In my "New Democracy" topic I am interested in ideas about how technology can change democracy and governance. In California, a rule was passed (curiously needing only a 50% majority) that any ballot propositions that wanted to raise new taxes for specific projects needed a 2/3rds majority to come into effect. I'm in agreement with that. My libertarian bent knows the dangers of letting 51% of the people decide to spend the money of 100% of the people on the flavour-of-the-month.

In this county, a proposition that needs 66% asks for a $29 levy on all properties to pay for medical programs for children. How could anybody vote against that? (I have not examined this proposition in detail, but generally when you see "motherhood" propositions on the ballot, particularly bonds, they have been put there by politicians who have other projects they know would not be popular. So they arrange a ballot proposition to raise money for something nobody could be against, which normally they would have had to spend general revenue on, and this frees up general revenue so they can spend it with less accountability.)

But I digress. And I'm not trying to comment on this particular issue or wishing to come out against medicine for children. But in looking at this proposal, it was clear to me that if 2/3rds of voters wanted it, then you would get the same amount of money if 2/3rds of voters just paid $43.50 (50% more) out of their pockets! No need for a vote (which probably costs quite a bit of money) or asking those who don't agree to pay. In fact, since property owners are probably just a small fraction of the voting population, it might require less than $29 per eligible voter (though not, alas, per ballot casting voter.) With a small amount like this, is there a different way we could do things?

Imagine a contribution system where some sort of publicly funded project could be proposed, with an amount and time period. Each person could register their agreement to pay any amount, including the suggested one, but also less or more. Agreements by registered voters would count as a vote for the plan in addition to being a pledge to pay. (You will see why later.)

(Update: This was written back when Kickstarter and similar companies had just gotten started, you will see similarities to it, and my earlier proposal for congressional voting from 2006.)

The total amount pledged, and the general distribution of it, would be public. People would see if the measure was close to getting its funding target. If it does not reach the target, nobody has to pay. If it reaches the target by a deadline, everybody has to pay what they committed -- in fact it is just added to their tax bill. (This works only with property tax and income tax, not with sales taxes.)

There was a bit of a stir when Google last week announced that one of the winners of their 10^100 contest would be Shweeb, a pedal-powered monorail from New Zealand that has elements of PRT. Google will invest $1M in Shweeb to help them build a small system, and if it makes any money on the investment, that will go into transportation related charities.

While I had a preference that Google fund a virtual world for developing and racing robocars I have come to love a number of elements about Shweeb, though it's not robocars and the PRT community seems to not think it's PRT. I think it is PRT, in that it's personal, public and, according to the company, relatively rapid through the use of offline stations and non-stop point to point trips. PRT is an idea from the sixties that makes sense but has tried for almost 50 years to get transit planners to believe in it and build it. A micro-PRT has opened as a Heathrow parking shuttle, but in general transit administrators simply aren't early adopters. They don't innovate.

What impresses me about Shweeb is its tremendous simplicity. While it's unlikely to replace our cars or transit systems, it is simple enough that it can actually be built. Once built, it can serve as a testbed for many of PRT's concepts, and go through incremental improvements.

Yesterday we had a meeting using some videoconferencing. In a situation I find fairly common, the setup was a meeting room with many people, and then a small number of people calling in remotely. In spite of this being a fairly common situation, I have had trouble finding conferencing systems that do this particular task very well. I have not been looking in the high-priced end but I believe the more modestly priced tools should be able to focus on this and make it work. Yesterday we used Oovoo, one of the few multi-part conference systems to support PC and Mac, with some good but many bad results.

The common answer, namely a speakerphone on the meeting room table and a conference bridge system, is pretty unsatisfactory, though the technology is stable enough that it is easy to get going. The remote people are never really part of the meeting. It's harder for them to engage in random banter, and the call fidelity is usually low and never better than PSTN phone quality. They usually have trouble hearing some of the people in the meeting room, though fancier systems with remote microphones help a bit with that.

The audio level

The next step up is a higher quality audio call. For this Skype is an excellent and free solution. The additional audio quality offers a closer sense of being in the room, and better hearing in both directions. It comes with a downside in that tools like Skype often pick up ambient noise in the room (mostly with remote callers) including clacking of keyboards, random background noises and bleeps and bloops of software using the speakers of the computer. While Skype has very good echo cancellation for those who wish to use it in speakerphone mode, I still strongly recommend the use of headsets by those calling in remotely, and even the judicious use of muting. There's a lot more Skype and others could do in this department, but a headset is a real winner, and they are cheap.

Most of these notes also apply to video calling which of course includes audio.

This story from the Register about a test at the Stanford VAIL Lab reports an interesting result. They created a fake robocar, with a human driver hidden in the back. The test subjects then were told they could push the autopilot button and use the car. And they did, immediately picking up their newspapers to read as they would in a taxi (which is what they really were in.)