Hubrist

I would like someone to create a web site—actually, a group of them—dedicated to information, opinion polls, commentary and discussion solely about government. A unique site for each and every government entity, organized geographically for easy navigation. There would even be distinct sites for separate divisions of government. For example, different ministries and agencies of the federal government, different police organizations, different departments in major urban cities.

The site(s) would track the time and financial expenditures of government, the passage of laws and other activities, in real time.

Of course I’m inspired in part by the Obama administration’s transition website, Change.gov. That site is not operational any longer, so in fact I’m a bit unsure if that’s the exact site I’m thinking about, where users could propose and show support for various priorities.

There’s no reason a private business or NGO or non-profit couldn’t do such a thing, and keep it going indefinitely.

While in some ways, government is boring, and a lot of people might not be interested at first, I know from reading the commentary on news and other websites that a lot of people are very passionate about it. If you provided the tools for users to present themselves as real citizens, and gave them the ability to state their beliefs and opinions on an unlimited number of topics, it would let them demonstrate a complex point of view. They would be able to transcend the simple-minded left-wing versus right-wing caricatures so prevalent on simple comment threads. They could comment specifically on the issues, instead of only on various news articles, which come and go.

The site would be most likely to depend on advertising revenue, but it would be important that it NOT accept advertisements from governments or organizations affiliated with government. Probably it would be best if it didn’t accept any political ads whatsoever, because that would dilute the value of the contents. I suppose that would make Google AdWords out of the question, since those would be overwhelmed with politically-oriented (and probably sketchy) ads.

The site would have to be politically neutral itself. The role of the site and its employees would be to ensure accurate contents and provide tools so that users could moderate by promoting good commentary and demoting bad commentary. It would have to allow users to distinguish mere opinion from facts, and filter out lies, hearsay and slander almost automatically. I think it would even be appropriate to deny the use of profanity. Civility would be mandatory.

The central idea of such a site would be to promote dialogue and informed decision making. People are too ignorant of what their governments do and how they do it. Ignorant citizens make bad voters, or non-voters. Since the governments themselves don’t seem particularly interested in keeping the public informed of their doings, preferring to work in secret or effectively so, a site like this would go against the desires of many members of government. Which is why such a site is needed—it would discourage ethically unreliable people from joining government in the first place, knowing that the public is in fact watching what they do very closely.

The main focus of the site would be centred on how governments spend their tax money. The dribble of information available on this is generally ignored. It’s published on government web sites and traditional media have no interest in it. The site would track how governments distribute money to their disparate parts, by organizational entity and department, including materials, salaries and the rest.

The site would live or die by its design. A user must be able to browse easily to what they are interested in, and quickly find any specific subject page. If they wanted to see Canada’s military spending, or Toronto’s public works spending, or the salaries of Ontario civil servants, it would all be there to find. It’s all publicly-owned information, and it should be easy to find.

Possibly the information would be controlled somewhat. It’s not clear that it’s necessary for Canadians to know what the United States is spending its money on, although perfect transparency would be ideal. It seems as though most of that information is in the public domain, which seems to be a mostly universal concept, at least in democratic countries.

I highly doubt I will be able to develop this idea myself, since I don’t have the knowledge or experience, but you never know. I’m just too busy with my day job and other distractions. So I thought I’d at least get the idea out there.