Professional Citizens

We talked about some ideas for lowering barriers to citizen participation in the last post.  And we floated the idea of treating the citizen's civic job seriously, as serious as that of any sophisticated profession in government, business, academia, or the military.

They would typically have at their disposal:

• Trusted advisors to give them the best analysis.
• Systems to provide them accurate information.
• The ability to delegate action and representation.
• The resources to do their job (supplies, transportation, etc).

The voucher concept from the last post might cover the final point (resources), but analysis, information, and delegation are missing.  Without these, how can a citizen possibly hope to stay informed?  How can a citizen possibly hope to participate in the many relevant meetings, campaigns, demonstrations, and other events that are relevant to their civic duty?  It is impossible.

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Most of us have friends who are more politically active than us, or who have more expertise than us in certain areas.  What if we could delegate part of our political power as citizens, to these people?

I know friends whose opinion I agree with, and who attend public meetings and protests far more than I can.  I want to be able to assign them as my delegate. When they go to a public meeting, I want them to be able to carry my political weight with them, if I am busy that day or choose not to attend personally.  And I want that act of delegation, recognized by the government officials.  Just like delegation by busy CEO or government officials.

Delegation allows us to be in multiple places at once, avoid excess travel and expense, and even be active while we sleep!

This concept is partly described by the term Delegative democracy or Liquid democracy: the idea that we should not only have a vote, but the right to delegate that vote.  Stripping us of the right to delegate (as the current system has done), results in the massive Citizens Burden which makes our job impossible.

If citizens can delegate, then:

• Issues like transportation, child care, and time off work become much less important.  If 100 citizens can send one delegate, these barriers become much easier to handle.
• The issue of access to the best information is largely solved: we simply pick the person we trust who already is an expert at staying informed.

But more specifically, I want to see this delegation to be topic-specific.  Just like the prime minister has a cabinet of ministers she trusts to handle specific domains.  We citizens should have our own cabinets to advise us and act on our behalf in their area of expertise.

Every citizen should be able to have their own hand-picked Cabinet

For example, I would trust my one friend A on issues regarding censorship and digital rights.  If they were to sign a petition on this issue, I would trust them enough to add my name too.  But I don't have time to read an understand every petition on this issue.  I wish I could lend them my name, for the single purpose of representing my interest as a citizen, on issues of censorship.

I have another friend who I totally trust on issues regarding food and agriculture.  I wish when she called up an elected representative she could state her opinion and say "...and I represent Robin and 55 other people on this issue".  I want the elected official to unequivocally know that this one call represents 57 voices.

So in summary:

• The Citizens Burden makes it difficult to participate in the political process.
• Citizen's delegation could massively reduce the Citizen's burden.
• The current political system forces us to smear together the views of all voting citizens in a riding, into one elected official.  This means we lose the ability to advance our specific mix of agendas in the different aspect of civic life.
• Topic-specific Delegation could allow us to reclaim the ability to advance our specific mix of agendas, by allowing us each to hand-pick our Citizens Cabinet of people we trust to represent our agenda in specific areas.

Even as a professional citizen, wearing a pantsuit would be entirely optional

This might sound a bit abstract.  What would a day in the life of a Professional Citizen actually look like?  Surely we couldn't be in Cabinet meetings all the time?  Lets look at that in the next post!