Group items tagged

help you make a choice

the political world and the citizen world, our world

They barely talk to each other and they hardly understand each other.

This situation is barely acceptable. Let’s be proactive citizens: how can we try to improve this?

The complexity of the system, as in “the political system is horribly complex, it’s hard for a citizen to really understand it”.

let’s say that we have coded it, and let’s call it our magic box.

Now, let’s use our magical box. We are asked to choose between several candidates, so let’s ask our box to tell us what it knows about them. Well here’s the catch: we end up with a mountain of data that we can barely understand. Complexity just hit us.

Complexity is annoying because we can’t solve it by coding.

Magic box + la Quadrature du Net’s voting recommendations = semi accurate concrete data on who represents me the best

Magic box + voting recommendation of all citizen groups that represent our interests = way more accurate concrete data of who represents me the best

In fact, what I want to see (and to build) in the future would be a website that allows me, and every citizen, to: Select a series of representatives I can vote for; Select a list of citizen groups that I personally trust to represent my interests; Decide if I want to give certain groups more weight to better represent my concerns and priorities (we could even imagine giving negative weight to citizen groups we dislike); And have in result concrete data on which I can rely to make my choice.

The best reward will come when elected representatives start realising that we actually know what they are doing and that their actions matters. Guess how they will change their behaviour.

What this magical box is offering you is a paradigm shift, a bridge between those two worlds for them to better understand each other and to work together again

Memopol is the magical box we are building. It’s time for us, citizens, to take back our role in politics.

According to the socio-demographic data, men are more likely than women to have used various means of expressing their views, including taking part in a public debate at local/regional level (22% vs. 15% for women), expressing their views to a local elected representative (27% vs. 20%), and expressing their views via the Internet or social media (32% vs. 25%)

A fifth of respondents (20%) are members of an organisation with a specific economic, social, environmental, cultural or sporting interest

Overall, 45% of women say that they did none of these things in order to express their views, as opposed to 38% of men.

People in different age groups demonstrate preferences for using different means of expressing their views on public issues. Younger respondents are more likely to use the Internet or social media: 42% of 15-24 year-olds did this during the past two years, but this falls to 17% among people aged 55 or over

The full report is available here [PDF].