Concept for Participatory Policy-Budget Outreach

Strategic Objective: To use any real budget (local to global) as a basis for inspiring policy discussions and agreements among all citizens regardless of nationality or party affiliation, in order to efficiently identify areas of agreement and disagreement on both specific policies and on the relative priorities for spending among the 30 agencies within the US Government that have discretionary spending authority. The key is to combine real money with real facts and especially "true cost" facts, that is the only way that dialog & deliberation can lead to meaningful outcomes that create a prosperous world at peace.

Tactical Objective: To get this up and running in time to engage voters before 2012. The intent would be to do press releases and talk shows, get local participation, and use it to fine-tune understanding of people’s concerns about the specifics. This is not polling; this is substantive public intelligence and public policy development in relation to specific communities of interest defined in geographic, political, and demographic terms. It can be used to support one candidate, or all candidates.

Tribes of Intelligence. One concept that is helpful in energizing Collective Intelligence is that of the Tribes of Intelligence. For centuries "intelligence" as been defined as "secret war" or "secrets for the president." That era is over. Intelligence is about decision-support--the specification, collection, processing, analysis, and presentation of tailored answers that help a specific person, group, organization, or distributed network make an informed decision.

At the links below are three graphics and a short four-page memorandum.

Graphic: Eight Core Functions for Citizen Intelligence Online

Graphic: Schematic for Participatory Policy-Budget Dialog

Graphic: Eight Tribes of Intelligence & the Public Information Commons

Memorandum: Participatory Policy-Budget Outreach