Nikita Bier, co-founder of Outline.com, a Knight News Challenge winner, and creator of Politify.us, a 2012 Civic Data Challenge winner, delivered the above talk on a new platform for citizen participation in policy discussions at a recent convening of TEDxBoston.

By Nikita Bier

In a functioning democracy, people should be able to influence their government in ways that can help their families and improve their communities. However, when assessing complex policy decisions, it is difficult for the ordinary citizen to understand the merits, the flaws and the trade-offs of all their options buried in reams of proposals.

I founded Outline.com to remove some of those barriers. By giving citizens the same tools that our policymakers have, we get to a genuine inflection point in our democracy: where all of us can have constructive input about how our public sector should be organized.

Much of the information to educate citizens is often buried deep in spreadsheets and PDFs, or it is nonexistent. In fact, to perform a simple assessment of the personal impact of a proposal (including tax burden and individual spending allocations), a person would need to parse pages of policy and tax documents, which could take more than a day. More sophisticated analyses, such as income or geographical assessments, would require weeks of work by a team of skilled knowledge workers.

However, given recent advances in web applications, nearly all the steps of static policy analysis can be abstracted away so that assessments can be generated instantaneously based on a set of inputs. This in turn can be translated into easy-to-understand visualizations that can be starting points for our political conversations.

Shifting these conversations online leads to a more efficient and participatory process. And it makes it easier for our electorate to voice coherent – and informed – directives to their government representatives.

Nikita Bier, co-founder and CEO of Outline.com