In the fall of 2007, I was pretty frustrated; having studied public policy, spending time reading some prominent arguments from social democrats, I thought the US should have been clearly set to be doing the policies that help create a better society: early childhood education, healthcare, public schooling, etc.

This didn’t seem possible running around the golden triangle. DC has the smell of lobbyism: real estate prices 10-folded in 5 years, and this trend had been going on for decades. Companies have strong interest and activities on Capitol Hill.

It seemed pretty clear – government was not there to create a better society for all – it was to make it better (or keep the status quo) for the powerful few.

The above video with Robert Reich giving a lecture at Google makes it probably pretty clear. There is actually little to discuss at an intellectual level that the system in US has failed. And is not able to move on to any other direction. Not yet. What could help?

How about reducing the transaction cost for average citizen to part-take in policy-making and making it very expensive for lobbyists to continue funding their interests? Yes, I’m talking about online democracy.

WeDecide was founded from this perspective and from this frustration. We are bound to a social contract in every circle or community we live in. This contract needs constant re-consideration, and giving our power to bargain to some famous rich few politician doesn’t seem to do us any good.

The system we aspire should be equitable: anyone can join in with same opportunities. It should reward merit: those who contribute and influence should be acknowledged. We want it to produce smart decisions, and we want it transparent and efficient.

Efficiency is an important element here: many movements, initiatives loose their community if they are not moving (fast enough). There is no trade-off necessarily between efficiency and wisdom of decisions, nor transparency. Often, idealistic initiatives forget about this element of efficiency – they would rather fine-tune or discuss a dream for days rather than take action. Yet, when we are trying to optimize our well-being as a society, we must take into account the cost of making choices. Instead of optimizing (endlessly) we will need to satisfice and feed-back the results for improvements.

WeDecide makes use of market principles to be an efficient and smart system for decisions: participants are handed some credits to evaluate the potential of policy-proposals facing a challenge.

The credits are a means for influence: by using them, participants take part in proposals, they get shares in proposals and thus have a say over the proposal. This allocation of credits also updates the value of proposal – the more demand for it, the more its value.

Different from voting, every user who has taken part in the proposal becomes co-owner and has incentive to improve it. They are also limited in their capacity to participate: users with plenty of time cannot dominate; everybody is asked to focus on the proposals of interest.

The top-valued proposals then go through a round of voting. This is a display of the proposal the group has put together for the rest of the community. The goal here is to get a confirmation from the community that this proposal is a step forward solving the challenge. It is not going to solve the challenge on itself, most likely, but is one of the iterative steps to help solving it.

WeDecide launched a project with Dagbladet Information right after the elections in September, 2011. About a 1000 people participated while another 7500 visited the portal in its first 2 months. The group made 15 proposal decisions so far responding to 4 challenges from how to improve public education to reducing stress at workplace. Register and join this reader’s think tank to contribute: http://100dage.information.dk

The next step for WeDecide is to launch a public portal, which will be a hub for public participation to various institutions’ questions. On this portal, all will be invited to partake and suggest policies in many areas from reduction in traffic accidents to better integration and organic farming.

There are increasing sentiment to move to online democracy. I foresee that parliaments will be converted into museums by 2050; we will legislate directly by then using online tools.

The WeDecide model may not be the best one for the challenge – yet it is serving a great enough purpose if it helps enhance this area.