E-ThePeople is a
website (www.e-thepeople.com) attempting to help
leverage democracy to increase the rate at which
improvements are made to and by the
government. It allows members to post articles which are then
encouraged or discouraged by others. Other members are also allowed to add comments to articles. The website's appropriate motto is "Democracy is a
Conversation". E-ThePeople also allows members to conduct polls. The features of this site that seem most useful to me are listed below.
The relevance of an article
decays over a period of two and a half weeks from 100 times the difference between the number discourages and the number of encourages to 1 times that difference. Comments are not given relevance scores but they do receive encourage and discourage votes.
Polls on E-ThePeople are written by members. They incorporate the idea of
Approval Voting wherein the
pollster can decide to allow poll takers to pick only one answer or to pick all appropriate answers. This feature is an important step toward
educating people on the
shortcomings of
Plurality Voting. If you are a voting method enthusiast, you might like to help me lobby e-thepeople to allow
Condorcet Voting in polls.
E-ThePeople allows members to scope their polls and articles to the entire
nation (USA, though I'm not sure why
other countries aren't featured) or to a
state or city. I don't believe my state and city are well-enough represented to benefit from the scope
mechanism, but I hope they will be someday, if not with E-ThePeople, then with
another site like it.
Members are encouraged to learn about existing
initiatives and
movements, to discuss their
merits, and even start their own.