> The Citizen Dashboard Software Project
October 09, 2007
Why:
The basic technological building blocks to enable Collaborative Democracy now exist and all that is required is that they be threaded together in a way that an average citizen can use them productively.
Goals:
Participating in government is a citizen’s right and duty. The Citizen Dashboard saves citizens time and keeps them abreast of the issues of the day thereby increasing their participation in the democratic process.
Steering Committee:
The committee is to facilitate the process, make suggestions, maintain fairness and order, and to supervise whatever votes are required to help create truly useful software, not dictate.
Roadmap:
The Citizen Dashboard organizes the citizen’s government and personal political interests in one location; it is a control panel for the democratic process using the Internet and a browser. Its design employs commonly available technology and allows for new technological advances to be applied through a flexible and open architecture that can be customized by citizens as they see fit. The large minority required to promote legislation and candidates is created using the Citizen Dashboard as is voting.
Citizens are presented with a user logon, similar to the password/user ids for online banking. The Dashboard works with mobile devices and desktop computers and is secure.
Once the citizen has successfully logged into the system, he is presented with a screen that contains all the information on the government of his town/city/municipality, county, state and federal government. He will see election schedules, sample ballots, and contact information for officials. Additionally, there will be discussion forums, instant message capability, tracking of legislative support by elected representatives and citizens. He is also enabled to propose new laws and modification to laws and policies as illustrated in the Collaborative Democracy Framework.
In order to collaborate with other citizens locally, regionally and nationally, the Dashboard allows communication with all political subdivisions down to a zip code level.
The Citizen Dashboard is completely customizable for each citizen’s interests. Citizens can mark as, ‘favorites,’ laws and bills under debate and candidates running for office making it easy to participate.
Citizens can attach to candidates, officials, bills and legislation to form large minorities with other citizens and contribute comments or feedback. In addition the Collaborative Democracy Candidate Framework and Collaborative Democracy Framework are enabled through the Citizen Dashboard.
Citizens can keep track of meeting schedules, comments and feedback to elected representatives and candidates for office - with percentage of support and details on them and their agenda. Further personalization allows groups to be created, making communication with and by the group open and effortless (e.g. library committee, freeholders meeting, board of education). Meeting minutes, video recordings or Podcasts can be published and viewed by citizens through the Dashboard.
Information generated by the Emergency Broadcast System and Amber Alerts are incorporated in the default view of the Citizen Dashboard.
Additionally, the Citizen Dashboard accesses the general ledger and budget for the municipality, county, state and federal governments as the Transparent and Accountable Government Software Project is rolled out.
Get Involved: Email us to join in!
- We need software engineers, architects and coders to volunteer who are familiar with working in an open source collaborative environment to design and build the software.
- We need good citizens to volunteer for the initial steering committee to assist in the forming of steering committees who will help set the software's design goals.
- We need good citizens to volunteer to put the Citizen Dashboard Process in place to nominate and choose our successors on the steering committees.
- We need citizens to nominate towns, counties, states and nations where they think the citizens would benefit the most in deploying this software.
- Donate.
