| Is there an opportunity for a data driven approach to politics? I would be interested in a service that segmented people into large groups based on their political ideas. A cross between a semi-anonymous Facebook, groups and politics, none of the social networky stuff, just ideas, viewpoints, groups and votes. For example, you might belong to a very large simple 'liberal' group, with vague and general ideas. Within this group, you'd have factions with more specific ideas and options. It may drill down to situations like: "You are a member of group liberal-software-developers (xxx,xxx members), group members strongly support ..., generally support ..., generally oppose ..., no strong opinion about about ...". Eventually you might find a group you nearly always agree with. With enough support across the population, it would make it easy for everyone, including politicians to see how everyone felt on various topics. To make this work, you'd need to put topics to people (in a fair way, with proper presentation of each viewpoint) and do some polling. It would then be interesting to see the correlation between groups you are in, and your viewpoint. You could then pivot the data based on categories and any number of dimensions to see what people are thinking. Some other usecase ideas:
"I'm a member of liberal-software-developers, I generally agree with this group's viewpoint. I'll trust viewpoints from group members who are better informed on topic Z, rather than some TV commercial." "My group doesn't have a strong opinion on some healthcare thing, I'll trust liberal-doctors instead..." As a step for the original question, perhaps conduct a fair nationwide poll on each contested topic? You could ask 1000 people what they thought of each topic in a credible fashion. The result then gives media organisations some content to work with and read out. If public support is overwhelming for each topic, then it may become difficult to ignore the polling data. |
However, the problem is getting congress to recognize these systems are better. Currently, lobbying groups do the education of topics, and donate to campaigns of candidates. This system needs to be changed first, and We The Lobby believes a fundamental positive change would be to alter where the money comes from; and thus whose influence (special interests vs. the general population) is being made on Congress.