Open source distributed political big data project

Most people agree that governance is necessary; most people acquiesce in the use of politics to form governments. So far, only private and ethically dubious political movements seem to have used large-scale data analysis in their political campaigns.

I imagine that most scientists think that public policy and governance should have a rational and scientific basis.

Many political and governance decisions do have an element of moral decision-making, which is perhaps where voting has its role.

Suggested is that scientific bodies and instiitutions, on a voluntary basis, donate staff time and computer resources to create a large-scale global distributed project or system to gather data, analyse it, create social and economic models, and disseminate the results. Data could be gathered through mining social media and other methods that are coming to be used. Results would be open source and open access to allow anyone to use them. But part of the project would be filtering results and presenting them in as simple a way possible (consistent with them being true), always linked back to the source data.

This may allow political debate to become more solidly grounded in empirical research, and allow political choices to become limited to the moral assessment of the data and situation.

For example, different Brexit deals or global-warming-mitigation-strategies or political party manifestos could be analysed by real-time economic modelling, the likely benefits and disadvantages to groups and individuals could be presented. Paid adverts could be shown to target individuals flagging up the actual likely outcomes of different courses of action. The moral judgements leading to different situations could be highlighted, and then people could be encouraged to make their political choice on explicitly moral grounds.