A Starting Point for an educated citizenry?

I attended a very interested webinar this week. I have had an interest in democracy, elections, and the role citizens can play since I wrote about secularism and nationalism for my MA. A focus on France and laicité meant that I could not ignore the importance of democracy for “La Republique”, and upon examining the origins of democracy in the ancient Greek milieu, I started to wonder if we were doing it right- not assuming that the Greeks did it best, but there is a question about how to make democracy work better in our time. One of the problems is simply that people are less engaged now. Information has a lot of competition and reading about politics or watching the news is not a riveting as trying to work out what’s cake and what’s not.

Tuesday’s webinar was interesting because American national treasure Chris Evans believes that he has found a way to compete with cat videos, tik toks and endless memes, through a website/app which will help people to better understand what their elected officials think about a range of important issues. For the sake of brevity, I will quote from ASP’s boiler plate, and point any curious people to the team’s video explaining their motivation.

?“A Starting Point is a video-based civic engagement platform created by Chris Evans, Mark Kassen, and technology entrepreneur Joe Kiani. ASP’s mission is to create a bipartisan channel of communication and connectivity between Americans and their elected officials with the goal of creating a more informed electorate.”

I love the idea and found the webinar energising. I have been following the activity leading up to this launch and conducting some research around the subject since I saw the logo on Evans’ profile. He has been a very vocal ally over the past few weeks following the death of George Floyd and the resultant burst of activism, even attending marches with his brother, and their masks. I trusted his judgement and was therefore delighted to learn more about what ASP was setting out to do.

The idea of an educated citizenry, which is then able to make better decisions (assuming free and fair elections) is extremely seductive to me, especially when I think my native Zimbabwe, which continues to languish under the incompetent leadership of a single party, 40 years after our ostensible emancipation from colonialism. I remember asking my grandfather why they continued to vote for the ruling party (which has often been accused of electoral fraud) and he basically responded with “better the devil you know”.

The attraction of ASP is that you can actually get to know what the devil you voted for thinks, and with the addition of “Daily Points” and “Counterpoints”, you can see elected officials engage in ongoing conversations on a range of topics in a simple and informative manner, in a way that we have not really seen before. The promise of bipartisanship, supported by great efforts in the methodology to ensure that all views are balanced also means that we can finally hear what the other side is saying in a calm, depoliticized environment (i.e., not the cesspits of uneducated opinions that are Facebook and Twitter).

In developing countries such as Zimbabwe, where wi-fi and access to mobile data is still expensive, asking people to watch hundreds of videos, might be difficult, but not impossible. Perhaps we could do the same with infographics as a concession- for now. With elections 3 years away, (in Zim) the ASP model could be applicable, even if only at elections. The prospect of hearing concise responses to matters which affect people daily from elected or soon to be elected officials could improve the dialogue significantly.

I would like to see this initiative go one step further and think about showing a link between what elected official say and what that looks like on the ground. Personally, I would employ Strategy Game Dynamics which create worlds in which you can move the levers and pulleys and see the effect that has on multiple facets of civic life. Government simulation games such as Democracy have inbuilt mechanisms to mimic the conditions of political life, which could be applied to give people an idea of what it would mean to vote for X or Y. Building on the same mechanics that influence tactical voting, we could start to see an engaged citizenry which after being informed, simulated strategic decisions about what they want their world to look like, and then votes accordingly.

The possibilities are endless- no, I am getting over excited, but I would say that this could be a game changer in creating an educated citizenry. The future, if nothing else, looks interesting. It’s definitely a starting point.?