urasaru

Once the Open Neighborhoods Project is set up, the collaborative neighborhoods will form the basis for a fair re-districting of electoral boundaries. Rather than a few people determining how votes are accumulated, the same tools that support complex online collaboration for neighborhoods will be used to openly and fairly correct distortions in how we elect our reps.

Districts can be determined by a combination of commonly-held local boundaries, and geography. We have the tools: social media, versioning, open geographic standards, an engaged development crowd. Other nations have independent commissions to determine districts - but nothing open and crowd-sourced. There’s a lot of prior art in this area, most of it in the ‘dark arts’ category. Too bad.

This is the first Census year where a people’s redistricting is possible. Could be amazing. Let’s fix this embarrassment.

UPDATE: As well as prior art, there’s active art happening right now along the same lines at Redistricting the Nation. It’s hopefully obvious that none of the ideas on here are original research - just tossing out some sketch thoughts, rather than trying to give a state of the art with all due diligence. Turning on comments here soon so it’ll be easier to add other existing examples.