There’s something else missing from recovery.gov altogether (see here): the ability for citizens to have input into which projects get funded in their jurisdictions.

Stimuluswatch.org, evidently a work in progress, provides an interesting (albeit imperfect) example of how this might work. Launched by team led by Jerry Brito at George Mason University, the site encourages citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in their city to find, discuss and rate those projects. The list of shovel-ready projects was developed by a coalition of US Mayors as a response to the stimulus package. The mayor’s have had their say, now stimulus-watch allows citizens to register their opinions on which projects they believe are critical and which are not.

Despite being sympathetic with the site’s aims, I can’t get past the problem that there is absolutely no way to determine whether the input on forums like stimuluswatch.org is in any way representative of the majority views in a given jurisdiction. This is a general problem with citizen engagement online and one reason why online consultations will remain marginal until at least two big issues are solved:

1. The ability to authenticate the citizens who participate (i.e., are they who they say they are and are they in fact resident of a given jurisdiction) and,
2. The ability to determine whether the opinions expressed by the online population are representative of the general population (particularly the population of people who are unlikely to participate in online engagement exercises).

Unfortunately, without these elements I struggle to see how projects like stimuluswatch.org can claim any democratic legitimacy. That doesn’t mean that they are not a useful source of input. But it does mean that local elected officials would be hard-pressed to justify using this input to determine how they allocate public funds.