Idea of a customizable performance index in a democratic system

A Democratic system should work based on continuous feedback on its performance.  Without that it works like a uncontrolled and unchecked system which eventually drifts from its original goals set forth by its founding fathers.  Right now in India the feedback system is largely based on input from the media.  But, what media provides is news.  That has the following problems:

1. It may, and largely is, biased.
2. There are lot of information, but often the source of those information are not presented in structured manner and hence becomes difficult to validate the information. 
3. Many times the sources are just not trust worthy. 
4. Generally media reports news which they consider news worthy.  There is a wide area of information which is very valuable for evaluating performance of a Democracy but not news worthy for media.
5. The output of media news is optimized for public reading/hearing but not optimized for doing further analysis by computer algorithms.

There are some other feedback systems.  For example there are wealth of information hidden in various survey orgaziations' data bases.  E.g. Survey of India, Ministry of program and implementation.  While there might be ways to extract these data for further processing, the systems themselves are not really optimized for collecting and analyzing information for evaluating performance of the Democratic system.  Also these information are not readily accessible to common people for digesting in a way they can comprehend.
In modern India, we have got other ways of collecting information about government matters, RTI.  But while RTI provides a mechanism to access important government related information, it is not really easy enough for general citizen to file and understand these on regular basis.
So what we observe is that we already have several sources of information and mechanism of collecting them in place.  Now what we need is organizing those information and performing analytics in a way in which it serves the goal of becoming a perfect feedback path for the working Democratic system.
In order to do that we need to define first what we mean by performance of a Democratic system.  When do we say we are performing good as a Democratic system and when do we say we are doing bad.  There have to be precise measures using which one can say it is doing good or bad.  If bad, how bad.  If good, how good.  That is a complex question and in subsequent writings I will get in details of my thoughts on this.  But at this point what we need to keep in mind is the definition of performance may very among different analysts.  The goal of this article is to show that it is possible to create a system where different analysts, who can be anyone from a minister to a school student, can create their own definitions of democratic performance.  This has to be done with the following conditions in mind:

1. Creating the definition will be easy enough so that one does not need to be highly computer literate to create that.
2. The definition itself, including the data it is analyzing and the results of the analysis, all needs to be in public space which any one can.
3. There has to be a public comment and voting system in those definitions so that some of those can naturally bubble up as the most famous ones and eventually will reflect what people really want.

Information

We can collect lot of relevant information from various sources.  It is very important that we categorize these information into different hierarchical buckets so that people understand them easily.  For example, at broad level they can be categorized into buckets of "Economic", "Social", "Religious" etc.  Then we can further categorize "Social" into "Literacy level", "Hygiene" etc.  And so on.  For this article, let me assume a flat structure. 
Let us assume there are total Cn different categories of information : C[1], C[2],.. C[N].
Now let us define a general performance function F which works on these Cn categories of information and yields a result.  Then we can say, performance P = F(C).  This is true for a single regional unit where P can be assumed to be same.  But in general we will find P needs to be different from one regional unit to other.  For example the performance criteria of a village will be different from the performance criteria of a town.  So if there are Rn different types of regions(R), then performance becomes P = F(R)(C).
In a simplistic case let us assume R is not varying.  So we can have P = F(C).  Now let us assume a lenear formula for F where F = x[1]*c[1] + x[2]*c[2] + ... + x[Cn]*c[Cn].  Where x[i] is a real number (i from 1 to Cn).  Then we can write P = X * C.

Analysis

In this model we notice that if:

1. We can create a system where C is available to people via Internet APIs and other medium
2. C is updated sufficiently frequently (Because actual real time is impossible to achieve) 
3. We can create a system where people can easily create X

Then we can build a system where the P = A * C is calculated on real time or on demand and presented to the whole nation.  Graphical interfaces can be built where even a politically illiterate person can interpret P.  Mechanisms can be built where these information are distributed everywhere free of cost or at cheap price without the helps of internet as well(E.g. through schools, post offices).
One can easily see that X itself is not a constant measure.  In general each analyst will have their own defintion of X which will be visible and ready for comment and feedback from people.  So each P can then be subjected to further analytics to obtain a more reliable nationwide performance index.

So we can see that it is possible to build a customizable system which can constantly provide feedback about the performance of a democratic system.  I think such a system can play many more important roles, I will discuss them in further writings.  The construction of such a system, specially to create the initial structure, is an enormous job in an already established system.  I will try to address those challenges one by one in future notes. 

The falling apple and moral grayland

Isaac Newton, without his 'Sir' and all the associated intelligence, was sitting in the orchard.  Suddenly it happened!  An apple fell on Newton's head.  He picked the apple from ground and became thoughtful.  He wondered why the apple fell in the direction it fell?  May be it fell in the same direction his eyes were pointing to, Newton thought.  He was convinced by his reasoning because he was indeed looking down at the earth.  While deeply engaged in his thoughts looking down, another apple fell.  His hypothesis found stronger foundation based on two events supporting it.  Curious, he looked up to see how many apples were there on that tree. As he looked, another apple fell right on his nose.  "Blue blistering barnacles!".  Jumped off Newton.  He looked up again and wondered, "Why?".  Then came the wise man, walking down the street.  He saw Newton and felt like contributing something to his great thoughts.  "The world is a complex place, Newton." - shouted wise man.
"Hmm.. that is right", thought Newton.  So the new law, which is going to be famous, consists of two rules:

1. If you are seating under an apple tree, an apple will always fall in the direction your eyes are pointing.
2. The world is a complex place so there will be deviations to the above law.

Back home, Newton was happy that his beautiful little theory could indeed explain all the falling apples on earth.  After a sumptuous dinner Newton rested his satisfied mind and stomach on an incline in the backyard of the house under the vast universe of glittering stars.  He imagined each star as an apple on the tree.
"But..", thought Newton, "If there are more people under the same tree looking at different directions, apple will still fall in only one direction."  But this thought contradicted his newly formed theory so strongly that he resented the thought and became restless.
"For now let me assume that there can always be maximum one person under one tree", chuckled Newton.  "Later I will prove that my assumption is true." That seemed to be easier.
Next day Newton was back to the shade of the same tree.  He was consumed in thoughts of how to prove that there will be only one person under one tree, even though there may be multiple people under the shade of the tree.  Meanwhile, a dirty poor fool, who was watching Newton deeply troubled by the falling of apple, called "Sir.. Why do you worry so much about falling apples?  They always come to the ground.  It's no more complex than that."
"Poor fellow..", Newton sympathized.  "I think he is so sick that he could never raise his head up to see apples going high.."
He tried to imagine how the poor fellow never enjoyed the beauty of an apple flying upward.  But.. the world suddenly stopped in front of him.  The falling leaves, the falling apples, the falling rain drops.. everything stopped.  Nothing went up.  Everything fell to the ground irrespective of where he looked.

"Gravity!"  - Newton was relieved.  

== END ==

[Note: I put down my thoughts in this story only to refer to this back in my later writings.  The core idea is that often we are provided reasons for certain actions by power or authority which strongly contradict with facts.  Generally these justifications are philanthropic in nature and false. In an authoritarian system the anomalies are mostly ignored.  But in a democratic system these are justified through state run propaganda system stating "The world is a complex place." or something in similar lines.  This is done to smear the truth, which is often simple and often points to evil intentions of the authority.  As a matter of fact, this level of conformity from people is seen more in a stable democratic system where people are complacent and largely politically illiterate.  This is not what should happen, but this is what mostly happen.]