Three Challenges for Politics and Technology Development: Organizational Complexity, Virtuality, and Design Values

Abstract

The democratic process is in chaos in many nations. What role has technology played in this to date, and what are realistic goals for the role of technology in the future? How can we best design and develop technologies to support democratic process with participation from community members? How can we learn from deployments and help communities adapt to actual uses and results? These elements of the talk will be illustrated with examples from different community projects we have done together, including a crowd sourced voter deliberation platform, a virtual assembly site for Occupy Wall Street, and a planned international thought network to address related problems of economy, environment, and democracy.