I would have thought that this place would be the last place to speak of politics, but I think there is a way to use the internet to bring democracy back to the masses.
Problem: The cost of running a successful political campaign is astronomical. As it would seem, if you don’t have the money to back up your political campaign most main stream media outlets will not give a candidate the time of day; voiding the democratic standards America was founded on. The internet has slowly been helping the problem through blogging, youtube, and personal website etc… But it is not enough. Here is how I think the internet can help bring back democracy…
Solution: A fully open source platform, for the people by the people. A listing of every political candidate, where the candidates themselves can provide their views on a standard (and expandable) list of issues, upload video or other rich media content, and have open, transparent communication with the masses. Each political candidate could also have a list of news articles and blog articles listed on their ‘profile’ pages that are consolidated from an advanced ‘zoominfo’ like webcrawler. Any candidate, no matter how small their budget, could open themselves and their ideas to the public.
One the flip side, users could check off certain views that are important for them and see a listing of corresponding candidates. Users could also freely discuss various topics surrounding specific candidates on the candidate pages, promoting free and uncensored speech. I think this is a great way to bring democracy back to the people, but for something like this to reach the masses I think it requires collaboration and acceptance across the board. Giants of the web world need to come together to create this revolutionary site, and for it to gain respect it would need to be embraced by (not run by, nor censored by) the government and popular media sources.
This would be a large step in the way of user created content, but I think its for a good, and under understood cause. Our generation is flooded with media, and its hard to sort through what is important. It is important to bring politics to the youth, and the youth are online. I think this would be a major step in leveling the political playing ground, and bringing democracy back to the people.
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I dont have much political knowledge, so a website like this would be great for people like me, to understand politics and compare the various objectives of election candidates.
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- has comprehensive list of candidates but light use of mixed media (no video), very poor design
clearly has not caught on... about as web 1.0 as it gets
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Here's two sites from Switzerland that go in the same direction, although none of them is an "all-inclusive" platform:
- Smartvote is a site that lets candidates answer a set of questions on different political issues. Users can then go to the site, answer the same questions and based on that get recommendations on who to elect.
- NZZvotum is a blog platform hosted by Zurich-based newspaper NZZ. It has blog channels for all the political parties and lets the candidates blog themselves. It proved to be very popular in the months before the national election in October.
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http://www.politicalbase.com
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here's a fun link for the democrats via bill mahr....with video answers to basic topics like health care, iraq and education where you click on the candidate and topic of choice to hear their views.
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