si1-5551212

Before thousands of political activists were "meeting-up," and before Governor Dean was collecting millions online, back in 2000, there arose a proposal for "Smart Initiatives," which would have allowed citizens in states where the initiative process was in place to sign such proposed legislation, not in parking lots and malls, but in the comfort and security of their own homes, using the reach and power of the Internet to affix digital signatures to virtual petitions as a way of officially registering their desire to see a substantive change in the laws that govern them put before the people of their state for an up-or-down vote.

You can still read the text of the original "Smart Initiatives Initiative," which was circulated the old-fashioned way (with a few flourishes) but which never qualified for the November, 2000, California ballot.

Yesterday, a reporter from Northern California, having encountered an online text titled California Smart Initiative on the web site of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) called the author of the text and of the Smart Initiatives Initiative itself to ask about its present status, information she said she might want to include in a piece she was preparing on the initiative process in general for publication sometime in the Fall of 2004.

The author of the Smart Initiative proposal explained it in detail and regaled the reporter with Smart Initiatives-related anecdotes. Then, at the reporter's request and encouraged by the heightened level of media interest portended by this call about a project that had long lay dormant, both in his mind and on his hard drive, the progenitor of Smart Initiatives collected some old-but-still-relevant Smart Initiatives texts, reformatted the audio version of his January 22, 2001 presentation in support of Smart Initiatives to the Speaker's Commission on the California Initiative Process from RealAudio to Microsoft Media Player 9, and sent the text and a link to the audio file to the reporter for her use in preparing whatever she eventually would put together about the initiative process.

Having done that, it seemed a small step to put all that information on a web site, add a few more links, provide visitors with a way to join a new Smart Initiatives mailing list, and see if now, with the Internet billions of secure commercial transactions beyond where it was in 2000; with e-government applications sprouting up everywhere; with almost every political candidate using the Web for fundraising, recruitment, advertising and research; with campaign videos, chatrooms, meet-ups, controversies, and parodies proliferating; with, in fact, every part of politics except voting and initiative petition signing having largely migrated to the Web, along with so much more in the non-political world, might be a more auspicious time to propose that the early 20th century progressive reform of the initiative be updated and upgraded into a progressive online tool for the early 21st.

What emerged was the page you are reading now.

For even more materials about Smart Initiatives, visit the web site with links to the eleven chapters of Etopian Elections: Internet Voting, Smart Initiatives, and the Future of (Electronic) Democracy. Most of the Smart Initiatives material can be found in Chapters 4-8.

You can also access Etopian Elections: Internet Voting, Smart Initiatives, and the Future of (Electronic) Democracy in PDF format.

To visit the primitive, legacy Smart Initiatives web site, click here.