Zenon Evans on Making Democratic Accountability as Simple as an App
Democracy kind of blows but it's the best we've got, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. Researchers with the University of California Data and Democracy Initiative are trying to make it a little better. They're working on a project called the California Report Card (CRC), a truly grassroots tool that provides individual citizens with a quick, clear channel to communicate ideas to politicians and a platform to rank the government's performance.
Given the near-omnipresence of data-analyzing and social media-style constant communication, it's almost a surprise that America's public servants have lasted this long without something like the CRC, argues Zenon Evans. And it seems that those public servants who are ignorant of their own constituents' wishes won't last long without warming up to these new channels of accountability.