One of the most promising entrants in the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge was Your Own Democracy (YOD) by Gong Szeto, a feature rich platform for online political engagement.  YOD proposes to offer a suite of useful tools, such as collaborative bill building, issue tracking, and real-time data about citizen sentiments.

YOD also overcomes one of the usual problems with e-governance applications – they are no fun.  YOD solves this by using standard social network best practices, always tying issues to action opportunities, awarding points for actions completed, and presenting its application suite using a financial trading desk metaphor for the interface.

While it gets many things right, YOD faces the same challenge as every other “Facebook for government” out there: it has to become as widely adopted as Facebook in order to become relevant.  Democracy is messy and ultimately local, and this holds true on the web.  It is difficult to convince users to allocate time to a new social network, even if they feel a civic obligation.  In addition, a platform that attempts to put all of the necessary features in one place thereby increases its coordination costs, and is less able to take advantage of the rich ecosystem of democracy applications being built by independent developers.

If we are to truly evolve to “Government 2.0”, powered by online democracy applications, it will come down to cross-platform protocols rather than a single platform.  In the U.S., Brooklyn nonprofit Gateway to Gov is developing Civic ID.  Based on the Open ID identity protocol, Civic ID preserves a user’s identity across online platforms, ties that identity to the user’s official voter status (congressional district, party affiliation, etc.), and maintains a record of that user’s signed petitions and other political declarations.

With protocols such as Civic ID in place (it is nearly complete) we can imagine political engagement applications and widgets across a number of existing platforms, allowing users to build movements without leaving the comfort of their favorite social network.  This allows application developers to focus on crafting tools for specific needs and specific online locales, rather than trying to “build it all”.

My own company, the Independence Year Foundation, is adopting this strategy.  We recently released the iVote4U Facebook application, which allows users to learn about their representatives, declare opinions about them, and initiate mini-campaigns to steer representatives’ votes on legislation.  In the near future, we plan to integrate with Civic ID, and will build sister applications on platforms such as iPhone and OpenSocial.