"Emerging Trends; how tech is changing democracy"

Pirates,

I’ve been volunteered to facilitate a discussion with an Open Democracy group on 25th August.
You may have seen reference to the group at: New Slack Group : Open Democracy ( Meta Discussion Group on Improving Democratic Discourse )

So, the subject was decided to be “Emerging Trends; how tech is changing democracy”.
Thought I’d prompt my Pirate peeps for some areas of consideration related to the topic.

I thought I might organise the facilitation by asking the participants to decide for themselves what technologies they were interested in, but in this meetup to address how their favoured technology would meet a range of democracy challenges:

High on my agenda are:

  • Tech seems to be tearing people apart at the moment, diminishing their faith in democracy as an institution. I suspect it may have something to do with limits to how many trusted connections we can handle in our lives. Social media just permanently maxes this out, leaving us without capacity for more, leaving us more rather than less tribal at some basic level. How will technology address this?
  • Trust - why should people trust your technology? Why should they trust each other in this system?
  • Scale - when will the scaling of your technology break down?
  • Human Bandwidth - Will your technology require too much human bandwidth? At scale?
  • Security - what are the most vulnerable attach surfaces in your technology?
  • Who decides what the questions are?
  • Does it accrue decisions, or do we have to keep on deciding the same old stuff over and over?
  • Why is it a good fit for the lowest common denominators of human nature?
  • Will it tend to crush minorities?
  • Why will it spread?

What else you got Pirates?

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Algorithms - seems to be a the core of a lot of problems with the net.
Chilling Affect - I remember reading some where Google was able to measure a drop in certain topic because of a change in legislation…

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I’m going to add “Corruption - how does it avoid that?”

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