The Fix California Challenge Pt 2 | Caroline Bruister

So as I mentioned, there's a lot of great civic and govtech ideas that came through the challenge. One that I just love the tagline of— I don't know where they are in production yet, but they called themselves Thumbprint, or LinkedIn for citizens. So there was a lot that we wanted to showcase, because we couldn't select every idea, obviously, as a winner. So last October, just across the street at Hero City, we held a civic tech showcase to highlight many of the innovative ideas that came through the Fix California Challenge, as well as additional ideas and projects that we had been made aware of, you know, kind of with the activity that was going on through the challenge. So the first, Bitnation— probably heard of Bitcoin, which is pretty innovative as the first universal currency. So Bitnation is trying to do the same thing with— or is doing the same thing with government. So it's the same principle of crowdsourced online government basically becoming replacement for things like the US or State of California. So it's a very interesting community. Definitely check out MyBitNation if that's interesting at all to you. And all of these presentations are available on our— on Innovate Your State's YouTube page. So you can get— you can see them all. And they're pretty short too. It's a great length, 3-minute clips. And it really gives you a good idea of the level of innovation that's happening in and around government. Holacracy. Have folks here heard of that one?

Yeah.

Yeah. So Zappos uses them. It's kind of this decentralized way of communication. They were actually remote. I forget what country they were coming in from. But another great innovator idea. We actually had one— so the LA County Registrar of Voters. Any guess what his job has to do with? The Registrar of Voters?

Registering voters.

Yes. Awesome. So registering voters and putting on elections. So like we talked about, there's 58 counties in California. Each county actually has their own Registrar of Voters, so the person who's actually responsible for mailing you a ballot. Mailing you, you know, asking you if you want a vote-by-mail ballot, making sure you have all the information, you know, that phone book that comes sometimes when the elections are super long, or putting that information available online. So Dean Logan, who's the registrar for LA County, again the biggest county in California, and also has some of the most diverse language needs, so which is important when you're thinking about producing elections materials. So everyone can have access and good information in those, is working with IDEO, which is a Bay Area-based design company, and they are employing human-centered design research and techniques to envision and to basically prototype what does— what should modern voting look like. And, you know, you can think of some of the really interesting things that they have to plan for— so maybe I'm, you know, blind or in another way disabled. I have the same right to a private, secure vote as anyone else. So how do they plan for making sure that that, you know, regardless of where I go to vote, that that can happen? How do they plan for, you know, somebody who walks in and, you know, maybe is just used to touchscreens, you know, can interact and have and get the right— ballot in the right language, or maybe my mother hates touchscreens, and you know. So there's a lot of different things that they have to plan for, and it's really an innovative approach that they're working with this human-centered design firm to try to plan how we could all be voting in the future. And again, like, as goes California, goes the US. LA County is a great example within California as You know, a really diverse, really dynamic population. So what works for LA is going to really, really have major impact about actually how the rest of the US ends up casting their votes. The last presenter we highlighted here was Steve Hart from the Google Votes Project. And he talked about liquid democracy. And I thought it would be cool, assuming I can do this. To hear straight from him.

Hello, my name is Steve Hart. I'm the technical lead for Google+ Communities. And I'm particularly interested in electronic tools for democratic decision-making, particularly interested in systems called liquid democracy systems. So what are we talking about here? The general space, we've got a group of people and they want to make decisions on an issue. This could be a small group of people, a local volunteer organization. It could be something bigger, a parent-teacher association or a government body of some sort. And what we have available now is generally a choice between direct democracy or representative democracy systems. Now, direct democracy systems, everybody votes on everything, and this is great for control, accountability, But it doesn't scale very well. You don't have time or expertise to vote on everything. So we generally go to a representative democracy system where you elect someone to make decisions for you. And this has problems with transparency, accountability. You can get distortions from the election process itself. And a lot of the times when people are complaining about politics, they're often really complaining about aspects of representative democracy. Now, liquid democracy system kind of combines the best of both worlds. The idea here is that everybody can be a politician, and you use an electronic tool for people to manage delegations from peer to peer. And these delegations can be transitive. So, for example, this— the woman in the green circle there has a number of people delegating to her, so she acts much like a representative in that she has a lot of power and a lot of people trust her. But very quickly, if she abuses her power, people will de-delegate away from her. Now, liquid democracy ideas have been around for a while, but social networking technology is new, and it makes it more practical. So analogy I like to use is with an electric network and a social network. An electric network can carry either information or power, you know, Ethernet or high-voltage cables, whereas social networks generally only carry information. Now, liquid democracy on social network says we're going to flow power as well. We're going to use your social network to flow decision-making authority from peer to peer to vote on things. Okay, so I'm an engineer at Google. I'm like, this is cool. Got a few buddies together and let's say, let's build one. So this is an experiment called Google Votes that we put together. It's for Google employees only. It's internal to Google, and we built it on the Google+ corporate social network. And we got some good results. We got about 15,000 Googlers to cast votes. One thing we found is you kind of need to build the voting infrastructure before you can build delegation on top of it. So we did that, and then when we've got about 400 people delegating and able to flow votes, we made a number of decisions like voting on cafe names, food products, some logos, a lot of kind of internal stuff. Anyway, I have a booth over on the demo table during the lunch hour, so please come by and I'll give you a demo and show you more if you'd like. Thank you.

And we're back. So that was just a small sample, but I encourage you guys definitely to go to the YouTube channel. I think there's about 20-ish presentations, all pretty transformative as far as their implications potentially for government. And without further ado, I am very excited to introduce the relaunch of the Fix California Challenge. Woo!

Woo!

And again, let me— let's hear it straight from Somebody who may be familiar to you.

Hi, I'm Tim Draper. I'm the founder of Innovate Your State. A year ago, we got 500 Californians to submit ideas to Innovate Your State for this Fix California Challenge. It was so successful, we, we actually got 4 ideas funded in one way or another that we decided we're going to do it again this year. So we're looking for ideas that will result in a positive transformation, things that are going to be good with transparency, ideas for better educating our children, ideas for how just better to run California. So if we see a good idea, we might get it funded, donated to, or get it on the ballot for California. But in any case, we'll get the discussion going, we'll make great things happen out there. Submit your idea today at fixcal.org and sign up for updates at innovatyourstate.org. We're counting on great things from you Californians. We know you can do it.

Let me go into some of the principles behind the challenge because after I explain those, then you are going to have the opportunity within your breakout groups to brainstorm and actually submit today. So hopefully you're excited about that.

Yeah, cool.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the principles so you can be— we can orient that. So we're looking for really big ideas is the largest takeaway. So we asked for— we are asking for ideas that are transformative, that improve representation for citizens in California, that would achieve better education outcomes, that would bring greater accountability to the overall government process, that would have better opportunities for Californians within the state, and then so again, big, big overall renewal.