Performance-Based System for Electing Better Leaders

This project is about creating a website that would help people elect better leaders.

Problems with the existing Political situation

There's no reason to vote for people who haven't shown past success for the role that they're being voted for. Everyone is familiar with the problems with politics. Here's a table talking about some problems in today's systems and here are some examples.

• Isolation: The public is isolated from the leaders, with regards to what is happening and the decisions they're taking. Due to this isolation, there's no transparency
• Lack of a Qualification Process: There's no meaningful qualification process for transforming a citizen into a political leader. The things are that involved in this process are: lots of money (example), banners, advertisements, popularity, staff for running the campaign, promises made, public-speaking skills, opinions on existing politics, and promises made. The most important aspect which is a track record of success is not considered. Consequently today people vote for leaders for the wrong reasons because there's no useful information available to them to help them make decisions.

The Vision

Here's how it could work. We would have a website with the following features:

• Activity Monitoring: our leaders are monitored on a regular basis. All their activities would be reviewed and graded in a way that would be accurate and objective. People can easily see who their top-performing leaders are so they would know who to support.
• Initiatives created by people: People could create initiatives that leaders can work on and they can prioritize their work based on what people want them to work on.
• Non-partisan Teamwork: The specific political party that a leader belongs to would not have any role on the website since we would vote for them based on their performance in different categories of activities. Nonpartisan cooperation would be one of those categories.

Goals of this Project

• Create software for a performance-based system that helps civilians identify who their best leaders are
• Encourage leaders to work on important initiatives and activities identified by themselves or by the community
• The system should be able to improve existing politics
• It should also be able to create and maintain a new system of leadership that we are trying to develop
• It would help citizens lead their communities at a grassroot level, all the way up to city, state, national and international levels
• This software should work for every location and country in the world

Main Components

These are the main components of this proposed system:

• Engagement levels (Neighborhood, City, State, National, International)
• Categories of Activities (Environment, Crime, Consumer protection etc)
• Evaluation of Activities ... (International Cooperation, Non-partisan Teamwork)
• Training/Education of leaders and requirements

Engagement Levels

As mentioned in the Goals section, people can be involved in leadership at multiple levels. They would have to achieve success at lower levels before they are eligible for participation at higher levels:

• Neighborhood / Zip
• City
• State/Province
• National
• International

This is the simplest part of designing such a system so at least we have that out of the way. Basically we are trying to identify community and political leaders at all levels of society who work with each other and we want to see the same kind of high-quality, skilled, cooperative, transparent and accountable leadership at all levels.

Things that need to be decided

• Expected activities for each level of leadership
• Standards to abide by
• Things to be evaluated on

Main categories of Leadership Activities

• Environment
• Preservation of Earth's Resources (including recycling)
• Consumer protection
• Human Rights - extra points for leaders who work on these initiatives in places where Human rights of different kinds need special attention
• Crime Reduction
• Healthcare
• Parenting - improve the way our children are brought up
• Education - What should students of all ages be taught in schools and universities?
• Standardization - unifying systems between city, state, national and international boundaries
• Anti-Corruption
• Transparency - maximize and enhance the pubic visibility of processes and decision making
• Anything else?

This list probably needs a lot of granularity and sub-levels. All these categories can be created and maintained by the community.

Evaluation of Activities

Activities of leaders in the above categories need to be evaluated on the following criteria:

• Level of intensity of activity e.g. Taking initiative and being a leader, or just supporting something from the sidelines (this needs to be differentiated)
• Level of intensity should reflect what the country needs the most. For example its more important to work on human rights where they are a bigger issue. What each country needs the most can be decided and that is what the leaders have to pay attention to
• Specific tasks for leaders to work on. Let people propose and leaders could work on popular proposals. No ownership of proposals, let community work on them collaboratively before a leader starts to work on them. In case there's any existing proposal-generation websites/tools, draw information from those sources or use those tools directly.
• Decision-making quality - Make decisions based on thorough research, science and data
• Track all-time performance as well as Recent performance
• Public involvement - interact with the public, listen to them, understand what they need, incorporate their opinions in decision making
• Innovation - create and support innovative solutions to problems
• Nonpartisan Teamwork - get extra points for working with leaders of parties traditional seen as hostile to any degree (notice that this list doesn't talk about the color of their party, Red, White, Blue, Orange; none of that). If we are going to vote for anyone, lets vote in a more meaningful way which is their success in these categories.
• International Collaboration - working cooperatively with leaders from other countries. Extra points for working with leaders from countries currently defined as hostile to any degree (mild to strong)

Fake and low-quality reviews on websites are a common problem as we all know, so how can we create a system that provides reliable and objective ratings? Some ideas:

• Create objective, specific descriptions of activity types
• Have a 'constitution' or a set of standards. For example these things will always strengthen the profile/reputation of a leader: the environment, non-partisan cooperation
• Perhaps make evaluation 'anonymous' e.g. when an activity is evaluated, the evaluator will not know the identify of the leader being evaluated.

Training

Leaders need training for how to be effective leaders in all these categories. There needs to be an educational program that educates leaders of all levels. Completing this education and keeping it updated will be required for maintaining acceptable ratings in the system. They may also be asked to retake certifications under certain circumstances.

Website Design

The main website javul.org is a generic task-management system that can be used to improve any project. Many projects need their own specialized software which is why the Javul Information Technology Group exists. This section will describe some specifics of this performance-based system.

Links

• Government and Politics