A communication system for popular opinion

Information technologies will allow the tools to analyze all opinions into a coherent understanding of the ideas and preoccupations of an entire society.

Understanding public opinion is fundamentally very simple: ask all citizens on a regular basis what they think, gather information in natural language that lets all citizens speak their mind and synthesize for the overall population the aggregated viewpoints. Additionally, specific questions can be asked on issues of particular importance, in addition to general opinion on the state of political affairs.

Political scientists and governments alike balk at the task and systematically reject it as impractical and irrelevant, insisting citizens have neither the knowledge nor understanding to voice coherent opinions. Impracticality has recently been surpassed with the communications tools offered by the Web, semantic and ontological languages and artificial intelligence analysis of natural language text. Informed opinion can be assured using an information system for political decision-making that allows citizens to understand everything they need regarding political issues.

Speech recognition can gather opinions in natural language, producing a text document of the citizen’s speech. Upon confirmation, the opinion can be broadcasted through a RSS feed into a distributed ontological analysis system capable of understanding its meaning and classify it using artificial intelligence into an ontological map of aggregated opinion.

Speech recognition, RSS broadcasting, distributed computing, text analysis and ontological classification have all been achieved. Synthesis and presentation of the overall opinion through artificial intelligence is close to realization, merely lacking sufficient interest and funding.

This open system of opinion broadcasting would be immensely superior to the current statistical polling paradigm. Its cost would be meager and its value for democratic institutions priceless. It will allow for the first time to have an understanding at the wide spectrum of opinions, identify unanimous sentiments and remove misunderstandings.

Democratic participation is equally important in opinion as it is in decision-making. An important first step towards more direct democracy would be to bring government closer to citizens, before attempting the more arduous task of bringing citizens closer to government.