Introduction Problem Solution Appendix / Ref
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WeMatter.com > the_book (Introduction)

WeMatter.com, the_book

released under (GPLcc)

    • There seems to be a disconnect between the US citizens and their governments.

    • We citizens are seeming more and more discouraged with the actions of our Government as it seems to careen from one failed (or partially successful) policy to another.

    • It seems that the polices are not the result of considered citizen thought but are developed, enacted by special interest groups.

    • In addition, the accountability of our representatives is legally limited to a Yes or No vote, once every election period, with manor pressures to reduce even the effectiveness of via Incumbent districting, Cost of elections, etc.

    • This book is a study of the problems of this disconnect, and a proposed solution, the implementation of a Political hub, WeMatter.com (the_site), for reducing it.

     

  1. Problem -- There is a disconnect between the US citizens and their governments.
    1. Symptoms --
      • Low esteam of our Government and of citizen participation
      • Large influance of non citizen special interest
    2. Reasons -- The some of the obvious reasons for these problems are:
      • The accountability of our representatives is legally limited to a Yes or No vote, once every election period, with manor pressures to reduce even the effectiveness of via Incumbent districting,
      • The Cost of elections, etc.
      • The separation of the Representative from the people, for example, the Senators who determine federal policy are elected by a large number of people, thus, one person's vote is relatively unimportant, and only those in the district of a Senator who is on the proper committee will be listened to for the porposals that are relavent to that committee.
    3. Other Solutions -- As this is not a new problem, many solutions have been proposed, all the way from a strict Libertarian approach that proposes that the government be so limited that it is irrelevant that it is divorce from the people to an electronic direct government approach that proposes that all issues be decided by the population directly via Internet voting. This section discusses some of these solutions.

  2. Solution -- The site WeMatter.com is the author's proposal to solve the disconnect between the Government and the Citizens This is a political hub site that allows the people to learn about issues, to express their preference to their representatives, both governmental and virtual, to maintain a history of how their representatives followed their preferences, and finally to allow the people to reward/punish their representatives based on how well they were represented.
    • Tools -- There are many internet structures/tools that may be used in such a cooperative site.
    • Polorization of the WEB -- The book republic.com and various articles had discussed the tendancy of the internet, and the multitude of Cable channels to make it easier for people to get their main news not from common sorces, as was possibly true with the 3 networks, but from their own political orented news feed. See:

Appendix

      Key sites

      Business Plan

References

GPL content copyright {here} -- This material will be copyright under what I am calling the "GPL content copyright" (As a working label) based on the standard GNU Public License. This means, sort of, that the material will be available at no charge on the WEB, or on any other media, and any suggestions... that others want to make can be included in it under the same considerations. On the other hand I, the author , request that any permanent copies be paid for, either by purchasing the book, or by paying the original publisher of the book a rate set by him as reasonable for such material. Note: The Creative Commons is in the process of developing appropriate licenses so that intellectual property can be properly protected, and I expect that the final license will be based on one of their forms. As I read it, the closest one is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

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July 3, 2004 16:41