Goal?

It’s participatory democracy with delegation. If legislation affects you, you can vote on it. If you trust someone elses vote, you can delegate your vote to them. When they vote, you vote along with them.

Scope: What needs to be done?

Improving an interactive demonstration of a complex process is communication problems mixed with engineering problems. We have to split the two.

Communication: What are we saying?

To communicate a new idea, you have to start from common ground, and then build a bridge to the new idea.

The common ground is voting. Everyone knows what a vote is. An individual votes for a candidate. If the candidate wins enough votes, they become an elected official, also known as a legislator. The legislator votes on legislation. If the legislation gets enough votes from the legislator, it becomes law.

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The next layer of common ground is direct democracy. In California, and in a lot of municipalities, citizens can vote directly on specific legislation in a constituent-wide referendum. In California we call these propositions. If a proposition gets enough votes, it becomes law.

Now we can try to build a bridge to new ground. What if you could register a vote on all legislation that an elected official that represents you is voting on? What if your elected officials could see those votes? What if you could see how often your elected official’s vote matches up with your vote? That would be nice wouldn’t it! Well that exists today. We built it for San Francisco and New York. You can access a version of it here. LINK TO LIVE SITE And if you’re reading this, and want us to build one for the city you live in, we can build you one too. Tell us to here: LINK TO FORM

Now we can try to build another bridge, to even newer ground. Legislation is complicated. Some of it is cryptic. A lot of it is mundane. And we’re busy. In every 24 hours day, most people spend 6-8 hours sleeping, 6-8 hours working, and 6-8 hours doing the important stuff like spending time with friends and family. Even when you have relevant legislation in the palm of your hand, making informed votes can be tedious, overwhelming, or leave you feeling fundamenally unqualified to take action. What if you could register a trusted delegate, who’s beliefs and opinions matched yours, or who’s trusted expertise you value in making voting decisions? That way you could take a peek at the the current week of legislation that affects you, make your votes, see your delegates votes and make sure you agree. When your delegate votes on an issue, it would also count for your vote on that issue. Neat huh?

What if you’re an expert? Or someone who a lot of people trust? Then those people could delegate to you. And when you voted, you’d be voting with their voice as well as yours.

And what if both of those things were true? Someone trusted you as a good representation of their beliefs and values, and you trusted someone else to be a good representative of yours? Then your delegate would be able to vote not just with you behind them, but also with everyone who’s behind you!

And just for good measure, what if you and a friend mutually agreed that you both shared similar beliefs? You could mutually delegate to eachother. Then whenever either of you voted, it would count for both of you.

And of course at any time, all of you could vote directly on any legislation, and of course have your direct vote counted, no matter how your delegates voted.

Cool idea huh? Imagine any number of people could delegate to you. And imagine you could have any number of delegates. And you could rank them. And they could be anyone. Imagine how much easier it would be to take informed action? Imagine how much easier it would be to know when to take action. Imagine how much you could help your friends who are trying to make positive change in their communities. Imagine the change you might be able to make yourself.

Let’s go one step further. Imagine an elected official, who agreed to use a system like this to determine how they voted on legislation. Would you vote for them?

The test: Is what’s attempting to be said, being said clearly?

This is a great two part question:

What is attempting to be said? First draft, just releasing something off the top of my head. Instead of defining what’s attempting to be said, start by saying what you believe, and then back your way into what you were trying to say.

Is it being said clearly? Without defining what’s attempting to be said, it’s impossible to know.

Iteration on Communication: What is attempting to be said?

Alright. This is a first draft, outlining some of the things that could be said. But are they the things we want to say?

Voting could be better.

It could be better by being more direct.

Being more direct would be easier if we could delegate to people we trust.

A system of voting more directly, and delegating to people we trust, can exist today.

A candidate could agree to use this system to register their votes on legislation, today.

Would you vote for them?

Iteration on Communication: Is it being said clearly?

Really the only way to know is to have someone read it, and tell you if it’s coming through clearly.

An alternate approach: Say Exactly What You Want to be Heard

Example 1: Tell, Then Show

While sketching out this flow, I took a peep at https://pudding.cool/2017/03/incarceration/ which is, I think, a nice reference example of saying explicitly what you’d like to be read.

US prisons have grown dramatically over the past 50 years.

Most people admitted to prison will be out in 1 year.

Even with low time-served (half admitted are out in 1 year), we refill prisons with about the same number of people each year.

Private prisons hold 8% of inmates, up from 5% in 1999.

Support those statements visually. And that’s it.

Example 2: Set Context, then Show and Tell

Let’s take a look at another example: https://pudding.cool/2017/09/clinics/

This one is more narrative in design, and addresses a single question.

We set out to quantify access to abortion clinics by measuring what really affects people: how long it takes to drive there.

Then the article follows with some great abstraction visuals:

There are 4 urban areas in the US with no accessible abortion clinics within a 8 hours round-trip drive.

Round-trip time to the nearest clinic at 20 weeks pregnant. is different from Round-trip time to the nearest clinic at 8 weeks pregnant.

Change in accessibility at X weeks if a clinic in LOCATION_Y closes.

Communication: What to learn?

You have to choose the points you want to make, before you can do anything else. If we’re to follow example #1 we’d make those points explicitly, which is, I think, right approach for a first shot. Example #2 is a more powerful, but perhaps more mature and complex way to tell the story.

Engineering: What needs to be made to support what’s being said?

Real quick from the engineering side; example 2 is made up of 4 core assets. A scrubable map of of the US. A very lovely path tracing video. A table with a dynamic hover-based scrolling globe. And then 4 map highlights of relevant time and location parameters from the data rendered on the map. In essence it’s a well organized inspection of the details of the map.

How about example 1? 7 plots. Scrubbing accross decades. A couple thousand lines of D3. Also the format is Heading -> Paragraph -> Interactive Visual which is nice and straightforward. Alright that’s useful prep work for now.

Scope: What does it take to explain a complex topic like the potential for delegative voting, visually?

5 headers. 5 paragraphs. 5-7 visualizations all built from a core asset. That core asset, at the moment, would be demo.united.vote which would need to be encapsulated and reproduced in a couple different forms for the 5-7 visualizations. It also might need some styling updates… maybe.