OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

David Langer

Member since 3 years ago

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Ideas contributed by David Langer

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  Open Government Dialogue Site Needs Rework

  This site over the past few days shows the potential for abuse of any electronic forum. In my opinion, the site should be frozen, with only voting or commenting on posts allowed. Since the brainstorming session was supposed to have ended anyway... A new site should be developed that provides a lot more protection against spamming ideas over and over. There is a lot that one can do with the concept of electronic karma ...more »

  This site over the past few days shows the potential for abuse of any electronic forum. In my opinion, the site should be frozen, with only voting or commenting on posts allowed. Since the brainstorming session was supposed to have ended anyway...

  A new site should be developed that provides a lot more protection against spamming ideas over and over. There is a lot that one can do with the concept of electronic karma (good actions, which is to say using the site responsibly, on the site give access to functionality, bad actions, electronic spamming, harassment, extreme vulgarity or disrespect, threats, place restrictions to functionality). Also, a more robust account set up. When flagging a post as duplicate / spam / inappropriate, require:

  1. A link to another post that is the duplicate. A search form could be provided for this purpose, if it is a duplicate it should be searchable quickly, or a place to past a link could be provided.

  2. A link to a few other duplicate posts by the same user in a short period of time to indicate spam.

  3. The reason you feel something is inappropriate.

  Also, consider breaking out duplicate / spam posting into a seperate section of the site, for instance, create a SPAM and a DUPLICATE category. People are complaining about openness when you remove posts. They have a point. Instead, move them into a seperate section that folks who enjoy that kind of thing can use and verify that yes their postings are still available, but those users who want to use the site as intended can not be harassed (too much... there is some level of harassment that cannot be avoided when attempting to deal with people who like to harasser and annoy others in a respectful manner) by it. It MAY (and I emphasize MAY) prevent some users from spamming posts. At the very least, they can longer claim that they are being censored. It may also clue some people in as to what spamming is and how rude it can be.

  This seems like an excellent time to review the posts on how this site and this process in particular can be improved.

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  8 comments for Idea: Open Government Dialogue Site Needs Rework

  Submitted by David Langer 3 years ago

• I agree

  Voting is Disabled

  16 votes

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  New Tools and Technologies »

  Open Government Dialogue Allows Multiple Votes Per Individual

  This note, "Please note: On Saturday morning, we made a small change to this site. Posting, commenting and voting on ideas now requires users to log in. This change was made in response to concerns that settings that allowed anonymous posting may also have allowed users to vote more than once on the same idea." while nice, doesn't get at the root of the problem. A given *individual* may still vote multiple times, all ...more »

  This note, "Please note: On Saturday morning, we made a small change to this site. Posting, commenting and voting on ideas now requires users to log in. This change was made in response to concerns that settings that allowed anonymous posting may also have allowed users to vote more than once on the same idea." while nice, doesn't get at the root of the problem. A given *individual* may still vote multiple times, all they need to do is obtain additional email addresses to register with.

  This is a basic problem with allowing 'online voting' based on registration from an email address. Anyone even remotely internet savvy can obtain multiple votes if they so desire.

  For an 'idea swapping' interface, this is not a huge issue. However, it does mean that results can be skewed to not represent the actual will of the people.

  Thank you for trying.

  If you want to restrict one vote per individual, you will need to do some basic level of identity checking for new registrations. This would require:

  1. A secure web site for setting up new accounts, at the very least.

  2. A verification process that an individual should be allowed to create an account (using SSN if nothing else, but more robust would be to have the user verify their income and taxes for the previous year(s), which is information the government should have on file already), and also verifying that the identifier (in the example, SSN) has not been registered before.

  Account identifers could be completely abitrary after the verification process was performed so that sensitive data for the account set up process was not required to be submitted all the time.

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  11 comments for Idea: Open Government Dialogue Allows Multiple Votes Per Individual

  Submitted by David Langer 3 years ago

• I agree

  Voting is Disabled

  -8 votes

  I disagree
  This idea is active.
  New Tools and Technologies »

  National Electronic Voting Kiosk Network

  We should create a network of electronic voting kiosks (EVK), similar to ATMs that are everywhere across the world. However, these EVKs must be owned and maintained by the government, without any influence by private business. The ownership of the vote must be by the people, hence, only our government should be able to administer and maintain our voting system, electronic or paper based. The most important aspect of ...more »

  We should create a network of electronic voting kiosks (EVK), similar to ATMs that are everywhere across the world. However, these EVKs must be owned and maintained by the government, without any influence by private business. The ownership of the vote must be by the people, hence, only our government should be able to administer and maintain our voting system, electronic or paper based.

  The most important aspect of the software that runs on these EVKs is that is must be open source (that is the source code can be read and reviewed by anyone. This is so that 'we the people' can review the code that is doing the work powering our democracy) and the software compilation and installment process must be openly reviewable by both Congress and private citizens. The open source caveat must also apply to the operating system of the EVKs, there must be no private business proprietary software in the units. This could be end point verifiable by private citizens being able to use freely downloadable software and a common interface for obtaining information (only! there should be no mechanism for private citizens to upload data to the kiosk, the only data the kiosk should record is voting data via the display) about the software running on the kiosks. The downloadable verification software could then independantly report a verification message to the government with the kiosk id, citizen id and authentication tokens and verification results. Actions could be taken upon the kiosk upon the results of these verifications such as shutting down the unit until government technicitians are able to service the unit, subjecting any votes cast by the unit to manual scrutiny, prompting further citizens attempting to use the unit to perform additional verifications and submit results until the unit is serviced or it is determined that someone submitted a false report (at which point the false report could be investigated as election tampering).

  This would provide a high level of faith in the system, in that anyone could run end point verifications. Also anyone could review the source code of these systems and the government records of EVK servicing.

  The reason for using a kiosk network instead of making access available to home computers is twofold: first it allows access to anyone, second it provides a high level of voter security.

  In terms of access to anyone, it is important that participation in our democracy not be restricted to those affluent / technologically savvy enough to be able to afford / use a computer. An ATM-like kiosk should be simple enough to use that anyone should be able to participate. For those citizens living abroad, we should be able to set up these EVKs in our consulates in foreign countries at the very least. I am certain that there are other places that could be identified to make these places available to citizens abroad. Obviously we should not take United Nations assistance for granted, but it seems likely we would be able to work something out with the UN to expand our democratic participation.

  It will be a matter of utmost importance to verify the identity of people logging in to system to record their votes. It is likewise of utmost importance to prevent electronic tampering with the system. The EVKs, being kiosks with very limited input capability and with almost no contact to the internet at large would be very secure and not subject to the vagaries of viruses, worms, keystroke-loggers and such that plague the common home computer. This would provide a high level of reassurance to the public that their voting system is not being tampered with.

  The EVKs would be located in post offices, public libraries and possibly government buildings as well.

  Obviously, tampering with this system would need to be made a federal crime with stiff penalties.

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  2 comments for Idea: National Electronic Voting Kiosk Network

  Submitted by David Langer 3 years ago

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