Citizens’ Forum

(Still plenty of room for fresh ideas and time for overhauls. Italics indicate portions aspiring to be actual amendment text, the rest less precise notes. Trying to make a solid and not easily corruptible process without over-defining.)

§54 Citizens’ Forum. a. The city shall provide, for the use of the people as an alternative method of drafting, deliberating, and, when permissible, qualifying any proposed law that the charter or other law permits to be placed on the ballot by petition, a citizens’ forum publicly available on the internet.

b. In order to participate on the forum in any way other than reading, a user must be logged in to their forum account. In order to get an account a user’s identity must be verifiable. In order to perform any moderation task on the forum, a user must be a resident of the city. In order to propose or digitally sign in support of any proposal’s ballot placement a user must be a registered voter in the city. Standard precautions for account security as determined by the commissioner of information technology and telecommunications shall be used.

c. The digital signature on the forum of an elector in support of a proposal’s placement on the a ballot, if not since voided either by the elector or as a result of significant change to the proposal’s content as defined in ## of this section, shall be equivalent, where such equivalence does not violate applicable law, to that elector’s valid signature on a petition to place such proposal on the ballot at the next general election not less than 60 days following the proposal’s qualification.

d. Upon request, any member of the public signing a statement that such information shall not be used for any purpose other than to verify the validity of a proposal’s support, shall be provided, for a fee not to exceed fifty cents per page, a printout listing in chronological order and in as compact a manner as is practical the names and addresses of all electors digitally signing in support of the proposal.

e. The commissioner of information technology and telecommunications shall be responsible for the provision and maintenance of all needed computer hardware with sufficient redundancy to allow inspection on demand by members of the public at any time during working hours, using such protocol, made available on the forum, as is necessary to guarantee both the hardware’s security and its transparency. If the initial costs of providing and maintaining such hardware cannot be met by normal budgetary procedures, the public advocate shall request donation of the needed funds from the public. If the costs remain unmet, the forum’s implementation shall be postponed until the first fiscal year for which a city budget is prepared and adopted after the public advocate has given notice of the selection in the following paragraph.

f. All computer code used by the forum shall be available to the public. Such code or software, as soon as any securely and reliably provides all the features required by this section is freely available, shall be initially selected by the public advocate who shall give public notice such selection within 6 months of receiving notice of such availability, in consultation with the commissioner of information technology and telecommunications and the director of the independent budget office, and after holding a public hearing. Thereafter the commissioner shall be responsible for implementing all software updates and fixes, but any significant changes in the software selection or function shall only be made pursuant to an initiative approved by a majority of the electors voting thereon at a general election. Such code or software shall provide, in addition to any others implied by this section, legally or logically necessary for its execution or to ease relevant government coordination, all of the following functionalities:

1. All incoming links and attempts to initiate a forum session shall go to the main forum page, which, along with all forum pages, shall provide access to, among other features, full search and browsing capabilities except as limited herein, a random feed of active proposals, lists of the most recent and the most supported proposals, a random moderation task, and access to tutorials.

2. All search results shall include alternate and similar proposals. Searching for names of individuals shall be disabled. Searches of names by external search engines shall be blocked.

3. Logged in users shall have easy access to their forum homepage providing direct access to the pages they are active on and any notifications and messages including all those implied in this section. All actions taken by a user affecting forum content in any way, including all editing, suggestions, and moderation tasks, shall have attached to them and viewable by all users, the full name of the user, their city or borough of residence, and the action’s date.

4. Use of the forum and user editing of forum texts shall not require knowledge of any computer language or mark-up text.

5. Each proposal shall have its own drafting page, and the proposal’s forum originator shall control who has the ability to edit the proposal’s text as a co-drafter.

6. Every forum page related to a proposal shall have links to (a) all political action committees supporting or opposing the measure, (b) all available information on related campaign donations, (c) a page containing summaries of all submitted arguments for enacting the proposed law, (d) a page containing summaries all submitted arguments against doing so, (e) current lists of all alternative proposals in order of current number of supporters, most recently proposed, and most recently modified text, (f) any reference or drafting resources selected by drafters, and (g) the proposal’s drafting page.

7. All drafting and argument pages shall have the capacity to receive suggestions, and shall show a list of all such suggestions not acted on. Every acted on suggestion shall be accessibly archived after the person making the suggestion confirms the drafter or moderator as having either implemented or rejected the suggestion, or where there is disagreement, as its status being disputed. The total number of suggestions of each kind shall be listed on each page.

* On argument pages, summary of every novel argument included, ordered by evidence rating, with links to relevant citations.

8. Any voter can support any measure that does not conflict with another they are supporting, and may at any time verify or remove that support. Before any user may submit a suggestion or any participate in the forum in a way that will require moderation, the number of moderation tasks they have completed must be at least equal to the number of their previous acts requiring moderation.

* Brow-beating screen before signing support, with links to Pro and Con arguments, all available funding information, and alternate proposals.

* Signatory notification of changes to proposal altering its effect. Automatic removal of support if change significant.

Moderation of the site shall only be performed by logged in city residents qualified as set forth herein. All moderation tasks shall be assigned randomly, but shall not be assigned any task related to a proposal if they have been active on its or any related pages, including alternative proposals, or have made a donation to any related political action committee.

* Moderation tasks shall be one of the following types: novel argument assessment, strength of evidence assessment, advertising assessment, change to proposal assessment, dispute resolution, legal advice, or proposal comparison.

* Qualifications and guidelines for moderation and content.

* Process for appeal of moderation.

* Definitions..

* Process for providing legal counsel to proposals.

Any advertisement on the forum shall be offered first to local 501(c)3 organizations posting volunteer opportunities, and second to individual residents with non-commercial messages, both at a minimal rate not to exceed half of the equivalent market average click-thru rate as determined by the public advocate or the people, and in its display labeled unobtrusively as receiving such discount in a standard way, and in all cases shall not be constructed in any way that could be interpreted as an attempt to influence specific forum or voting behavior. All advertising revenues shall be used to pay for the cost of the forum and the implementation of this section.

The city shall take all steps to make the forum accessible via all feasible mediums, including but not limited to telephone and mobile devices. All city agencies and entities receiving city funding must demonstrate a thorough effort to the extent feasible to make accessible to the public all available resources for accessing the citizens’ forum. Evidence of underutilized resources not made accessible presented to the comptroller shall be cause for withholding of city monies until such situation is rectified.

Bad behavior:

online: less than impartial moderation, fraudulent statements

in general: attempting to coerce forum behavior or posts or causing any harm to anyone for their forum behavior(do we even need to say this?), failure to disclose status as paid advocate.