Sunday, September 29, 2013

Citizen Intelligence use case: the temporarily motivated

It has happened to us all, we read, listen to, or watch something that strikes a chord. We are outraged, motivated, energized, but only for a short time. We move on to the next story on the page, or the next item in the host's stack of topics to go through and urgency and motivation disappear. One energizing moment follows another and only a very few of these moments result in action. That time between motivation and its replacement by some different motivating force is the window that modern idea wordsmiths have to create and effect a call to action.

But what if at the bottom of the article were a button saying 'monitor' and with a simple button press, alerts would be set and a widget would be loaded into your personal government oversight dashboard? What was a few minutes of concern turns into a persistent effort and the creation of a community of people interested and willing to take action.

This is the sort of science fiction result I'd like to see coming out of Citizen Intelligence. A lot of pieces need to be built up before that happy use case becomes available in real life.

1. People are going to need to develop and adopt personal dashboards for government oversight
2. Authors are going to need to sign on to a dashboard plug-in feature.
3. News and commentary outlets are going to need to make this available through their outlets much like they use Facebook and Disqus to handle comments today.
4. Standards for doing all of this are going to need to emerge, at least in a de-facto sort of way.

Ultimately, anybody can do this but nobody is doing this and the imbalance in oversight tools vs tools the elite uses to work their wills on the body politic is tearing the advanced world apart.

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