Fortytu: Public Opinion Aggregator

For a long time, I’ve been working on an idea that I’ve termed “Open source government.” For various reasons, it’s never gotten out of the idea phase. Last week, I attended startup weekend to start talking about it, make connections, and get some feedback. This weekend, I’m filling out the application form for techstars. I have small hope of even getting the form finished by the deadline, but it’s a good exercise in figuring out which bases I still need to cover. This post is an attempt to describe the idea clearly, in its present form.

Let me first state the problem: We don’t know what we think.

By that I mean “we,” as a sum total population, don’t know what we think as a group.

We have public opinion polls, but they fall far short of the mark. Polls are managed by asking a specific set of questions of a group of people intended to represent a cross-section of the population. They have flaws. Are the right questions being asked? Who is being polled? Do the questions lead the respondents into a specific type of response? Are there different ways to interpret the results? Why, exactly, did people respond the way they did? Could there be deeper reasons for their opinions, that we’re not getting at through these yes/no or multiple choice questions?

Polls don’t allow us a deep look at what’s going on. All too often, I feel that the right questions aren’t being asked. The data that comes out of these polls is sifted through and reported on by experts. People like you and me generally don’t have access to it. We are left with interpreted results that, unfortunately, have been further filtered through the various biases of the media.

I want to know what people really think. I want to be able to see by state, county and town how many people are in support of my favorite candidate, and why. I want to be able to drill down and find out how many people share my opinions on any given subject in any town in the U.S. I want to be able to see how many people are in support of a war and how many are against it, and follow that data to find out why.

I also want this information to be available to everyone. The most powerful thing I think I can do to help my country and to help humanity is to find a way to make sure that we all know what we think.

To use a stark example, and to reveal some of my political leanings: if most of the people in this country had had the chance to go online in early 2003 and securely, safely register their opinions on whether or not going to war in Iraq was a good idea, what would have happened? We might have still gone to war, but many more of us, in all parts of this country, would have known that we were not alone. The climate of fear that existed, in which people were afraid to express their opinions to their neighbors, could have been greatly lessened. Groups may have formed and actions may have been taken to change the outcome, much sooner, before so many lives were lost and America’s reputation so damaged in the world.

When people know the strength of their numbers, they are empowered to speak out and rally support. Today, we are witnessing a movement for change with astounding momentum. When people see so many others of like mind standing up and demanding change – creating change – they are encouraged to do the same. Knowing the strength of one’s numbers is an antidote to being manipulated through fear.

Ok. So now you know the why – let’s talk about how.

Fortytu is intended as an account based system in which users willingly register their opinions on a variety of subjects. The questions are both seeded and created by the users. The system will allow users to merge similar questions, combining their results, rate and categorize questions and topics, and comment on them twitter-style so that discussion remains succinct. The system will be self-maintaining in a way similar to wikipedia.

The net result of all this activity is that:
1) The questions that need to be asked – the ones that are most important to the users – will float to the top.
2) Demographic data on users will be kept, but privacy maintained, so that aggregate data will be available by region, state and town, and across several different demographic measurements pertaining to any specific question or combination of questions.
3) Since users are able to maintain a private list of their answers and change them at any time, the results of any given question will be dynamic and reflect changing public opinion.

So, what happens when we’ve got all this data?

Politicians start using it to aid their campaigns. Elected officials put questions into the system to find out what their constituents want them to know. Journalists mine the system for data and report their sources. Marketers use the data for more tightly focused ads. People organize themselves into groups more effectively based on common interests and causes. Politics, government, media, marketing, and grassroots organization are transformed.

Hubris aside, I think it’s a good idea.

Crimes of Compassion

I wrote a letter in support of a friend last night, who is being sentenced to federal prison in less than a month. The letter was a plea for leniency. In it, I described the better points of her character and tried to explain what could have motivated her to do what she did.

It’s an emotional time. I’ve known my friend for 10 years. I never knew that she was involved in some of the things for which she’s now being sentenced, but looking back at the time during which I met her, it makes sense. She’s a compassionate individual, and the crimes she committed are the sort of things a strong-minded person in their twenties, with a passion for protecting those who can’t protect themselves, might be motivated to do.

She was involved in some actions with an environmental group about a decade ago that resulted in some serious property damage, but not, as far as I can tell, any loss of or injury to human life. That seems to have been one of her group’s principles. Apparently, some of the facilities they took action against were owned by companies that were using them for some pretty heinous acts – rounding up wild horses from public lands and rendering them for meat, for example. But though this may have been bad, her group’s actions were considered the more illegal. She did a pretty good job of keeping these things quiet and unknown to her friends outside of that group and her family, and apparently she thought she had left that part of her life behind long ago.

It caught up with her, with a vengeance. Someone in her group eventually informed on the rest of them, and by the time they caught up with her, they had enough evidence to put her away for life. Given that choice vs. helping the investigators in exchange for a lesser sentence, she chose to help. It must have been a gut-wrenching decision for her, as some of the people she was asked to give evidence on had been her friends. I don’t like to think about what I would have done, or how I would have felt, in the same situation. Fortunately, I have nothing in my past that would ever put me in that same situation, but still.

In the past few weeks I have read more hate-spewing stuff on the internet than I have ever seen associated with anyone I knew. There are news articles describing her in harsh terms as a felon and eco-terrorist, whose authors wonder how such a nice young girl with such a promising future could have taken such a wrong turn. Some of the more negative comments I’ve read with these articles say that she should just be locked up for life, or killed, or worse.

I’m not defending her actions. But sometimes, caring, compassionate individuals, especially when young, can take their enthusiasm for justice a bit too far. While some choose to heal the evils of society in a more measured, steady way, some choose a more abrupt route. What I’m saying is that she’s not an evil person – as far as I can tell, her actions were motivated by a desire to protect wildlife and the environment, not for personal gain or personal vengeance. She discontinued doing these things long ago, and now understands that these actions were not only wrong, but may have damaged her causes more than helped them.

The sad thing is, the worst stuff I’ve read about her has been on environmental activist sites, where she is reviled as a snitch. There, people are calling her a traitor to their cause and posting photos of her so that she can be identified on sight to anyone who might wish to do her harm. I find this sort of knee-jerk reaction to be as bad as the people who automatically revile her for committing her acts in the first place.

It’s different when you know the person. It’s easy to look at a person you don’t know who has committed a crime, and assume all kinds of things about them that justify your hatred of their actions and allow you to hate them as well. It’s not so easy to give a person you don’t know the benefit of the doubt.

The person I know is a caring, compassionate individual who sometimes goes out of her way to help the people she loves. I’ve known her as a loyal friend and a bright, intelligent person who I’ve been happy to have in my life. It saddens me deeply to see her going off to jail, though I understand that, karmically and otherwise, it’s what has to happen. I don’t think of her differently, even though I wouldn’t have done what she did. I see her as a friend who went a little too far in expressing her sense of justice, by taking matters into her own hands.

If anything, this experience teaches me to think of anyone I read about in the news, who has committed some sort of crime with which I disagree, as a person with a life and a past, who may or may not have good qualities that I may never know about. The age-old wisdom that you should hate the sin, but not the sinner, seems to apply here. I wish I could teach that to the people on both sides who simply want to judge her based on what little they know, instead of understanding her as a whole person.