Democracy 2.0

This is my idea submission for Google’s Project 10 to the 100.

What one sentence describes best your idea?
Improve democracy by helping people contribute their opinions to their country’s decision-making process via a Web 2.0 system that can systematically and statistically process feedback information.

Idea descriptions:
Do leaders and managers listen to their people when making decisions? Some of them do, but unfortunately more than half of the world’s population rarely has a chance to contribute their opinions to the decision-making process of their country. Obviously, “where are we going?” is a common question people often ask themselves.
Thanks to the popularity of the Internet and advanced web technologies, we can change that sad fact.
The idea here is to improve democracy and encourage people to contribute their opinions to the decision making process. Every opinion counts! This can be done via an advanced feedback system that can systematically and statistically process the feedback information.
The operating model is like this: Before making an important decision, a leader should propose his/her plan and a SWOT (Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats) analysis on the web system. Then every people will be able to assess the plan and rate/evaluate any items on the SWOT analysis. Moreover, people should be able to add more items to the SWOT analysis. These additional items will later be assessed and rated by other people and so on. Based on community ratings, the system will automatically refine items in the SWOT analysis. After a definable period of time, the final result will be a refined SWOT analysis showing the level of importance and level of impact of each item in the analysis.
The results will help many countries’ leaders and managers make better decisions and ensure the decisions are for the benefit of the people.

What problem does your idea address?
A large percentage of world population does not have a chance to express their opinions when their country leaders making decisions. But every people should have the right to decide things that affect their life, right?
Another issue is that most existing feedback systems only gather feedbacks as raw data, which is useless in macro management. What make this system more effective than many existing feedback systems are the ability to systematically categorize opinions into 4 categories (SWOT) and the ability to evaluate the level of importance and level of impact of each item in the SWOT analysis.

If it becomes a reality, who will benefit most from it:
If this idea becomes a reality, people (especially people in poor countries where democracy is not adequate) will benefit the most. This is because people can contribute their opinions in deciding what is best for them.

Initial steps to get the idea off the ground:
- Get funded
- Define a set of necessary features.
- Define a set of rules for rating and evaluating opinions from people.
- Design a user-friendly and intuitive interface.
- Implement the system in programming codes.
- Revise and make corrective adjustments.
- Launch the system to public.

Optimal outcome:
The optimal outcome of this system is getting a large number of people willing to express their opinions so that the statistical data is meaningful for making decisions. In case of operating independently, a large number of users can have significant power to influence the decision makers.