An Idea Worth Pursuing

By Suhail Rastogi

Cyber-Constituency to me is a term given to a novel attempt aimed at using the Internet to create enthusiasm among the general public about the political system and its players. The idea goes way beyond infusing transparency into various facets of the political system like disclosing assets, education and income information of prospective politicians. I foresee the net as a potent tool for generating buzz about political events that shape our daily lives. Discussion about politics has simply fallen out of favor among media consumers. We aim at generating grassroots support using the internet, and at the same time ensure impartiality of views and opinions.

If I take clues from the blog and think of CC at another level…. it seems to be a good idea to shift the election procedures over the net. Log into a site and cast your vote or opine about the latest happenings. Two issues arise here…:
a.) Ownership – Private, Government, An Autonomous body like the election commission. A critical issue, given the sensitivity of information being handled
b.) Inclusion – Access to the Net differentiates the have nots from the haves.

25 Nov 2007

SS Fiction

K. Sankaran

When I ran this idea of CC with my some of friends their terse comments or silence said a lot. The most loquacious would only say, “Interesting… but”, “Great idea… but”.

There simply seems to be no takers for CC.

Just to get past the practicality argument, I wanted to suggest that what I have is not a practical idea, but an idea for a fiction, or a fictional idea… You know what I mean.

Now-a-days scientists have become so respectful of science fiction! Wonder whether it wasn’t so years a century ago… long before going to the moon and spacewalk had become passé.

Science fiction thoughts were (and still are) considered harbingers of things to come. There ideas, we know from historians of science, had a very real and practical impact on the scientists who developed rockets and made moonwalk possible. Fiction provided a kind of “dream” roadmap. The question now is “why can’t we have our lives embellished with some dreams and practical fiction… We may call this kind of fiction Social Science Fiction or SS-fiction for short!”

SS-Fiction is for those who do not equate healthy (non-pathological) speculation or dreaming with the "impractical"!

And why not develop this as a “story” over a period of time with contribution from you... readers of this blog… A kind of unfolding SS-Fiction over the net with many contributors. May I invite you to this endeavor... Any takers?

Our Task is Humongous

K. Sankaran

We will have to develop this idea from scratch. Cyber constituency as we define it here does not exist in the internet vocabulary. A Google search today returned 5 URLs that have used the expression “cyber-constituency” or “cyber constituency”. The closest sense in which the term is used (when compared to ours) is as “that part of the electorate who are cyber-savvy and are tuned to TV and other forms of digital media and who make decisions based on discussion aired in these media.”

We are talking of something entirely different. We are talking of a new way to give expression to representative democracy, a new way to organize the electorate and choose our representatives. We are not merely talking of influencing the electorate but creating the electorate using Information Technology.

Sankaran

Cyber Constituency - The Bare Bones

K. Sankaran

This site is for examining the idea of Cyber Constituencies (or CC for short). The idea is very much in its embryonic (or pre-embryonic!) stage and the purpose of this blog is to tease out the idea so that an adequate level of dialogue is achieved so that we can decide whether it is worth considering this for further inquiry.

CC is a way to send a person to a legislative body who would truly and entirely represent the aspiration of a proportionate number of eligible voters.

Let us take the case our own Lok Sabha in India. Lok Sabha is the highest legislative body that represents people at the central (or federal level). The Lok Sabha in its entirety is meant to represent all the eligible voters in the country. Each of the Lok Sabha member would represent a proportionate number of eligible voters.

For the sake of argument, if there are 600 million eligible voters in the country and if the full house of Lok Sabha would consist of 600 representatives, then each member would be representing a million eligible voters.

With advances in IT the question is why not have 1 million persons endorse an individual and carve out a “cyber constituency” for a certain time frame (say between 2010 – 2015)? Next time around (during 2015 – 2020) this constituency will not hold because a new constituency would have been formed with the existing members having chosen to endorse different persons.

The process of selecting the person will not be through “election”. It will be through some form of “endorsement”.

This forum is created to discuss the following themes

1) Benefits of CC

2) Downside of CC; whether these can be overcome if benefits outweigh these

3) Issues of rights, justice and other jurisprudential issues

4) Issues of legality, constitutional provisions, legal hurdles

5) Sociological issues of exclusion and inclusion

6) Impact on institutions and institutional impediments

7) Impact on national integration (and search for collective good) on the one hand and autonomy of individuals on the other

8) Impact on quality of decision making in the legislative body

9) Information Technology; whether the endorsement can be realistically done with the IT infrastructure in the short and medium term.

10) How we can take this to the next level with proper academic research

11) Or any other relevant matter

Here are eleven themes we could discuss. If you think there are other themes, please point it out through comments in the blog.

For the time being, if you will, treat this as a mental toy to play with. Later, if successful, we can elevate this to an academic level when mental toying would lead to some serious research.

Please do respond if you would like to comment on any of the above themes. In fact it will nice if this cyber-conversation throws up some experts (or groups) who can work on each of the eleven or more themes. Thanks.