User:Troughtm

Interactive Governance

The concept of interactive governance deals with how the society can become more engaged in the decision making process of government using the internet.

Historically, each country choose leaders at various levels based on a system of voting which are held every so many years depending on the constitution of each of these countries. Electing officials allow ordinary citizens the chance to pursue the personal objectives while these officials deliberate, organize and implement systems that will ensure that their basic and common needs are met eg the provision of roads, health care, education and so on. One of the main reasons they have to do it this way is because of the expense and time it would take to get the vote of each and every citizen in all aspects of the decision making process.

However, with elected officials comes various interest groups who in many cases are big companies who in order to further their specific needs and desires sometimes control these elected officials and they end up not making decisions that positively affects the people who elected them in the first place.

The fact of the matter is that we still need these officials but there must be a way that each citizen with a voting right must have the ability to still vote on each and every issue that will involve the spending of their moneys. It must not be that we have to wait another four or five years to correct the situation. It is agreed that we still need these officials to deliberate with the experts and do the mathematics concerning how a state operates but the public still needs to be able to do their own due diligence and vote based on their own assessments.

Te internet has been developed to a stage where it is now possible to achieve interactive governance and it is believed that we should begin the process of true and interactive democracy. We must be allowed to vote on issues too not just vote for people to make them for us. Historically we have seen leaders who after being elected make decisions make times in an about turn fashions against the promises made and many times it has been proven that they have acted in self interest.

Now, we have the internet almost everywhere and in wired and wireless forms. What is needed now is a system to 1. Identify voters based an IP address and other biometric mechanisms 2. ensure that each vote is a singular vote representing one eligible person 3.a well secured database management system 4. an agreed format for expounding the proposals to be voted on. 5 a means to let voters know when an issue up for voting 6 a means to get these officials to start using such a system.