Supporting debates over citizen initiatives

Citizen/popular initiatives provide a way for the inclusion of constitutional or statutory proposals on the ballot (e.g., at an election) if enough signatures are collected in support of the proposal [1, 2, 3, 4]. Once citizens are enabled to digitally sign such initiatives remotely, the next challenge will be to provide support for verified eligible citizens to debate on running initiatives. Intelligent ways of structuring information for easy access and cooperation is a major research interest in computer science, with results like WWW, Semantic Web, Forums, Blogs, Slashdot. We propose here a new interaction paradigm for debates in the setting where participants are verified for eligibility and have equal weight. The estimation of the popular support for proposed initiatives and emerging comments (justifications) forms a basis (and a by-product) of such debates. This paradigm can find additional applications in supporting debates of shareholders for decision making, as well as for debates of working groups and committees, or for the administration of other entities like towns and counties. To illustrate the functionality of our system, we use an example of statutory initiative for the State of Florida. Our paradigm is coherent with regular popular initiatives. A few features, consisting of non-legally-binding interactions, are added to improve the civic discourse. To improve scoring of comments attached to initiatives we propose to stress their intent by revealing if the authors/supporters have signed the corresponding initiative. To make things clear, when a comment is submitted the author is asked to state his current position by either signing the initiative (a pass signature), or explicitly delaying to sign (a fail or a borderline signature). This improves the truth incentiveness of the debate in the sense that it discourages political comments trying to please some or all parties without having substance. Privacy concerns and solutions are described in [5]. Another relevant feature is a help to bootstrap the initiative processes: matchmaking to help citizens reach the threshold required by state constitutions for starting the signature gathering (7, 20, or more initial signatures, function of the state/country). Our paradigm of interaction can be