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The volunteers running the experiment were not completely hands-off. Submitted ideas were screened according to a moderation policy, and redundant ideas were not posted. Ford says that 51% of ideas were published, and 31% were deemed redundant. About 6% of ideas were not posted because they were either completely off-topic or contained a personal attack.
But some researchers who study the technologies that can make democracy more effective question whether soliciting input in this manner is a reliable way to understand what a community wants.
One problem is self-selection—for example, certain kinds of people tend to show up to in-person forums like town halls. Research shows that seniors, homeowners, and people with high levels of education are the most likely to attend, Fung says. It’s possible that similar dynamics are at play among the residents of Bowling Green who decided to participate in the project.
“Self-selection is not an adequate way to represent the opinions of a public,” says James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford who’s known for developing a process he calls deliberative polling, in which a representative sample of a population’s residents are brought together for a weekend, paid about $300 each for their participation, and asked to deliberate in small groups. Other methods, used in some European governments, use jury-style groups of residents to make public policy decisions.
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