The volunteers running the experiment weren’t completely hands-off. Submitted ideas were screened in response to a moderation policy, and redundant ideas weren’t posted. Ford says that 51% of ideas were published, and 31% were deemed redundant. About 6% of ideas weren’t posted because they were either completely off-topic or contained a private attack.
But some researchers who study the technologies that could make democracy simpler query whether soliciting input in this fashion is a reliable method to understand what a community wants.
One problem is self-selection—for instance, certain kinds of individuals are likely to show as much as in-person forums like town halls. Research shows that seniors, homeowners, and other people with high levels of education are the almost definitely to attend, Fung says. It’s possible that similar dynamics are at play among the many residents of Bowling Green who decided to take part in the project.
“Self-selection is just not an adequate method to represent the opinions of a public,” says James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford who’s known for developing a process he calls deliberative polling, by which a representative sample of a population’s residents are brought together for a weekend, paid about $300 each for his or her participation, and asked to deliberate in small groups. Other methods, utilized in some European governments, use jury-style groups of residents to make public policy decisions.
What’s clear to everyone who studies the effectiveness of those tools is that they promise to maneuver a city in a more democratic direction, but we won’t know if Bowling Green’s experiment worked until residents see what town does with the ideas that they raised.
“You’ll be able to’t make policy based on a tweet,” says Beth Simone Noveck, who directs a lab that studies democracy and technology at Northeastern University. As she points out, residents were voting on 140-character ideas, and people now must be formed into real policies.
“What comes next,” she says, “is the conversation between town and residents to develop a brief proposal into something that may actually be implemented.” For residents to trust that their voice actually matters, town have to be clear on why it’s implementing some ideas and never others.
For now, the organizers have made the outcomes public, and they’re going to make recommendations to the Warren County leadership later this 12 months.
