AP Photo

Regardless of your views on our recent election, one thing that we can generally agree on is that our political system is broken. There are myriad contributors to our malaise, not the least of which is the voting system on which it’s all based. But apart from the intractable structural problems, there is one area that we in the web world are tantalizingly close to ameliorating: constituent opinion.

AN OLD PROBLEM WE TAKE FOR GRANTED

In the middle of February in Wisconsin, nearly 100,000 people, some driving hundreds of miles, all converged on the same location at the same time simply to convey information. These people didn’t want to be there, but they felt, rightly, that this extreme effort was the only means available to convey their opinions effectively.