From the perspective of a third of a century later, these 14 goals may seem even more fanciful than they did in 1977. Certainly none of them have been achieved, and a recent retrospective on my old study implies that the goals that could have been achieved, given humanity’s technical capabilities, have been achieved, and we completely lack the technology for colonization of the solar system (Bainbridge 2009a*). Many of the goals were relatively unpopular in 1977, but all of them touch on hopes for humanity that many future-oriented, thoughtful people hold. Today, the government of the United States is deadlocked about what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should achieve beyond the confines of Earth.
I have argued that the funding should go entirely into fundamental research in science and engineering, that will increase our knowledge about the universe and perhaps prepare the way for much more advanced space technologies in future decades, and the manned space program should be halted (Bainbridge 2009b*). However, any politician who advocates this position is likely to lose votes, because many people in the general public like the idea of human spaceflight, but lack the technical understanding to know how little we can accomplish at the present time.
Knowing what segments of the public want does not directly tell us how to give it to them, nor does it help us weigh the costs, against the costs and benefits of other goals the public also desires. The fluid network method described earlier, and already worked out in its general principles by leading thinkers in the worldwide Pirate Party, should be fully successful for many issues, but a second method with which we already have a good deal of experience is also worth considering. Indeed, the best approach may be a flexible mixture of the two methods. The second method I have in mind is peer review used by many scientific publications and science-funding agencies. It may be especially suitable when the public goals present difficult technical challenges that require unusually solid expertise that requires a considerable period of time to establish.
The general public often conceptualizes the political process only in terms of elections and the functioning of legislatures, yet much of the real decision making is done inside government agencies where the processes are obscure by nature and intentionally hidden from public view. Major exceptions to this lack of transparency are many science-funding agencies of technically advanced nations. In particular, the scientific peer review process involves a very large number of experts, who are not government employees but teaching in universities or occasionally working in other technical settings. The use of these methods could be expanded, at the same time that fluid democracy was introduced into the electoral and legislative processes, to make proper use of expert knowledge that is too specialized or complex for the general public to understand.
Here is one of the ways a contemporary science agency can manage the peer review process (Bainbridge 2011*). I will describe it in somewhat idealized terms, and not all of the features exist in any particular case; however all of these features are common.
In the course of human scientific development, new areas open up, and a sense develops in the relevant scientific community that funding should be devoted to research in one or another of them. In a somewhat chaotic process, individuals and small groups of colleagues may write white papers , outlining the potential of a new area. A science funding agency may then fund a series of small workshops, or even a major conference, to work out a scientific agenda for the early stages of exploration of the area. If the output of all this communication is promising, a new funding initiative is announced, with funds devoted to it either from several related existing programs or from a central fund of the agency. A formal funding announcement of solicitation is posted on the web, with a particular deadline date for submission usually set a few months after the posting to give academic researchers time to write proposals.
The weeks after the submission deadline are an exciting and very demanding time for the employees of the science agency that posted the solicitations, because they must sort the proposals into categories for the peer review. Strictly speaking, some of the scientists managing the new program are not government employees, because they are university faculty who have come on detail for a period of time, often two or three years, and will return to their universities when their tour of duty has finished. These rotators exemplify a different form of fluid democracy that might be applied more widely in government.
Let’s say that 500 distinct proposals have been submitted. This is far too many to review in one lump, so they are divided into groups on the basis of the expertise required to evaluate them. After much reading and discussion, the program officers might divide them into 20 groups of 25, for example. Each of the 20 groups would be reviewed as a unit by one panel of reviewers, managed by one or two of the program officers. The managers of each panel then recruit reviewers, following some mixture of two different approaches.
It is possible to recruit separate reviewers for each proposal, what are called ad-hoc reviewers. It is also possible to recruit a group of panelists, each of whom would review several proposals. For example, a panel evaluating 25 proposals could have 10 panelists, each reviewing 10 proposals, to provide 4 reviews for each proposal. And of course, the panel could handle fully 50 proposals at this rate of review writing, if half the reviews were of the ad-hoc type. Each written review would have a summary rating of the quality of the proposal, plus text that might follow a template listing the criteria for the particular competition.
Great care is taken to avoid using reviewers who have a conflict of interest on the proposal, and typically nobody submitting to the particular competition can serve as a reviewer or panelist. The proposals and reviews are usually confidential, and everybody involved in the process swears to avoid exploiting any intellectual property that is in the proposals. Depending on the particular science agency, the panel may or may not precisely rank the proposals, but it certainly will separate those that deserve further consideration from those that do not. Again, depending on the rules of the particular agency, the program directors may have a significant role in deciding which of the fundable proposals to move forward for actual funding.
The entire process is Internet-facilitated. In addition to having computerized records of past reviews, the program officers have efficient tools for finding new reviewers, such as checking the rosters of recent conferences in the given area, and of course visiting academic websites. Reviewers and panelists are recruited via email. A special web-based information system handles the submission of proposals, and their distribution to the individuals who will be writing reviews. During a panel meeting, a well-designed groupware system gives panelists access to the proposals and reviews for their particular panel, allowing them to develop a collective written record of their deliberations, and to assign proposals to funding priority categories. A number of agencies have recently experimented with conducting the panel meeting itself online, using videoconferencing or even virtual worlds such as Second Life (Bohannon 2011*).
*
Bainbridge, William Sims. 2009a. “Motivations for Space Exploration.” Future[a-z] 41:514-522.
*
Bainbridge, William Sims. 2011. “Peer Review.” Pp. 389-396 in Leadership in Science and Technology, edited by W. S. Bainbridge. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.
*
Bohannon, John. 2011. "Meeting for Peer Review at a Resort that’s Virtually Free." Science 331: 27.