Click here for part one of the Distributed Democracy series
Local councils provide many useful services such as refuse collection, road repair and public transport. These days, however, they also do annoying things with our tax money, such as setting up energy companies that almost inevitably go bust and paying councillors enormous golden parachutes. Can we use our Distributed Democracy ideas to try and improve things?
Some local services, for example a library or a day centre, are easy to fund using the regular vote credits. Other services may get chaotic if we do that. For example, we could easily end up with there being several different refuse collection rounds each collecting a different set of bins at different times. So we may prefer a way to select one organisation per area to collect the bins, and we might want to do the same for highway repairs, park maintenance, etc.
So, taking refuse collection as an example, we imagine we've got several companies and other organisations offering bin collection services and we want to democratically select the best one for the area, and also which service they should provide (e.g. should they provide a weekly or bi-weekly service?). To do this, every so often the bin companies tender their bids, specifying what services they offer and how much they cost. Local people would score each service out of 100, and provide a sum of vote credits to help pay for it. The scores for each service would then be totalled, weighing each score by the number of vote credits provided by the scorer, and the highest scoring service for which there's enough money to pay for it is selected. As usual, if you just want a bin service and have no strong opinions as to which one you can donate credits to a local representative organisation and they can make the decision on your behalf. The result of this should be that people get the services that they want and are prepared to pay for, and there should be little to no funding for services (or business ventures) they don't want.
There is the issue of whether the vote credits here are just the regular ones or local ones based on local taxes. If regular vote credits are used, there may be a problem similar to the monetisation problem in that people may choose to funnel all their credits into top-notch local services and hope that people elsewhere fund anything non-local. A way round this would be for people to decide how many vote credits they want to dedicate to local services, which they would send off to a central agency to be divided up amongst all the local areas according to population size. Each area would receive its share of the funds, which could be topped up with local taxes. Local vote credits would be used to decide how each area's funds would be allocated.