Guest Opinion piece by Brent Allsop and Jim Bennett.

In the recent State Convention, Bruce Lindsay wonderfully clarified a big problem we have with the United Utah Party when he listed synonyms for “moderate,” including “average, middle of the road, mediocre, unbiased, compromising, and boring.” We believe we can create a party that doesn’t match those synonyms. The way to do that is make this a party that directly reflects the consensus of its members.

To date, all political parties are modeled after traditional hierarchies.  And for thousands of generations, we’ve been bred to only support what the guy at the top of the hierarchy wants.  Anything else is feared and something that needs to be destroyed.  Any group that tries to function without a hierarchy is like “herding cats” and can’t scale.

But what if it could? 

If we could amplify the wisdom of the crowd and measure the collective consensus, shouldn’t getting as much of that as possible be the true direction for a political party?  If we could know that, could we break free from the polarizing hierarchies?

That’s what we’re doing at Canonizer.com, where we’re working to efficiently find out, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone wants in real time.  We’ve started a “Governmental Priorities” topic where people can join camps that fully represent what they want from government. This topic is not exclusively for the United Utah Party.  It is for everyone, no matter how diverse their opinions may be. We have Canonizer algorithms for the United Utah Party, as well as for the Democratic and Republican parties.  Once we find out exactly what a consensus in the United Utah Party wants, we can compare this to what participating Republicans want by simply changing to the Republican Canonizer algorithm and watching everything re-sort in their chosen priority order.

Knowing what everyone fully wants brings everyone back to the same table. Instead of limiting, compromising, and censoring, we can instead find a way to bridle our diverse passions in ways that drive us all forward.  The camp tree structure at Canonizer enables us to finally keep the focus on the things we all agree on in the consensus super camps, while pushing all the less important polarizing stuff out of the way of consensus, into the lower level supporting subcamps.

Canonizer is a tool that allows for communication from everyone. If the United Utah Party knows and understands the consensus of party members and everyone else in real time, that will give us a huge advantage over the other parties. We invite everyone to participate and let your voice be heard in the “Governmental Priorities” topic.