Democratic Structures in Cyberspace
Online Communities That Self-Govern
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- Navigate this page:
- Connecting Real Space Government with Cyberspace
- Developing a New Architecture for Voting
- Internet Governance of the Future
Online Communities That Self-GovernOnline communities, which have been developing for years, provide a good starting point for studying the Internet’s relationship to democracy. Small communities formed from MUD's, MOO's, BBS's, and Usenet groups resemble local neighborhoods where the citizens of the group govern themselves by choosing their own rules and punishments. Yet these communities differ from real space neighborhoods in the relative permanence of their memberships. In a physical neighborhood, you must relocate to escape the offensive acts of a neighbor, which is not always feasible. In cyberspace, a few keystrokes will switch you from one online group to another. The ease of entry and exit in online groups would appear to sap the power from community norms. Yet many such communities persist. One explanation is that in these small communities, it takes a longer time and more effort to develop an online identity, and this investment is lost when one leaves the community. Establishment of identity may give the user a stake in a particular community, impelling him to attempt to resolve differences with online neighbors rather than moving out. Are these online communities the towns or states of the Internet? If so, what are the consequences of an individual being involved in multiple online communities? When does a user's identity in cyberspace begin to mirror, blur into, and change their real space identity?
The potential for online resolution of real space issues raises its own questions. The Internet offers a powerful tool to connect individual citizens with their government. Its information delivery could enhance transparency, allowing individuals checks on the actions of representatives. Alternatively, it could remove the intermediary and facilitate direct many-to-many participation. The geographic motivation for representative democracy is diminished, but the wealth of information and complexity of decisions may increase. How does this change the face of representation? If a direct democracy is more technically feasible, does that mean that it should be attempted, or should representative democracy still be preserved? How might real space governance be facilitated online? The CGI forms already available through a simple web browser can replicate the voting booth where yes/no answers are sought. We can streamline the process by providing easy access to the voting profiles of political parties, and easy hyperlinked access to their platforms and explanations.
Yet if we seek a more informed electorate, the deliberative polling concept developed by James Fishkin offers some promise. In Fishkin's model, a pool or sample of voters is given information on a topic and put into group discussions on issues before voting. Online, a combination of hyperlinked documents and media, and real time and asynchronous conversations can simulate this experience. Can we provide the right incentives to encourage informed deliberation? A type of proportional representation, more feasible in cyberspace, in which individuals could add weight to their vote through participation in areas of particular concern, offers one approach. If not yet ready for the prime time of national government, such a protocol might be appropriate for corporate stockholders or membership organizations. In any online voting implementation scheme, the technological architecture will raise issues. To enable anonymous voting, a form of digital identity must be established to verify eligibility and to prevent a person from casting multiple votes. Various encryption algorithms offer different answers. For instance, a self-adjudicating protocol uses several layers of encryption and computation to enable participants to vote without involving a third party. Computation is reduced with a central vote repository, but an independent third party must both administer and count the ballots. A multiple voting organization structure distributes the control, relying on two separate parties, one to administer and one to count the ballots. Before scheduling an online vote with real space effects, however, one must ensure universal Internet access to all potential voters.
In the immediate future, the governance of the Internet itself raises all these questions. The aforementioned small online communities cannot remain disparate forever, and the time will come when the Internet as a whole needs to have some form of a centralized government. The United States government has provisionally granted that governance to ICANN, a non-profit California corporation. As part of the agreement, however, ICANN has committed to developing structures by which “members of the Internet community” can contribute to and appeal to a neutral arbiter decisions that affect them. Who is a “member,” and by what mechanisms can this expansive “community” be defined and brought together? Here, the Internet is both the question and the tool by which it must be answered. In the coming months, it will depend on the “members of the Internet community” to answer these fundamental questions about themselves even as they construct the foundations for practical decision-making. The technologies of online voting and deliberative polling, combined with an understanding of the types of sub-community that have already carved out their own spaces on the Internet gives them some suggestions. In turn, we should take the construction of government for and in cyberspace as an opportunity to reexamine democracy itself, and apply the lessons and tools of Internet democracy to its real space counterpart. |