Own Your Government - DAIA APP

Democratic communities must be able to set the agenda and build consensus for residents' priorities. Only when voters’ actual priorities are honored in decisions of local, state and national government is democratic self-government effective.

Unless priorities of voters are implicit in ballot choices, participation is of questionable value. Without informed consensus on decisions that affect the electorate, potentially important measures, for instance, to address climate change, seismic preparation, economic inclusion, etc., are not attempted because they are not understood or unsupportable.

With technologies leveraged by our app, communities can engage, include and inform residents; organize collective will, and address environmental vulnerability, poverty and divisiveness. This realizes the power and humanitarian goals of democracy.

Scaled globally, our framework can improve the ability of democratic communities anywhere to build informed consensus on citizens’ priorities, thus ensuring that community values are reflected in decisions of government and local action is taken on global problems.

Priorities of citizens are rarely heard in decision-making at any level of government.

Congress, state assemblies, county supervisors and city councils are dominated by campaign financing, while community values, individual priorities and vulnerabilities are ignored and measures are based on priorities of industries and municipal hegemonies, disconnected from needs of electorates.

In an electoral process optimized for financial contribution, elected members of discretionary bodies are influenced by contributors. With no ability to build and express consensus, interests can skew the agenda for local development and citizens cannot prevent predicaments that should be avoided and they are unable to prepare for, or respond to predictable catastrophes.

Democracy is disempowered by a traditional electoral practice in which access is traded for endorsements, campaign finance and media, and priorities of voters and communities are subordinated to those of industries and other groups.

The result is inefficient and unsustainable development. Voters disengage in the face of top-down policy, producing a sham democracy in which 25% turnout is typical for local elections and local elites that dominate local campaign finance select delegates to Party conventions, resulting in disconnection of party platforms from the experience, needs and priorities of citizens.

DAIA is a solution for democracy, where freedom of speech is protected. The technology supports residents of communities in building, expressing and taking action on consensus.

Communities in San Diego County (3.5 million) and Tijuana Metropolitan Area (2 million) are an initial venue. The software reflects each community’s culture and enhances opportunities for intra-community interaction to expand consensus around common cause.

Unlike social media, a DAIA community uses authenticated but anonymized data to serve priorities of residents of the community, and makes IT available for communities to take action.

Opportunities for participation.

Every resident has the ability to poll the community. Technology available to communities includes organizational support for a town (or community) council, so residents’ ability to poll the community can lead to constructive action.

Methodology for inclusion and relevance to individual needs:

• NO FEES: Every resident may poll the community
• COMMUNITY-OWNED: Community Coop or Nonprofit, with elected leaders
• OPEN ACCESS: Smart phone, with subsidized access
• ROBUST DEBATE: Open community discussion and information
• VETTED INFORMATION: Documents and links open to question and debate
• POLL RESULTS: Binding on council representatives
• IMPECCABLE DATA MANAGEMENT: Reliable authentication

DAIA engages participation in communities about government decisions, giving residents a voice in decisions of local and regional boards and raising the priority with the voice of consensus.     

OYG - DAIA will leverage AI and natural language processing to analyze poll questions across a range of geographic areas from local adjacent communities to cities, counties, states and even countries.  At the local level, adjacent communities often share common interests based on culture, religion, socio-economic conditions, or climate.  At the global level, countries decide on collaboration based on some combination of politics, campaign promises, and industry influence but are not always in line with the will of the people. For example, membership in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

A small neighborhood poll consists of a set of questions typically derived from community activists, members of community or town councils. OYG offers an app (DAIA) that emphasizes participation in poll creation by any resident. A poll that demonstrates priorities organically developed by community participation may work well for the community to influence local elected officials. Adjacent communities may have very similar priorities but their poll questions may be significantly different in syntax. A stronger effect of a poll to a broader region would benefit from collaborating and synchronizing semantically similar questions. This will allow communities to receive notifications of similar goals from adjacent communities or even those geographically distant but which share common goals within a city, state or the nation. Communities could decide whether these prompted questions indeed match the meaning they are trying to get across to their residents and adapt them accordingly knowing that an exact match provides a much higher probability of deriving true consensus. 

The AI/NLP engine is based on algorithms that power speech recognition in smart home appliances; such as, Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Poll questions are fed into the parser, normalized and then compared to questions in other polls. Questions are also dynamically tagged with category keywords based on a dynamically and programmatically updatable dictionary. Participants are asked to approve automated tags along with the normalized matches to other questions.  By allowing community-driven polls to scale out to cities and states, we are convinced that consensus will grow geometrically and allow voters to more strongly influence politicians at all levels of government to not only take notice but respect and act on the priorities that have been clearly defined.

DAIA is a technology communities can use to engage members in alignment on the future of their community, focusing on and then addressing their needs and priorities, with tools and structures required to manifest their commitment.

Combining online access, machine learning, media and a physical forum, DAIA rewards citizens with accomplished goals and a changes in focus of elections from personality to ability and performance, supported in real time by data and reporting.

Each instance of the DAIA platform is governed by a volunteer town (community) council that can access resources the technology makes available.

DAIA invites participation in processes that benefit participants.

The app encourages debate to build consensus and actions that influence government decisions. Not only are voters responding, they also create polls, set the agenda, and present alternatives.

The direct impact of citizen’s polls on council actions is also innovative.

Data analysis allows the community to join with other communities to invoke broad change, with the ability to deliver authentic analytics to elected officials and traditional and social media—in a truly impactful way.

With DAIA, individual residents of communities:

• generate consensus on core values (and identify bias);
• engage with others in determining the future of the community;
• are informed about decisions that could impact their ability to flourish;
• quickly organize collective action to solve problems and influence government;
• can negotiate explicit government action for consensus priorities;
• turn complaints into committed action;
• support solutions that are sustainable because they are self-generated.

DAIA is designed on a scalable architecture using Docker framework and microservices to allow it to support millions of simultaneously active users answering polls and discussing voter issues in real-time group or peer-to-peer chats, while logging all of these conversations to big data cloud-based storage, with reporting functions designed for the community’s purposes.

We use machine learning and natural-language processing to find semantic equivalence between polling questions being asked in community/town council polls within a geographic region in order to scale polling results to reflect a larger population.  

DAIA makes the online experience intuitive and efficient by using features we are familiar with in social networks, games, and e-commerce. It incorporates behavioral design to produce transparency, and to satisfy user desires to improve and protect quality of life in their communities.

DAIA becomes an enduring technological solution that anyone can use and can be modified to keep pace with changes in technology. The social impact is engagement, a transformational change in community, that would survive the technology that forms it. Our team has domain knowledge in the area of town council formation and management as well as the electoral process.

DAIA begins with community members aligning on the future of their community in a community workshop designed and conducted by the Vanto Group. This future informs values and create relationship. What the future calls for is what people work on. Making the future they are committed to real informs debate and actions, and DAIA technology helps communities accomplish objectives.

By ensuring that local, state and national government decisions connect with priorities of expressed by communities, decisions that support communities ensure a future in which people can flourish and communities effectively manage emergencies.

To assure that OYG gets the traction it needs to rollout DAIA and consensus technology, we will implement a phased plan designed to:

• successfully reach and engage the diverse range of community members;
• foster cooperative relationships with a wide range of stakeholder organizations;
• develop working relationships with government agencies and their representatives across the spectrum of community concerns;
• work proactively with the media to educate the public about issues that affect the greater community.

A marketing plan provides an overarching marketing campaign theme to create a clear OYG identity. It includes a phased approach to outreach with specific action items and performance measures to assure the outreach effort is on track to completion.

A detailed timeline for rollout plans for local, state, federal and foreign organizations includes an implementation template, sample written outreach materials and online resources, that are adaptable to community culture and needs, which help them get up to speed quickly on their own outreach efforts.

We intend to serve a group of adjacent communities in coastal San Diego, with a combined population of c. 250,000 with a prototype DAIA app. We begin with a "community workshop" facilitated by Vanto Group, in which 500 - 1000 people from participating communities, over 12 months, explore possible futures, create networks of organization and design outreach projects. They will begin to shape DAIA to the needs of their communities and create targets for participation.

The language and culture of each community is reflected in their participation. The user group in each case is the community, and since the goal is the power of collective engagement, inclusivity is supported by features of the app. Successful implementation is defined by online participation, which is targeted relative to the size of the community. For instance, in Point Loma alone, the target may be 50% of eligible (voting) residents, c. 30,000 people.

DAIA offers advantages for communities over typical government platforms that promulgate top-down strategies that are often experienced as imposed on rather than "owned" by constituents, and tolerated rather than whole-heartedly supported.

In 5 years, this technology can potentially become an aspect of planetary evolution.

IT is the crucial tool we have to address poverty, justice, health and climate change. A key use is to improve the capability of people in autonomous democratic communities to provide better guidance for needed progress based on alignment with objectives that address homelessness, hunger, poverty, and effects of climate change. DAIA demonstrates the potential of IT, without changes to cultural norms and values or indigenous practices.

DAIA features can inform decision making without changing traditional election processes, or the local hierarchy, though such changes may occur as a consequence of greater participation.

Over the next 12 months, OYG will build the DAIA app and implement it for town councils in up to 10 San Diego communities and 2 or more Tijuana communities. A support and marketing team will be developed and trained to expand it’s use across and outside the nation.

By co-venturing with Polco and employing Vanto Group, we have the resources to rapidly scale up to meet large demand--in the hundreds of millions, limited by the level of support required.

Actions that are inspired by consensus are supported by the community, which is instrumental in supporting initiatives in health, education, social, economic and environmental problems.

Like the internet itself, the modularity of DAIA, and that it is based on adaptation to and governance by anonymous voting in communities, means there is no burden on expansion in terms of the number of communities that can be simultaneously served. 

If barriers to DAIA are not correlated with barriers to civic participation, we are not addressing the problem. Established civic organization is based on a military model, in which there’s a command center and a person at the top of a hierarchy, who controls by giving orders. This model doesn’t work the growth of populations, diversity and complexity and the civic enterprise muddles along driven by inertia.

• generational differences in IT familiarity and access;
• jurisdictional and partisan resistance to decentralization
• centralization policies produced by municipal management use of IT;
• public agencies habitual view that consensus means informing about decisions;
• fear of loss of control because of innovative technology;
• administrators and politicians fear loss of invisibility;
• inclusion values the familiar;
• the technology for participation is embedded in official procedures;
• new demographic and economic circumstances won’t fit existing procedures;
• organizations are resistant to change that threatens control and/or revenue;
• employees of corporations, industries and minorities that live in pluralistic communities and can influence decisions that benefit their organization, in conflict with consensus within their plural communities;
• gerrymandering, which fractionalizes communities, disrupting consensus
• low number of those engaged with local decision-making reflects diversity of background due to immigration, economics and education;
• though educated about representative government and aware of local regulations related to an enterprise or domestic activity, most citizens have no experience with government; media informs their knowledge of local boards and panels;
• university graduates and entrepreneurs are pre-occupied with building fortunes;
• individual votes seem superfluous in large and growing jurisdictions.

Community shows up in collective will and enterprise. To make community palpable, we will enroll 100+ residents in a physical forum conducted by professionals from Landmark Vanto, in which the community is assessed as a sustainable enterprise that is defined by forum participants including those who attend online.

At the conclusion of this forum, participants, including online participants, will form groups reflecting geographic, demographic and disciplinary distinctions within the community. Each group selects leaders and identifies objectives consistent with principles of best adaptation and response regarding all concerns. DAIA technology is incorporated into the forum and is used for exchange of ideas and collaboration.

While DAIA is rolled out, OYG facilitators will support integration of digital tools, reports and organizational features as communities develop independence in their use of consensus technology for decision-making and civic enterprise.

DAIA overcomes barriers by shifting the politics of the community from the traditional zero sum game, in which citizens compete for status, to a new context of mutual satisfaction.

In defined communities, with elected town councils, collective will can support micro-enterprise that gives the community independence from external support, with greater ability to negotiate effectively for services, replacing bureaucracy-driven economies of scale, with improved competitiveness in both local and global markets.

OYG employs a full time software development specialist and a full time community development specialist and partners with pre-eminent technology companies with a track record for maintaining data integrity and reports from analytics.

DAIA required a multi-disciplinary collaboration with several volunteers and four contractors, each of which has a staff. ThIs number will be expanded to support communities as needed.

Polco and Softstack Factory personnel develop and maintain the app.

A nonprofit E.D. works with legal advisers and board development of user communities.

(We’re seeking a UX designer and full-time and part-time community development specialists for the roll-out of the DAIA prototype.)

Michael Winn, co-founder of OYG and Point Loma Town Council, has led several innovative projects in education, media, infrastructure, community development and advanced technology, including: co-founding a nonprofit development company and development of 400 homes for very low income households and a fiber-optic franchise and a multi-tenant office building in Los Angeles that Urban Land Institute celebrated as the “smartest building in the world”. More recently, he co-created a year long demonstration of high-speed offshore transportation in San Diego.

Norm Katz is collaborating with Michael Winn to bring his experience with pattern recognition and data normalization to bear on community-driven initiatives.. Norm is a software architect and engineering executive with a broad experience in big data. In healthcare, he developed data normalization across time and providers for a patient-facing application developed by Seqster. In cybersecurity, at Experian (formerly CSID), Norm developed algorithms to detect and report on identity theft of personal information being traded in “dark web” chat rooms for millions of subscribers. In Defense, Norm worked as an engineer and director at Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman on signal and image processing algorithms to detect sonar signals from submarines, radar signatures from approaching helicopters, and worked in cruise missile vision system mission planning.  

Harold Gottschalk, CEO of the nonprofit, Softstack Factory, which is focused on technology job creation in North America has over the last 35 years developed software, run teams, participated in corporations, won awards, contributed in a local IPO and created startups including CSIdentity Corporation (CSID).

SoftStack Factory SoftStack Factory is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on technology job creation in North America. SoftStack Factory mission is to refocus young motivated people to code development. Softstack is helping to develop DAIA features.

Polco.us is a pre-eminent firm in the U.S, in data analytics and polling for public agencies. Polco is co-developing the DAIA platform with OYG

San Diego Coalition of Town Councils will be involved in the selection and preparation of initial app recipients.

Pacific Beach Town Council, Mission Beach Town Council and Point Loma Town Council are among local town councils that will be involved in the roll out of the App and a year long training and development demonstration.

Our business model is a monthly or annual subscription for community leaders to license and use our platform to both increase voter participation and promote the personal and collective priorities of voters within communities such as that elected officials and candidates for office take note of their collective will.

The platform consisting of two key components:

1. A set of web-based software tools to help community leaders launch a virtual community or town council that comes with powerful tools to design polls and encourage discussion about topics of interest to its residents
2. A mobile app for residents of each community to participate in the voting process in ways that are much more effective, affordable, intuitive and accessible than any social network provides today.

The key customers of the platform are community or town councils that are already established or currently being formed to address priorities that are not reflected in the actions of their elected officials.  The key users of the platform are residents that not only take polls but are actively involved in designing them.

OYG is a hybrid Profit/Non-Profit company. 

The non-profit component is initially sustained by grants through institutions such as those described below. Long term, we will fund non-profit activities with a share of profits to communities and in the form of free or reduced subscription licenses to use the OYG platform.

The for-profit component is sustained by a number of revenue sources including:

• Annual or monthly Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription. (Companies that serve political campaigns charge a minimum of $5,000/year.  We believe this is high for many communities but the app can help them improve finances. We offer and customers need some consulting to help them launch our platform and our labor costs can be significant.
• Consulting for communities to set up and launch their town council platform and design their first polls and engage residents.  Many customers want the  benefits of our platform to increase voter participation and data on the will of the community. More affluent communities will be a major source of recurring revenue. Disadvantaged communities can apply for subsidies provided by our grant revenue.
• Ads from political or news organizations. (If a substantial percentage of a community down-votes an ad, it will not be renewed).
• Anonymized analytics data that can show specific interests, policy positions, and priorities in communities that are valuable for political campaigns, urban planning, etc.  This information is not available at the level of detail we are developing, through traditional social networks.

Decision-making processes of communities in the United States are similar because they are subject to constitutional law and federal funding guidelines. DAIA technology must be sensitive to differences unique to localities, so that residents align on authentic visions of the future they intend to co-create. 

Solve can help us develop support for U.S. communities as well as exportable models, including funding to organize the roll out of DAIA consensus technology and efforts of communities to solve local problems that have global impacts.

Solve can help us assemble talent to develop materials for a curricula for students, administrators and officials to help them interact with DAIA and similar IT solutions to orchestrate cooperative, environmentally sustainable and efficient democratic solutions for global development.

We want Solve to help us develop national and international workshops with IT designers, behavioral and social scientists, educators, family counselors, economists, urban planners, climate specialists, linguists, entrepreneurs and investment strategists, to co-create a future that includes access to IT and AI tools, processes and knowledge, with a network of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural talent, available to the needs of communities using consensus technology.

With the advent of consensus technology, we anticipate that local elections will show great diversity and reflect individual abilities and community priorities in economic and social solutions. Solve can help us connect with expertise and funding to meet needs that arise, and create media about values of consensus polling, and the importance of leading government planning and legislators from the bottom up.

Vanto Group, https://www.vantogroup.com

We plan to employ Vanto’s methodology, involving workshops and webinars, in which participants in DAIA communities co-create and manage a future for their communities.

The Kresge Foundation https://kresge.org/

Partnership to provide funding to address barriers to inclusion.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation https://knightfoundation.org/

To foster informed and engaged communities that are essential for a healthy democracy by funding multi-lingual app development.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation https://www.macfound.org/

Grant and investment to support international app development and rollout in approximately 50 countries around the world.

The Ford Foundation https://www.fordfoundation.org/

A grant to include those now excluded from the political, economic, and social decisions that shape their lives ... to participate in reducing poverty and injustice, strengthening democratic values, promoting international cooperation, and advancing human achievement.

The Pew Charitable Trusts  https://www.pewtrusts.org/

A grant to make an enduring difference for the public with consequential outcomes, fostering new ideas, reducing partisanship and achieving measurable results that serve the public interest.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation  https://www.gatesfoundation.org/  

A grant to improve people’s lives through particiation at the local level, where individuals take action in their own communities by funding access to technology.

The Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) https://hd-ca.org/

To include local participation around human development and the capability approach in relation to the policy arena.

Data - Analytics - Insight – Action

Faced with an ability to foresee, if not predict the time and space intersection of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, volcanos, tsunamis, wildfires, meteor impacts, terrorist attacks and economic catastrophes, with ever larger concentrations of human populations, is there any way possible that computer enhanced intelligence can be used to help communities reduce vulnerability, improve safety and security; and in the event of a disaster, gives them capability to respond, reduce damage, care for victims and repair infrastructure, and that provides resources they need to recover from disasters?

There is no more important question today. And the answer is, yes, and like many important ideas, seems too obvious and we’re developing such a use of IT.

This interface with IT will be under the democratic control of the community. The capability of consensus around action distinguishes DAIA from top-down political software, and from polling functions, such as, Interaktive-Demokratie, which doesn't support interactive and intramural conversation, nor open debate, nor guide a panel of democratically elected representatives. And with these functions communities get the benefit of IT functions to initiate and support  enterprise that benefits the community, take action about concerns, and have an improved ability to make requests of other communities and political jurisdictions.

Underrepresented members of the human community are the most vulnerable to loss of life and property in earthquakes, hurricane, floods, volcanos, tsunamis, economic catastrophe and fire, and this economic sector has the least ability to recover from such disasters and are least able to safeguard themselves or to prepare for catastrophic events, and lack access to the global marketplace to bootstrap their recovery.

They are also the least capable of making their needs a priority for government attention. It’s hard for us to understand what it means to have nothing and we miss qualities of resilience, initiative and resourcefulness, which those in such situations must possess in order to survive—a potential well of untapped human creativity and energy for solutions to problems that more capable members of the global community cannot address without the participation of these people.

A United Nations human development program has estimated that, in Latin America alone, there are 145,000,000 people living in extreme poverty, and the UN has proposed that, unless we can bring their annual income to the equivalent of $5,000 US/year, their continued use of wood and fossil fuels will defeat our efforts to prevent deforestation and reduce greenhouse gases.

$25,000 will cover the rollout and support of technology for an impoverished Latin American community, including tools for communication and organization we will provide to a substantial community of people to enter the global market and meet or exceed the UN’s $5,000 per capita income goal. 

We plan to use this grant to apply AI and NLP to recognize semantically similar poll questions across communities and combine them to scale analytic reporting on consensus and sentiment across broader geo-political boundaries.

Data sourced and maintained by the DAIA app consists of poll questions, poll responses, poll comments, discussion threads, chat logs, and potentially, recordings of video teleconferencing sessions and authentication information. Comments, discussions, and recordings will be encrypted at rest and in transit, using standards adopted for PII and PHI compliance.

A core goal in our mission is to harmonize poll questions across communities to achieve the benefit of scaling priorities to city, county, state and national levels, which requires protecting and authenticating data at all levels, and an efficacious audit process.

Poll results go through two stages: unpublished and published. When a poll is receiving participants, it is “unpublished”. Registered users see current stats, and this data may be analyzed as trending, and released to the media as such, and to adjacent communities or elected officials. When  a poll has been closed, reports from it can be “published” and available to view as public record. (Poll results can never be withheld under any circumstances.)

To be added.

To be added.