In this seminar, students will design a digital environment to house the activities of local governments. Massachusetts‚s local government, known as "Open Town Meeting", requires all interested townspeople to get together once a year and determine basic issues like the tax rate, zoning/development questions or allowing sex education in schools. The thesis of this seminar is that this very old form of direct democracy can be facilitated and made more broadly accessible by allowing remote users to participate in the decision rooms and by unleashing the right technology in and around those physical rooms.

MIT has identified various Massachusetts towns that are willing to collaborate on this project. Students will work with officials, activists and typical citizen participants from these towns. It is hoped that the designs and a working prototype at semesters end will also provide interesting options for other organizations seeking better collaborative and self-governing communities, such as unions, coops, global non-profits, corporate shareholder meetings and
partnerships.

Students will work on teams and individually to determine the requirements for the final proposed online system; suggested enhancements to the physical meeting spaces; and collaborate with volunteer "open source"programmers to customize a working free software prototype of our system that will be freely available for any government or other party to use.

A cross-disciplinary approach will be taken; students with background in architecture, urban planning, law, cognition, business, digital media and computer science are encouraged to participate. No prior technical knowledge is necessary, though a rudimentary understanding of web page creation is helpful.

Based upon work completed last semester, an initial prototype exists for parts of the town meeting process, based upon "eRooms" technology (donated by onlineresolution.com, a sponsor company). In addition to that platform, we will be using and expanding open source free software, such as Slashdot and phpNuke. The systems based on this software would be free to use and improve by any government or other party. It is hoped that the entire system can be open source.

Town Meeting is a complex social, legal, political and procedural phenomenon of self-governance and community. Close attention will be paid to the existing physical locations and workflows as part of the design phase for the online system. The overall environment must accommodate citizens physically present and those who participate digitally, while creating meaningful opportunities for collaboration, debate and decision among all users. Similarly, students will propose enhancements to the physical locations based upon new relationships, activities and information made possible through the digital overlay. The inclusion of wireless devices (such as web-phones and laptops) as well as large screens and other embedded systems within public spaces and physical meeting rooms will be considered.

The end design goal is to create a model that fuses physical and digital Place, Process and Presence to unharness the dream of full democratic participatory government.