In my Rebooting America essay, I posit a series of principles. The principles are designed to be compared against any wide-scale implementation of an online opinion-gathering service, and they (hopefully) will ensure that such a service will actually work on behalf of the people, versus working on behalf of entrenched powers.

This, of course, begs the question: why a list of principles? Or, to phrase it as a snide comment, “if you’re so smart, why don’t you just build your own such service, make it be the most popular, and run it how you like?”

Lots of reasons:

  1. No matter what engineering I or any other person might do, there’s no assurances whatsoever that any given implementation would magically become “the most popular”
  2. Even if I were to cook up “the most popular” online polling system, the world would still need to judge whether my implementation was good for society, and hence would still need some set of principles to use as a measuring-stick
  3. Key to the principles is that society cannot have one service that is head-and-shoulders “the most popular”, lest that service exercise its power in nefarious ways

As such, the principles serve two goals:

  1. Be proscriptive for services not yet created, for people who truly want to empower digital democracy and come up with tools that will be widely considered “a good thing”
  2. Serve as a benchmark for comparing services that arise, ones that may or may not have had the principles in mind at the time of their creation

For example, suppose that Google.org (the philanthropic side of Google) decided it wanted to tackle digital democracy head-on. In concert with Google.com (the business), it could rather easily construct an online polling system, and in concert with its OpenSocial partners (e.g., MySpace), it could get those polls out to lots and lots of people. One might think that this is intrinsically “a good thing”, since it’s backed by a philanthropic foundation and engineered by a company with a motto of “do no evil”. And so lots of people might just gloss over the fact that Google, perhaps, had engineered it so all the votes were stored on its servers and only it had the means of counting them and coming up with statements of what the public position is on various issues.

Google might even have the noblest of intentions…today.

The catch is that Google is a publicly-traded firm. Couple that with the fact that most people aren’t immortal — unless Google engineers develop the Google Lazarus Pit — eventually, Google’s leadership will change. There is no guarantee that the “do no evil” Google of today will stick by that motto in 10, 20, 50, 100 years. Google might be a fine basket for us to place all our eggs in now, but we cannot, and must not, put all our eggs in one basket if that is at all avoidable.

I’m merely trying to shine a light for how to avoid it. With luck, if Google were to get involved more heavily in this area, we could convince them to be sufficiently open as to meet these principles, or whatever set of principles we collectively develop. Google certainly has a better track record than some firms I could name in the area of openness.