Okay I'm imagining a public debate platform based on twitter. You set up a time, a topic and a hashtag. Then people can log in with their twitter accounts and say something about the topic. When a thing is tweeted it shows up as a bubble floating at random around the screen. When you hover on the bubble it stops so you can read it. Then you have the option to retweet it . If you retweet it it the bubble get's bigger for you and everyone else viewing. You can tweet a new point, or you can just read and retweet what you agree with. The effect of this is a mass public discourse where thousands of people are 'heard' at the same time in real time.
Electronic voting. Yea, even internet voting. Really shouldn't be impossible. Tom Scott says this is a terrible idea, but I don't think it's so unsolvable. The ways to cheat are: - stuffing the ballot box with bogus votes - counting or recording the votes bogusly - voting more than once or voting for someone else Voter confidentiality must be preserved. Here's my solution. - every voter must authenticate with some non-government system that 1) ensures user ID uniqueness 2) contains a method for contacting the voter (can be a form obscuring contact details) 3) creates a random code which is not retained by the system. This is easily done by Google, Facebook, or any tiny NGO. They would need to register and be subject to audit. - when a user votes, the data is logged in two public registers. 1) a voters register showing the person's user ID (or a unique variant from the authenticator) 2) a vote register showing the random code and how they voted
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