Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
The connective tissue of democracy has seriously decayed in recent years as trust in impartial institutions hits rock bottom and the public square splinters into social media silos.
As one reparative response, California has introduced a first-in-the-nation online public platform to help bridge silos and mend the breach of distrust between the public and the institutions of self-government. The platform, called Engaged California (EC), enables and encourages the direct engagement of citizens with government and with each other.
Engaged California is not glorified polling and is more than a town hall gathering. It is a three-way tool that enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and be responsive; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground.
As Audrey Tang, who helped craft California’s program that was modeled on the pioneering online deliberative platform she created as Taiwan’s first digital minister, puts it, “This is a way for government to work with the people, not just for the people.”
Tang’s vTaiwan platform engages thousands of citizens at a time to weigh in on social issues or policy propositions. In essence, as each participant formulates a position on an issue, others chime in with their own versions. Extreme positions fall to the margins with minimal support, and more consensus views aggregate in the middle. In turn, legislators, parties and administrators can formulate policies in full knowledge of where the public stands.
While the algorithm is designed to sort out where responses and proposals coalesce in a pattern of rough consensus, it is also designed to register inputs that are too narrowly similar, suggesting an interest group seeking to game the process.
Housed in the state’s Office of Data and Innovation, Engaged California is meant to become a permanent feature of governance going forward that will be used for the public to deliberate a range of concerns and proposals, from smartphones in schools to transportation, housing, homelessness and other issues. Since state agencies will be integrally linked to this public input on matters of their competence, they are obliged to respond in a timely manner.
As the program’s pilot case, Gov. Gavin Newsom debuted Engaged California this week as a conduit for the Los Angeles community to directly influence how the state, city and country rebuild and recover from the recent firestorms.
In general, the first round of the process invites immediate public input that will then be used to further iterate specific agenda-setting questions for public consideration. Much emphasis is on ensuring the questions are specific enough so that responses are actionable by government, but not so technically narrow that they lack general application. To be effective, the time frame envisioned for any subsequent government action, as a result of public input, is within two months.
For the last two years, the Berggruen Institute has been working with the California governor’s office and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to develop the EC platform. Other partners include Stanford University’s Deliberative Democracy Lab and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
It has long been an embarrassment that the state of California, home to Silicon Valley, has not until now sought to integrate the latest technologies into democratic governance as a way to reinvigorate its withered practices. The introduction of Engaged California has made the state the largest political jurisdiction in the world to undertake online citizens’ deliberation at a scale commensurate with social networks that are fragmenting common discourse.
