Faciliate a factual and largely unbiased tracking of events which could lead down the road to despotism. Events cataloged in a tree or matrix (with parent events) like fashion might give insight as to which events helped or hindered a slide into despotism.
Suggested implimenation?
Catalog events with a parent child (or peer to peer) structure similar to how social networking sites are implimented. Automatically bring in news items and tag them to events based on keywords. Either have editors (similar to the Doomsday Clock) or crowd based social editors (wiki/digg style). Editor ratings of events would automatically aggrigate and represent a time on the Despotism Clock. If using crowd based editors possibly use negative bias algorithms in an attempt to filter out bias.
A matrix structure would probably be more helpful than a flat chronological timeline.
Possibly go back and modal previous societies which slid into despotism for comparison to recent events in the Despotism Clock.
