Zenon Evans on Making Democratic Accountability as Simple as an App

Democracy kind of blows but it’s the best we’ve got,
to paraphrase Winston Churchill. Researchers with the
University of California Data and Democracy Initiative are trying
to make it a little better. They’re working on a project called the
California Report Card (CRC), a truly grassroots tool that provides
individual citizens with a quick, clear channel to communicate
ideas to politicians and a platform to rank the government’s
performance.

Given the near-omnipresence of data-analyzing and social
media-style constant communication, it’s almost a surprise that
America’s public servants have lasted this long without something
like the CRC, argues Zenon Evans. And it seems that
those public servants who are ignorant of their own
constituents’ wishes won’t last long without warming up to
these new channels of accountability.

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