehensive candidate database. This database must be freely available for anyone to incorporate into their own website, so no one site holds a monopoly on this data and how it is presented. There are at least three ways an open, comprehensive candidate database can be achieved: (1) through a government initiative, (2) manually by non-profit organizations, or (3) voluntarily by the candidates themselves. Government initiative - The US government assembles the database itself and makes it openly available to the public. This would require passing legislation that ensures the data is accurate, comprehensive, and timely. While this could be a viable method of creating the database, one has to wonder, are US legislators willing to advocate for a program that would improve the visibility of all candidates, even their rivals? And even if US legislators do support legislation for establishing the database, how long would it take for it to be completed and available to the public? Would it be ready in time for our next election? How many US elections would pass by before the database is available? And if it was made, would it be available for any site to use, or would only privileged sites be allowed access? Manually - Non-governmental organizations assemble the database and make it openly available to the public. This is exactly what VoteSmart.org does for federal and state-level elections, but does not yet have comprehensive county and local-level candidate data. Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine VoteSmart.org assembling a comprehensive candidate

database anytime soon, because candidate data becomes exponentially more difficult to collect at the county and local levels. While there are only 50 states to track, there are 3,130 counties, and over 25,000 cities in America, each with their own respective elections. With enough funding and manpower, non-governmental organizations could achieve a comprehensive candidate database, but it would be an arduous task, and would require much more funding than these organizations currently have available. Voluntarily - Candidates add themselves to the comprehensive candidate database. This is the best possible method for establishing a comprehensive candidate database. It would cost radically less money than lobbying for legislators to implement a government initiative or hiring workers to manually enter the data. Whats more, no-one would be excluded from the process, since everyone would have equal opportunity to add themselves to the database. This would still require a non-governmental organization or collection of non-governmental organizations to host the database and facilitate the process of candidates adding themselves to it, so the hosting organizations would need to make their operations as transparent as possible to protect against bias and other bad practices.

4) Open OSP Federation for Freedom, Convenience, and Innovation

Today, if you vote on bills on OpenCongress, you need to manually re-submit your votes on those same bills if you later use POPVOX. If you told LoveGov you are pro-life, and in favor of decreasing military spending, you would need to manually resubmit those same stances if you later used ISideWith. Wouldnt it be great if the voting decisions you made on OpenCongress could be easily transferred to POPVOX? If the stances you submit to LoveGov could be easily transferred to ISideWith? If those sites participated in the same federated OSP network, you could. In a federated network (also known as a distributed network), each participating website is able to compatibly share its data with any other website in the network, so the votes and stances you cast on one site can be easily transferred to or synced with another site of your choosing. Federation liberates users from becoming locked-in to a single site that hoards data, spares users from having to resubmit the same data across multiple sites, and encourages users to experiment with different sites connect with the network. Examples of existing federated systems: Facebook Connect OpenID OAuth Disaspora Friendica -

A federated OSP network would allow users to create their personal civic profile, which includes a list of all of their formed opinions (in the forms of votes and stances) on government entities and issues, and any other number of data fields related to civic engagement and beyond. Potentially, a federated OSP network could incorporate all the interactions of any other social network, such as messaging, status updates, profile data, and friending. Elements of your locally-based, federation compatible civic profile can include: Your name Your email address Your voting districts Your political party/ies Your votes on: Government officials Candidates Legislation Committees Groups Other people News (links) Any other type of entity Your stances on: Government issues Any other type of question Your friends Your religious affiliation Your education history Your relationship status Your status updates Your direct messages to other profiles Your other profile data Hometown Inspirational figures Favorite quotes Favorite books/music/movies/TV/sports/etc. etc. etc. etc.

OSP Open Standards - How We Achieve OSP Federation

In order to create a federated OSP network, aspiring and existing OSP platforms must begin collaborating to create and coordinating to use the same OSP open standards. Open standards allow a platform to communicate with any other platform that uses the same open standards. They would ensure that your vote on a government entity on Site A could be accurately understood by Site B. Another term for this compatible transfer of data is

interoperability. Sites that use the same set of open standards basically agree to speak the same language so that their code can be interoperable. Without open standards, each site would speak a language of its own creation, incomprehensible to any other. A good way for non-technical people to understand computing open standards and what they mean to the OSP industry is to compare them with the standardization of a much older technology: the screw. In the 1860s, William Sellers3 embarked on a campaign to get America to adopt a standardized screw (which happened to be of his own design). Before the standardized screw, every American screw had to be handmade by a craftsman. This arrangement worked well for the craftsmen, because only they had the proper tools to repair what they made, and thus customers were locked-in to long-term relationships with their original craftsman. The flip-side of this arrangement was that it worked terribly for the customers and the US economy overall. Sellers knew that if screws became standardized, customers would have more freedom to choose their craftsmen, would save money, and industrial mass production in the US would become possible. Sellers challenge was not only to create a good design for his standard, but to motivate craftsmen ---the same people who traditionally make money from the lack of standardization--to adopt his standard. Sellers believed connections and influence shape peoples decisions, so Sellers targeted influential customers like the Pennsylvania Railroad and US Navy. Every major new customer attracted a wave of new customers, and within a decade, his design became the US standard. Sellers was convinced standardization of the screw would boost the US economy and speedup innovation. Likewise, OSP open standards can potentially help our economy and speedup innovation by enabling constituents to have a more active and informed role in their government. Sellers biggest obstacle to screw standardization was the craftsmen themselves, because historically they profited most from the ability to lock-in their customers. OSPs that do not participate in federation also lock-in their customers. Unlike the screw industry though, OSPs today tend to be driven by civically motivated individuals pursuing the common good more so than profits, so perhaps OSP open standards today will be easier to achieve than screw standardization. Still, universal open standard adoption is notoriously difficult to achieve (see below), and theres still the question, do existing and will future OSP providers see federation as an advantage or disadvantage to their bottom line?4

This account of the standardization of the screw has been adapted from Surowieckis Wisdom of Crowds. 4 More on this in a few paragraphs, but I think OSP federation today would attract more visitors to all sites participating in the network.

xkcd.com/927 Sellers believed that screw standardization was inevitable, and so raced to have his design adopted first, but OSP open standard adoption is not inevitable. OSPs are a type of social network, and social networks have a natural tendency to form monopolies, and to form them rapidly. This happens because of the network effect, which is the phenomenon of somethings value depending on how many people use it. If most of your friends are on Facebook, and fewer are on Google+ or MySpace, then you are more likely to start or continue using Facebook instead of Google+ or MySpace. The fact that Google invested approx. $585 million in Google+, and is recently making gains in active users, but has 10% the active users as Facebook5, illustrates how powerful the network effect can be. OSPs are also influenced by the network effect, so we should note that if an OSP or several attract a majority of users, but decide not to use a common open standard, the site may hold back successful OSP federation.

Ways You Can Help OSP Federation Succeed

If you want the ability to participate in a federated OSP network, whether youre a developer or not, you can help the development and adoption of open standards by introducing the concept of online federation to people. You can tell them that federation allows you to choose to share your data between websites, so you would only have to make your profile one time, and your profile could be transferred to any site you want in the network. Also, federation can allow you to communicate with people who do not use the same website as you but use a site that participates in the same distributed OSP network. Federation can even allow you to post a status update to one website, and have it simultaneously posted on any number of other websites of your choosing. Ultimately, a healthy federated network offers freedom, convenience, and connectivity for internet users. To support the candidate database, you can mention it would be nice for there to be websites that offered info on every candidate in every election youre
5

Google+ = 135 million active users / Facebook = 1 billion active users

eligible to vote in on a single page. If you are a developer, you can help by designing with federation in mind, and participating in public discussions about establishing OSP open standards. You can start by visiting EveryVote.org and clicking the Federation tab and posting to the forums, helping develop the OSP Federation wiki (mirrorable), and helping develop the Gov2.0 wiki (mirrorable). Email listservs focusing on developing and using OSP open standards would also help, [option A?], [option B?], [option etc?].

OSPs Are Uniquely Suited for Federation

While attempts at social network federation like Diaspora and Friendica have so far been unable to attract widespread user participation, there are at least 4 ways in which OSP federation is better suited for success: 1) Personal civic data is very sensitive information. People are more concerned about who they share their civic data with than standard social network data. So, users would appreciate the fact a distributed OSP network would allow them the freedom to decide which OSPs have a Terms of Use policy appropriate for them. 2) Most people dont like politics that much. The existing Gov2.0 platforms are not attracting enough users to support robust, in-depth debates and information exchanges. Federation would remove barriers to participation on these sites, and potentially increase participation on each of them. 3) Civic engagement can be a time-consuming process. Users would appreciate the ability to make a voting selection one time, knowing that the time they invested into making that decision cant be wasted, even if they decide to use a different OSP later. And since civic engagement is not everyones favorite activity, it would be good for users to experiment with multiple different OSPs to avoid boredom. 4) No OSP today has a monopoly on users, so the door is open for OSP federation. This is true today, but it may not be true tomorrow. If you like the idea, you should start advocating for its development today, before a dominant OSP may make successful federation more difficult tomorrow.

5) Open OSP Federation to Support Wise Crowd Conditions

Situations exist where crowds tend to be wiser than the wisest individuals within them. Crowd wisdom, also known as collective intelligence, is an experimentally verifiable phenomenon, observed in situations like the following:

When a crowd of people is asked to guess the weight of an ox or the number of marbles in a jar, the average of all of the crowds guesses is almost exactly correct, most of the time. On the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, contestants are given at least 3 lifelines to assist the user in determining the correct answer. One lifeline is the 50/ 50, which removes 2 of the 4 possible answer choices, giving the contestant at least a 50% chance of selecting the correct answer. Another lifeline is Phone a Friend, which lets the contestant call their smartest friend for help with the question. 65% of the time the contestants expert friend selects the correct answer. The last lifeline is Ask the Audience, which allows the contestant to ask every member in the live studio audience to submit their guess, and then displays the totals of their guesses to the contestant. This lifeline is by far the most accurate, with the crowd selecting the correct answer 91% of the time. Google revolutionized the search engine industry, quickly becoming the most used search engine in the world by implementing a method of tapping into crowd wisdom. When you submit a search to Google, the order of the search results you see are determined by how often a site is linked to from other sites relevant to your search. According to Google, their search engine interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. The pages that receive the most votes are considered the most important, and rise to the top of your search results. In addition, votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help make other pages important, so although Google derives its strength from tapping into crowd wisdom, it is actually a democratic republic rather than a pure democracy. While striking examples of crowd wisdom exist, democratically turning over decision making or guessing to the crowd does not necessarily result in improved decision making, and can sometimes reduce the quality of decision making. Surowiecki theorizes that 4 requirements must be present for a crowds decision to be wise ---diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation--- and that there are 5 challenges that threaten wise crowd decisions ---homogeneity, centralization, division, imitation, and emotionality. Before exploring Surowieckis conditions for wise crowd decisions as they relate to a distributed OSP network, it must be noted that it may be impossible to scientifically prove wise crowd decisions were present in a democratic or democratic-republic government. If the goal of a democratic government is to promote the common good, the definition of common good is subjective, so different people may have radically different interpretations of what common good means. Also, for something to be scientific, it needs to be repeatable via experimentation, but an experimenter can never truly recreate the historical moment a government is situated in. Still, its intriguing just how much OSP federation would support Surowieckis requirements of crowd wisdom, and Gov2.0 developers should keep theories of crowd psychology in mind when

designing their platforms. Most importantly, without federation, the public will be less able to even experiment with new OSP features, because dominant, disconnected OSPs would make it difficult for the new ones to attract enough users to sample the different features.

Surowieckis 4 Requirements for Crowd Wisdom and OSP Federation

Diversity of opinion - Opinions must be gathered from as large and diverse a sample of people as possible. This helps ensure that many possibilities are considered, and so protects the crowd from being blind-sided by an outcome that no-one foresaw. The presence of diverse opinions also makes it more comfortable for people to honestly share their views, which benefits Surowieckis next requirement of independence. Federation would offer people more incentive to share their votes/opinions because they would know every vote they cast now can be transferred to a different site they may prefer later. Independence - People in a group must be able to think for themselves and honestly express what they think. As Surowiecki says, diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. If the members of a crowd are too dependent on each other (for example, they all work for the same company), then it is less likely that they will express as diverse a range of opinions as possible, because they dont want to be labeled a bad team player for giving their honest opinion. Crowd members also must not be coerced to have an opinion by authoritarian leadership or a hostile crowd. Federation would offer users the highest level of independence, freeing them to try any OSP they want with no time wasted or strings attached. Decentralization - Members of the crowd do not receive their information from all the same sources, and can exercise their own autonomy on a problem, while still able to add to contribute to the final crowd opinion (e.g. casting a vote). Federation, is by definition, the decentralization of a larger entity. Aggregation - A method must exist for combining the groups knowledge into a collective decision or guess. For example, taking the average of the crowds marble number guesses or collecting a vote to determine consensus are each methods of aggregation. With regards to OSP federation, what OSP can truthfully say they offer the best political aggregation methods? None can, so we should create an environment that is conducive to developers experimenting with as many aggregation methods as possible. Federation would make it easier for developers to attract users to test new and different aggregation methods.

Surowieckis 5 Challenges to Crowd Wisdom and OSP Federation

Homogeneity - Group members are all too much alike, which results in a lack of diversity of opinion. Without diversity of opinion, groups are more susceptible to being blind-sided by possibilities that too few in the crowd considered. Federation would open participation to as

large and diverse a crowd as possible, and thus reduce homogeneity. Centralization - Members of the crowd receive their information from all the same sources, and only a small number of crowd members are allowed to vote or contribute their opinion. Federation is, by definition, the decentralization of a larger entity. Division - If crowd members are unable to share their information with each other, they cannot fully benefit from the crowds collective wisdom. However, paradoxically, too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent, because members may start following the herd rather than independently evaluating their information. Federation would allow users the ability to connect and share information with other OSPs in the network, but would not require them to. Imitation - The natural human tendency to imitate others to speed-up decision making. Too much imitation by members of a crowd results in uncritical group think. Federation would encourage robust OSP interactions and experimentation with designs meant to minimize uncritical imitation. Emotionality - The natural human tendency for emotions to override our rational faculties and affect decision making. Federation would encourage experimentation with OSP designs meant to de-escalate emotionally charged discussions and facilitate civil discourse. Cheating - Not explicitly one of Surowieckis challenges of the wise crowd, but definitely an obstacle to OSP quality. Cheating in OSPs tends to occur by users creating fake accounts in order to inflate the number of votes an entity receives, or to negatively misrepresent the opposing side on an issue. Federation would help users leave an OSP they believe is vulnerable to or engaged in cheating, and to join an OSP they believe is more reliable.

6) Introduction to EveryVote.org
EveryVote.orgs goals are (1) to help develop and participate in an open, federated OSP network, (2) to help develop an accurate, comprehensive US candidate database that is freely available for any website to use, and (3) to develop free-to-use, open source tools designed to make civic engagement easier and more constructive. Furthermore, EveryVote.org is committed to providing these services as ethically as possible.

EveryVote.org Principles
Open source - Affero General Public License version 3 Will seek non-profit status Financially transparent No advertisements Will seek donations and grants to pay expenses

Will not sell or share private user data with 3rd parties EveryVote.org itself will not declare opinions on government entities Will participate in an open, federated opinion sharing platform network Supports developing a publicly available, comprehensive US candidate database

Open source - All EveryVote.org software will be provided under the Affero General Public License version 3. This license allows anyone to use, download, and modify EveryVote.org software, as long as they agree to let others download their modifications of the software. The reason for selecting the AGPLv3 open source license instead of the MIT License, an open source license which would not require developers to make their modifications available to the public, is to support a culture of sharing and mutual benefit. Non-profit status seeking - EveryVote.org is a non-commercial organization, and will be seeking 501(c) non-profit status. (To be honest, Im not real sure how this stuff works yet. If you have any advice as to how EveryVote.org should go about establishing non-profit status, wed appreciate your input.) Funding - Will seek donations and grant-funding to pay organizational expenses. Financially transparent - All spending by EveryVote.org will be available to the public. All donations and donor names made to EveryVote.org will either be available to the public, or will be anonymous to the public and EveryVote.org the organization.This committment to financial transparency is intended to prevent EveryVote.org from giving candidates or anyone else preferential treatment for donating to EveryVote.org. No advertisements - EveryVote.org will never sell advertising space, will never give advantages to candidates who donate to EveryVote.org, and will never give preferential treatment to candidates for any reason. Privacy - EveryVote.org will never sell or share private user data with 3rd parties, unless required to by law. Unbiased - EveryVote.org the organization will never declare opinions on government entities (officials, candidates, legislation, constituents, groups/organizations) or political issues. Open federation - EveryVote.org is dedicated to helping establish and participating in an open, federated opinion sharing platform network. EveryVote.org may prompt users with brief descriptions of the Terms of Use of each site prior to letting the user autorize the transfer or sync of their data, but ultimately allows users to transfer their data wherever they want. Comprehensive US candidate database - EveryVote.org is committed to helping develop a comprehensive US candidate database that is publicly available for any website to use. The goal of this database is to give users organized access to factual information about every candidate in every election they are eligible to vote in.

VIDEO: Proposed User Interface Design for the EveryVote.org OSP

VIDEO: Walkthrough of the proposed EveryVote.org user interface
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZTDD847DE0]

Thanks for reading! @everyvoteorg contactus@everyvote.org www.everyvote.org Mitch Downey - @mdowney84 Northern Illinois University