An information system for political decision-making
Decision-making is at the heart of governance, yet its mechanisms have barely changed since the beginnings of human civilization. Information technology can provide the tools to allow politicians to make better decisions.
An information system capable of describing the structure, configuration, interactions, knowledge and decisions taking place at any moment in time within a government has only been possible recently, with the development of semantic and ontological languages, as part of the semantic Web effort, sufficient computing power and bandwidth capacity. With the semantic dictionaries and ontological deduction provided by these languages, it is easy, straight-forward and overwhelmingly efficient to embed full awareness of government structure and decision-making without affecting its ability to fulfill its duties.
Such an information system can provide access to fundamental knowledge about government’s work to political scientists. The most fundamental reason why political science has barely advanced in 25 centuries is heavily caused by the fact that it never had a chance to understand its own subject of study. It will essentially be the equivalent of turning on the lights in a dark room; allowing for the first time to understand what is, rather than what is perceived to be.
RSS feeds and other broadcast APIs can be used to broadcast from the multiple decision-making entities of government, computed through RDF-based semantic dictionaries, ontology languages and reasoning agents. All the requirements have either been developed or the tools needed to develop them already exist.
A distributed processing system can read, analyze and archive real-time information about government’s activities. Information access interfaces can allow citizens, journalists and political scientists to follow these activities closely and make full analyses of decision-making for the first time in history.
Traditionally weak checks and balances will be reinforced without hindering decision-making efficiency. Mistakes will be identified sooner, cutting heavily in expenses compared to the current system of post-identification of mistakes. Projections will be much clearer and hindsight much more objective, systematic and useful to its purpose.
It would eliminate the current need-to-know policy in effect in most governments and allow more relevant decision-making from all institutions by reducing uncertainties and maximizing knowledge in all situations. Political decision-making has forever been starved for facts and knowledge, functioning at a mere fraction of its potential.
It is our hypothesis that such an information system will bring more useful knowledge to political science within five years than throughout its previous 25 centuries of existence. This hypothesis is based on the empirical observation that every field of science has begun its scientific maturation with a demystification of its subject of study. There has been no exception in human history and there is little reason that political science will differ.