This might be an example problem:
Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a "crisis" in the relationship between politicians and voters.
from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6155932.stm
Further in the text:
"We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government," Mr Taylor told the audience.
Like "teenagers", people were demanding, but "conflicted" about what they actually wanted, he argued.
KeithHopper: This article does a good job at exposing a problem we will hear more and more about over the next decade: What is the result of all this empowering that it going on in our new participatory society? I find it odd that the article is about the backlash rather than identifying this as a new phenomenon or highlighting the encouraging opportunities for change. As an aside, this problem is not yet in the consciousness of the United States citizenry, and I’m unsure how it will manifest itself when it does. I suspect that it will become visible around a highly controversial but as yet unnamed specific issue.
I do think the article conclusion is accurate; that there is a dire need for new, organizing technology to help empower people to solve problems, not just whine about them.
Having said all of that, I suspect trying to resolve this “crisis” as an example problem may be too broad of a problem. Using this meta-problem to test out ideas for possible CPS Models is perhaps too similar to what this wiki is trying to address. In essence, I think the problem outlined in this article is very similar to our WikiObjective: how do we shape online environments and tools to be better problem-solving devices?
I suppose this is arguable - we could, for example carve out one angle of the problem to address that is less “meta”, or we could pick one political issue (that is not too parochial), and try to resolve the actual issue itself. For example, in Massachusetts, we are arguing incessantly about removing tolls on a particular highway. We might pose this issue as a specific problem that the citizenry needs to address with local government to ultimately deploy tax dollars and resources in a solution. Perhaps we could come up with something more generic, but similar.
SamRose: (this is also in response to http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/CollectiveProblemSolving/2006-11-26) I think that the problem can be reflected in something like Schelling's Segregation model(see also: http://web.mit.edu/rajsingh/www/lab/alife/schelling.html). We can see in this model that: even a small amount of “%-SIMILAR-WANTED” in each agent can lead to near total polarization/segregation. If more communications connections mare made between the agents, polarization happens even faster. We can see this polarization in studies like The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election:Divided They Blog PDF. The abstract states:
“In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 “A-list” blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.”
Basically, people in the political blogosphere are linking mostly to people they agree with and generally reinforcing their agreements, and when they link to people they don’t agree with, they are usually doing so in order to disparage the views of what they are linking to.
(as I mentioned on http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/CollectiveProblemSolving/2006-11-06) This is Polarization reinforced by InformationCascades?. The political blogosphere becomes basically an echo chamber. And, deliberation within it seems to have the effect of more self-selected segregation/polarization by participants.
One of the problems is that many politicians and their media operatives/PR people covertly or overtly nurture and support these echo chambers, in order to create InformationCascades? that result in more support and inertia for them. Politicians should ModelDesiredBehavior. They should help create a climate that encourages a balance of views, and careful processes for decision making. many of the principles in Softsecurity and AssumeGoodFaith can be applied to alleviate the problems we are talkign about here. Politicians should hire public relations/media experts who can apply these types of principles, instead of the type of people who encourage the polarizatrion that we see today. The problem is so pervasive in American politics that I think someone wil actually have to make a political campaign attempt showing that these types of social norms can work in order to get people to even consider that it might be possible that they can.