From: Osher Doctorow (osher@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 14:16:17 MDT
From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Sat. July 13, 2002 1:24PM
Excellent idea, Anders! When do we start implementing it?
Osher Doctorow
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
To: <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 13, 2002 3:02 AM
Subject: Improving governments with suggestion rewards
> Here is an idea I would like to kick around a bit to see if it could be
> turned into something useful:
>
> Open societies thrive on openness and accountability, since they allow
> constructive criticism and can use this to improve themselves. We have
> largely discussed how to help non-open societies over the last months,
> but making sure open societies develop better ought to be a high
> priority too - after all, most of us live in them and they are to a
> large extent the leaders of the world. If they can be improved, the
> transhumanist cause is likely aided (and in any case, it will be good
> for a lot of people). My proposal is to institute rewards for useful
> suggestions and criticism. It is not enough to just allow them, but they
> ought to be promoted.
>
> The system would involve giving rewards to people who discover
> government mistakes or wrong-doings, or find ways the government can
> work more efficiently. The simplest form would be a citizen suggestions
> box with guaranteed openness (one ought to add some
> anonymization/nymization cleverness so that one could make suggestions
> with less risk of persecution but still get rewards). The authors of
> "winning" suggestions that are implemented would get a percentage of the
> savings. Similarly there could be a scale of bounties for various levels
> of government abuse. Since the contents of the suggestions box would be
> official it would make useful reading for journalists, so if a good
> suggestion was made but not implemented or rewarded, the media (and
> political opponents) would be all over it.
>
> It is by no means a total solution. It cannot help areas of government
> which are shrouded in secrecy or cannot be held accountable. There will
> be resistance and inertia in the administration to suggestions. No doubt
> plenty of people will suggest reasonable (to minarchists) cost-savings
> by removing large chunks of government - these will largely be ignored
> (at first, at least). It will mainly fix parts of government, not
> government itself. One has to avoid the Dilbert pitfall where the boss
> gives people money for finding bugs, and the programmers immediately
> starts adding bugs to their own code to get extra pay (here
> accountability could be used: the people accountable for inefficiencies
> are not eligible for rewards of fixing them). People making suggestions
> and revealing abuse need adequate guarantees that they will not suffer
> repercussions for doing it (especially important if they happen to be
> government employees); this can likely be fixed by using either a bit of
> crypto-cleverness or having a trusted outside party handling the
> suggestions box and the person-nym database.
>
> The advantage is that this system can be instituted even without
> government support. It could be run by a private foundation, and it
> sounds like a cause one could get philantropists to support quite
> easily. Of course, paying back a percentage of the savings might be out
> of the question for a non-government solution, but this might work
> especially well for rewarding whistleblowers and revelations of
> government abuse. There could be several parallel systems for different
> kinds of information. It can work even in places like Singapore where
> political freedom isn't a high priority but efficiency is.
>
> To sum up, this is a non-coercive approach to improve government and
> institutions that strengthens one of the good sides of open societies
> while being fairly politically acceptable.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
> asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
> GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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