Keep It Simple Systems will empower more people to become active online citizens

It's not that we don't have the tools to make politics online, it's that there's so many of them, and even those that are used widely are too complex for even experienced users to completely understand. How many user names and passwords can a person remember -- and what does that hash-mark mean in Twitter?

Before networked democracy can become meaningful, the online access tools and technologies must be thoroughly redesigned to conform to the KISS principle. Right now, most of the Internet communications tools look like they've been designed by geeks for nerds -- which unfortunately in many cases, they have.

Keeping them simple doesn't mean making them stupid. It means melding them into a seamless experience that works effortlessly for everyone. Just look at Apple 's outstandingly integrated iPod/iTunes success for an example of a well-thought-out, cleanly-designed, simple to use, hardware/software/business fulfillment system that "just works".

Citizen activists need three things right now:

• cheap, universal, unrestricted, broadband, Internet access
• technologies that let them find and communicate with their constituencies, and
• software that provides a simple, seamless, satisfying, and empowering user experience.

What we have now is a technological Tower of Babel that drowns the average user in geekish gabbleflab and disempowers even the most determined. What we need are system designers who know how to harness the power and elegance of simplicity. Get it together, techno-tribe! Give us software and systems that "just work" for justice.

Then perhaps we can KISS and make politics, on both a local and a global scale.

Stuart Hertzog, Victoria, BC