Framework tools

For such a system to be administered, a range of new tools can be envisaged. And the first building block may already be under construction.

A range of major internet firms including Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, AOL, and VeriSign have said they will take part in the US open identity pilot programs.

As William Heath wrote on idealgovernment.com: "Governments that go down this route could eventually provide personalised services. Now that would be interesting. And they could do it without compromising privacy."

As policy areas such as health or education becomes disaggregated from any overarching ideological framework, voters will need guidance on how to make their choices.

In order to lower the search costs of this new politics and ensure the population remains engaged, more tools will need to be developed beyond those already described for creating and running microparties.

But the tools such as tagging, categorising, recommending and searching that are developed for microparties can equally be applied to frameworks.

This could mean tools which store favoured policy frameworks and provide information on any reviews of them. It might also include 'people who chose this also chose this' suggestions. And frameworks could be tagged so users can find them, and share with each other or recommended to friends.

'Bestseller' lists in different policy areas could show in real time which frameworks are being chosen by the most citizens – and in practice this could be expected to lead to some clustering of choices, again reducing the burdens on administrators.

Different microparties specialising in different policy areas might group together to recommend ideologically similar frameworks. These might become metaparties, and they, like the major parties of the present day, could take on a role in promoting broadly sympathetic policy frameworks which supporters can opt into.

And an official 'playlist' of the actual polices being administered to any citizen will also be required. In an open source world, this playlist would be transferable around any website that might want to provide an interface for changing and managing choices. This would be an open source iTunes for politics – an iGovernment which would in effect be a personalised manifesto. And again, this could be publicly shared with other citizens, friends or family members.

There would be no hiding place for policies which just don't work. Negative reviews from people who have tried them or respected experts could be expected to promptly kill off such policies.

And for more detailed analysis, perhaps a wiki for each policy would provide space for the pros and cons to be explored in detail.

It is also possible to then imagine a new set of tools which would help microparties and citizens develop new policy frameworks. This would remove policy from remote elites and further help encourage participation in the new model state.

In addition, it would obviously be vital to ensure that mutually contradictory policies cannot be chosen.

For example, it should be impossible for citizens, both individually and in aggregate, to choose frameworks which demand high spending but low taxes.

One option for delivering this would be the 'faceted classification systems' that Weinberger describes in Everything is Miscellaneous.

A citizen selecting a low-tax policy framework could lose the freedom to opt into smaller state school class sizes or better public healthcare arrangements.

Similarly, opting for a more environmentally friendly policy might mean that options for lower petrol taxes might be removed.

To put this into practice, each framework would need to contain a record of all other frameworks with which it is and is incompatible.  This would mean a citizen is not limited to one 'health' vote and one 'education' vote and so on, as this would be too complex to taxonomise. Instead, any number of microframeworks can be selected by a citizen in one policy area as long as they are not classed as mutually exclusive.

In all, this would deliver participation, engagement, clarity and choice, along with administrative efficiency and a rooting out of waste and ineffectiveness. It would also provide a means for aggregating choices across a population.

It is possible to imagine these decisions being applied at a macro level as well.

For example, if a majority of people opted into a metaframework that called for 0.7 per cent of GNP to be spent on international development assistance, then minimum tax takes for all citizens could be recalculated to ensure that there is always enough revenue to meet this commitment.

A separate requirement of metaframeworks would be that if a framework has been barred then it still remains available as an inactive choice so that it can be reinstated if the metarequirement that has overruled it is itself changed.

This might all seem like a recipe for policy and administrative chaos. But again, internet tools can provide much of the answer.

The systems to deliver this would require that the policy frameworks put forward by different microparties would have to comply with a basic data/metadata framework.

These could mean that costings and any other evidence would all be independently verified before they are accepted as options that the state could administer and citizens could choose. They may also have to be certified for compliance with human rights requirements.