Ask HN: As an MP, how would you use the net to scale political participation?
The pirate party is running for election 2013, chances are we gonna break the 5% barrier and get some seats in the national parliament of Germany. Whilst it is pretty easy to nominate yourself right now (login into a wiki, announce nomination), I haven´t seen much conceptwise. The pirates stand for a massive extension of political participation, exploiting the net to make decisions, develop position and so forth. Yet, the software we use is a UX nightmare and lacks formal power. Liquid feedback, our tool, is more therometer about the party´s current status, than an proper tool of political influence. Plus there is a big opposition against any virtual committee (mainly driven by security and fraud concerns). Nevertheless as a MP you are formally binded only to your conscience, and have much freedom to organize yourself, build platforms and so on. One idea would be to have the MP as proxy or megaphone, not making any political submissions him/herself, but only announcing the will of the virtual assemblies. So my questions is, if you would be a MP and your goal would be to allow a huge amount of people to influence political decision making via modern information technology, how would you do it? What problems to do see? Which processes need to be tackled and so forth.