Re-Inventing Democracy With a Complex Adaptive Political Crowdsourcing Platform: The Interactive Voter Choice System

Continuing failure of the major U. S political parties to respond to the electorate's demands, has finally brought angry Americans into the streets. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement expresses the dissatisfaction of most people with the status quo: a fallen system, closed processes and patterns, its policies, and the influence of special corporate interests. People are starting to self-organize, and form new relationships in groups and networks to reinvent a more open, interactive, deliberative democracy. Two main critiques can be heard: what are the demands and who are the leaders? What kind of solutions does eParticipation have to provide to support this reinvention of democracy, and its agenda-setting and election of representative candidates, using social media, social networks, political crowdsourcing etc. This movement has all the elements of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) in action (self-organization, emergence, relationships etc.) But how can we dis-intermediate and democratize the old legacy parties and the special corporate interests given the existing system and its rules? What role has eParticipation to play in solving these problems? What does a new political complex adaptive political crowdsourcing platform look like? In this theoretical paper we explore the implications of CAS theory and concepts for the re-visioning of eParticipation as a subsystem of eDemocracy. We offer a CAS framework and the functional requirements for a new complex adaptive political crowdsourcing platform and its tools. Next we describe the case of the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS) and its associated web platform, where a solution is being developed that we believe will meet these functional requirements. We advocate the use of this platform/tool, since it will empower voter-controlled, self-organizing voting blocs and electoral coalitions to dis-intermediate and democratize political parties, collectively set legislative agendas, and elect lawmakers they can hold accountable for enacting the agendas. This technology will overcome the existing impediments to popular control of governments by enabling the voters of any country to combine the collective intelligence of their electorate with the large-scale collective action power of the internet to ensure that their nation is governed by and for the people.