Building the Future — Founder’s Message
The Goodly Institute and Goodly Labs were officially born in 2015. We filed the paperwork when it became clear that research and development work to improve society had no clear home in institutions of higher education, in government, or in the ecosystem of existing think tanks. The academic social scientists study what is, not what could be. Politicians learn and play the game of governance as it has been constructed; they don’t typically try to empower human collective agency. And existing think tanks are highly-invested in current organizations of political and policymaking power, the major political parties in particular. So, we founded Goodly expecting that, over several years, we could begin building a different sort of entity – one with a very broad-base of contributors and volunteers working toward goals defined not by the constraints of existing power, but inspired by a greater vision of a future we could build together.
But then, it seemed, the erosion of democracy began accelerating much faster than we’d expected. It’s clear that we don’t have several years. We must come together now.
Democracies need the results of the Demo Watch project now. Already, the project is showing how various police and protester interactions played out during the Occupy movement, with findings that describe how cities with different government types, police department capacities, and political cultures behave differently depending on upcoming elections, violent crime waves, and other city priorities. But the urgency of the project’s second phase (with NYU) is only growing. With their help, we will be able to further process the thousands of news accounts describing the US Occupy campaigns. And with richer, more granular data, we will be able to tease out sequences of police and protester interaction that lead to violence, to negotiation, or anything in between. Our findings will give the people and police better information with which to make wiser and more democratic decisions about the safe management of protest.
Beyond analyzing protest, we are excited to see how other researchers will use TextThresher to test, refine, and improve theories about social phenomena that are described in the world’s massive archives of textual data. Social scientists and students will be able to parse political speech to identify the rhetorical patterns of demagoguery throughout history and into the present day. They will be able to track changes in social conceptions of identity characteristics across time and place, clearly demonstrating the fact that they are made up and can by re-made as we see fit. Scholars will be able to enlist hundreds or thousands of people in tracking the difference between what politicians say and what they do, and how judicial opinions evolve through court rulings. Thanks to Goodly’s TextThresher (which has gone on to become EveriLeaf), we humans will finally be able to systematically analyze, at scale, what we are doing as we construct our reality. These richer understandings of ourselves are crucial for crafting elegant and beneficial interventions.
With these first two projects, one could already observe Goodly’s principles in action. We inspire people to get involved in doing science. We take on new and great challenges. And, we avoid the sort of advocacy approach that drives analyses toward some particular (especially partisan) outcome; instead bringing rigorous scientific inquiry to problems that go to the core of what it means, and can mean, to live democratically.
The principle of engaging the public in a rigorous social science is also apparent in the Public Editor and Demo Watch projects. The former uses EveriLeaf software to engage thousands of people in the task of assessing the truth-value of news and journal articles. Use of these tools will simultaneously improve the quality of our discourse and the literacy of the population. The Demo Watch project even deputizes citizens as sociological observers of ongoing protests to ensure that the project’s data are not significantly skewed by partisan media.
Goodly will not stop there. More than just building a scientifically rigorous understanding of how we relate to one another democratically, Goodly seeks to actually build the democratic machinery of the future. We begin, as the Founders of this country did, with the legislative branch. Convening experts in democratic theory and online democracy/deliberation from institutions including MIT, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, Stanfrod, and the University of Texas, the SamePage project is designed to build a scalable platform that will fundamentally reorganize the way “we the people” deliberate and decide about policies. With today’s many-to-many communication technology (think Facebook, etc.) it is obvious that we have outgrown the constraints that led the Founders to design the particular form of Representative government they codified in Article I of the Constitution. That form, unfortunately, has become so ‘gamed’ by adversarial and clientelistic political parties as to barely function. So, we are building to replace a system of zero-sum political debate and competition with a form of collective decision making based in well-organized, constructive, comprehensive policy discussion. We know we can do it. We have a plan to roll out the technology so that it is well tested, tuned, trusted, and popular. Eventually, good-hearted participants will run electoral campaigns promising to deliver on policies deliberated and decided ‘by the people’ using updated democratic technologies like Same Page or those of our peer civic tech builders.
These plans – all of our plans – are ambitious. They are as grand as the challenges that democracies face. But they are not complete. We must carry them forward together. We’ll need your help, your ideas and careful efforts. We’ll need feedback on the designs and user experience of our tools, and the engagement of citizens throughout the country and world. This will be a massive team effort. And that’s exactly what democracy should be.
