Functionality

The Open Forum Foundation will create and maintain a web-based platform that provides reliable and legitimate communication between many constituents and one decision-maker. From constituent to decision-maker, it is free and anonymous, allowing user-generated opinions to be automatically aggregated into an easy-to-use dashboard that allows for fine-grained drill-down to the original opinions. From decision-maker to constituent, it allows direct on-site response to specific opinions and traditional forms of communications to user-subscribed lists on specific issues.

The platform will be different from the plethora of political forums, blogs, and social networking sites because of its focus on the needs of decision-makers. Providing a solution that meets the needs of these key individuals is the foundation which will allow the platform to accomplish its goals.

User Accounts

There will be four types of user accounts within the platform: constituents, decision-makers, advocacy groups, and administrative.

Constituents

This type of account will be utilized by the majority of people that access the system. constituents will use their account to register Opinions, agreement or disagreement with other Opinions, see what people believe using the aggregated dashboard, and get messages directly from their decision-makers. In order to verify their constituency and provide additional demographic data, constituents will be able to verify their identity using several levels of personal identification:

1. Self-reporting. This level of identification will not require any personally identifiable information be provided to the system.
2. Voter Rolls. By connecting their accounts to voter registration information, they will prove their constituency using the same methods that the state of registration requires. This information will be used to segregate the opinions being expressed by district and thus make it more valuable for decision-makers.
3. Additional methods to verify demographic information.
   Each additional level will be voluntary and allow for more accuracy in reporting. These may include age and identity verification techniques used on the internet by companies such as PayPal, Trufina, NetIDme, and VitalChek.

Decision-Makers

This type of account will provide special communication privileges that allow the decision-makers to communicate directly to their constituents using a variety of options which are described in detail below.

Advocacy Groups

Advocacy group accounts will give advocacy groups the ability to publish Opinions, but not register agreement or disagreement on them. In effect, they will be able to create issue-based campaigns to drive constituents to, but disallowed voting rights on those issues.

Administrative

This type of account will allow for management of the constituent criteria (eg, the voter rolls), and the establishment of decision-makers accounts. Ideally, this would automatically update from official state databases, but may require manual input on the part of the government or the Open Forum Foundation itself. Administrative accounts would not be allowed to register opinions or communications in any way.

Opinions

Much as YouTube is based around videos and Flickr is based around pictures, the platform will be based around Opinions. Constituents, decision-makers, and advocacy groups may create Opinions.

• Constituents may create Opinions anonymously.
• Decision-makers and advocacy groups will have their names associated with the Opinions that they create.
• Opinions may take many forms. Examples:
  • The Iraq War is bad.
    • (straight opinion)
  • We should stay in Iraq until the Iraqi people are safe.
    • (suggestion of what we should do)
• Each Opinion will have its own page – an Opinion page.
• Users may flag inappropriate content so that it can be dealt with.

Issue Areas

When creating an Opinion, the user will tag it with relevant Issue Areas. Each will have a definition of what agreement and disagreement mean within the context of the issue. For example, if the issue is the Iraq War, agreement may be defined as being in favor of it and disagreement as being opposed to it.

• Issue Areas will be used to aggregate user opinion.
• Additional tags may be added by constituents, advocacy groups, or decision-makers at any time.
• Users may flag mis-tagged content so that it can be corrected.
• Issue Areas can be created by constituents, advocacy groups, and decision-makers.
• Each Issue Area will have its own page – an Issue Area page.

• Educational resources
  • On the Opinion page, there will be a listing of the main arguments for and against each Issue Area that the Opinion is tagged as.
  • Clicking through on any of these arguments will lead to a Wikipedia style explanation, detailing the rationale for the argument with links to further resources that support it.
    • These arguments would be rated by users, with the top rated ones appearing on the Opinion page.
    • All arguments would be created by constituents, advocacy groups, and decision-makers.
    • The argument page would also contain links to all of the other arguments relevant to the Issue Area.
• Discussion forums.
  • Each Issue Area will also have its own discussion forum.
  • The forums will be designed to encourage communication between those on opposing sides of the Issue Area, including:
    • A forum for open discussion of the issue between all parties – those in favor of and those opposed to it.
    • A forum for brainstorming new solutions to the issue, with a strong emphasis on novel ideas, and with no disparagement or analysis of the ideas that are presented.
    • A forum for debating new solutions to issues – with the ability to easily import ideas from the brainstorming forum.
  • The ability to create Opinions easily in the Issue Area from all of the forums.

(Dis)agreement

Only constituent users will be able to express agreement or disagreement on Opinions.

• This will be registered on a sliding scale from 1 to -1, which allows for the expression of neutrality as well as varying levels of (dis)agreement.
  • +1 represents complete agreement
  • 0 represents neutrality
  • -1 represents complete disagreement
• (Dis)agreement on Opinions will be registered anonymously.
• (Dis)agreement may be registered by a variety of means. This creates the possibility for campaigns by advocacy groups as well as viral messages sent by constituents to friends and colleagues. Some possibilities include:
  • Email.
  • Mobile phone browser.
  • SMS text message (as used on American Idol).
  • Application plugins for Facebook and other social networking sites.
  • Widgets that could be installed on blogs and websites.
  • From within Second Life, World of WarCraft, and other three dimensional web spaces.
  • Apps that work on video game consoles – XBox, Wii, PS3, DS, PSP.
  • Open Application Programming Interface (API) so that developers may invent new ways of connecting to the platform.
• It is critical to the Open Forum Foundation that the platform incorporate full accessibility for disabled voters. In order to legitimately represent a constituency, all members of the constituency must find the site accessible and easy to use.

Additional Features

These additional features will round out the interface of the platform.

• Fully skinnable to allow for user-generated look and feel of the site.
• Multilingual with the ability for users to translate Opinions and Issue Areas into other languages.
  • Other users may then approve of the translations to verify their accuracy.
  • This will allow the site to aggregate data across multiple cultures that do not share a common language.
• Social Networking.
  • Many social networking features have already been discussed above in the Issue Areas section, where there are many opportunities for connecting with like-minded individuals.
  • The ability to save Opinions to social bookmarking sites like de.licio.us and digg.com, as well as to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
  • The ability to email Opinions to friends, just as you can email video links from YouTube.
  • Profile pages will be available for those that want to use them. These will be turned off by default and an individual may turn his or hers on, restrict viewing only to friends, or allow everyone to view his or her page.
  • This is potentially the greatest social networking opportunity to date. By becoming the single most-important, global, online destination for anyone interested in politics, people will come together in ways that have not been possible before.
    Today on the internet, there are innumerable forums, social networking sites, and blogs that vie for the attention of the political web-surfer. The platform will provide a single location for all of these people to meet and discuss, providing a global community that can form bonds around Issue Areas regardless of their political affiliation, ideological views, or country of origin.

Aggregation

Aggregation of Opinions into a useful dashboard will happen automatically based upon user tagging of Opinions into Issue Areas. In this way, a large number of varying opinions can be brought together into a figure that accurately represents the perspectives of constituents.

• The aggregation process will aggregate multiple (dis)agreements expressed by an individual on a single Issue Area as netting only one (dis)agreement. This allows aggregation of an individual’s opinions while still capturing the complexity.
  • For example, an individual may register (dis)agreement with the following Opinions:
    • The US should not be at war in Iraq because of the financial costs of the war.
      • This registers as -1 (opposed to the war).
    • The US should not be in Iraq because war is always bad.
      • This registers as -1 (opposed to the war).
    • It is the US’s responsibility to ensure that Iraq becomes a democracy.
      • This registers as +1 (in favor of the war).
  • These opinions summed are the average of the three registered opinions, equal to -1 (opposed to the war), but still allow for a detailed understanding of the motivations behind this opposition at the same time.
  • This gives constituents the freedom to express their Opinions, even if those Opinions seem to contradict one another or go against what they think should be done.
  • Most importantly, this gives decision-makers the information that they need to make laws that are fully representative and reflective of the beliefs and opinions of their constituents. It also enables the debate to move away from the traditional bi-partisan perspectives by allowing the full scale of available perspectives to be presented and discussed.

Dashboard

The dashboard will be a graphical, intuitive interface designed to make it easy for anyone to learn about the opinions of people by electoral district, issue area, party affiliation, and other demographic data as is appropriate and dependent upon the voter registration laws of the electoral district being viewed.

This data will be presented so as to be easy to read with the ability to drill down to the raw data at the same time.

The aggregated data will be more than simple numbers representing the number of constituents that have registered an opinion on any given issue. It will also provide the margin of error that the aggregated data represents in terms of accurately representing the full constituency of the electoral district.

Decision-maker Communications

The platform will provide several methods for decision-makers to communicate with their constituents.

Traditional methods

The platform will allow constituents to self-register to receive email or mail on issues of interest to them from their decision-makers. These lists will be anonymous to everyone, and only the number of communications sent out will be publicly available.

These services will incur fees sufficient to cover the costs of the service.

Direct Communication

The platform will provide a number of unique ways in which decision-makers can communicate effectively with a large number of constituents.

• The decision-maker can post statements to specific Issue Areas and Opinions. This may be used to accomplish a variety of things:
  • Directly respond to an Opinion that constituents have ranked as important.
  • Express support and rationale for their belief in the Opinion and link to resources that support their perspective. In this way, the official may work to educate his or her constituency on the complexities of the issue.
  • Share the decision-maker’s accomplishments on the issue.
    • “I just voted yes on HB1032!”
  • Share what the decision-maker is trying to accomplish.
    • “I’m working hard to bring a bill to the floor on this issue.”
  • Call for support. If the decision-maker feels that he or she needs support in order to make progress on the issue, he or she can make a plea on the Opinion or Issue Area, asking the constituents to register their (dis)agreement and email their friends (in the same district or others) to do the same.
• Each decision-maker will have his or her own profile page on which he or she can highlight specific Issue Areas and provide biographical data.
  • This page will have a standard format to make finding information on it easy for constituents.

The constituents can then view these responses in a number of ways, including:

• If the official posted their statement to an Opinion, the statement will automatically appear next to that Opinion when it is viewed by one of his or her constituents.
• The most recent statements that a decision-maker has posted to an Issue Area will appear next to any Opinions tagged with that Issue Area when it is viewed by one of their constituents.
• Constituents will be able to sign up for automatic notifications similar to those on Facebook – these will show up on their homepages, and also in a special notification area. These notifications will also be available via email, RSS feed, and SMS text and may be customized in many ways, including:
  • New responses by their decision-makers on Opinions that they have registered (dis)agreement on.
  • New responses by Issue Area from their decision-makers.
  • All new postings from a specific decision-maker.
• By visiting the official’s profile page to see all of his or her responses in a blog format that is fully searchable.