Time of weGOV is approaching
I was at Personal Democracy Forum, Europe conference last month. There are three areas of work I can disseminate: 1) open data/transparency 2) deliberation, and 3) smart public applications. Deliberation effort is essentially our path to direct governance. Deliberation can’t happen healthily without transparency. Hence the importance of the first. What is thrilling is that in one year’s time, there is much more belief and hype (is this a bad word?) around online direct deliberation becoming a tangible alternative to representative governance. PDF organizers seem to be at the...
read moreMovie on Direct Democracy
UsNow is inspiring: it’s a documentary convincing us why the world may be better if we made decisions together. One part of it delves into Participatory Budgeting with cute Sophia Parker explaining the benefits of this exercise. Participants stop blaming public administrators for being too lose with money, or too strict where they would have liked services – and after all – they become more respecting and constructive citizens. She also mentions that the difficulty in exercises like this is not the pitching of ideas (hundreds come out quickly) but the prioritization and...
read moreDemocracy Experiment (Demoex) of Vallentuna, Sweden
Per’s class receives town’s top politicians one day in 2000. He’s teaching philosophy at Vallentuna high school, and they are discussing authority and social contract. Students are eager to hear how the political system works and at some point they become curious as to why they could not participate decision-making on the net. The class keeps debating the issue until they decide they indeed need to do so. More on Demoex story here. What a magical start. The philosophy teacher and his inspired students debating in a high-school classroom a vision that goes a long way to reality....
read moreWe no more buy secrecy
I want to bet… that the war diary posted by Wikileaks is at the end going to help Obama and the US, and will eventually be praised by those who condemn it today. Why? Because it actually helps the poor US with lots of budgetary struggles smell the stinky military industry complex. Actually, we should expect to hear somebody suggesting that Julian had agreed with Obama on his sharing of Afghanistan documents.. Indeed, Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy could not do any better then engaging the public on the issue as closely as they are now engaged. The leaks’ effect...
read moreE-Voting: Can democracy use technology?
Participation has been bleeding wound of democracy in our century. The question is how to get people to evaluate and cast a vote at elections and ballots. People simply cannot bother with voting leave alone taking time for a thorough evaluation and even deliberation. Yet with public budgets to GDP ratio from 25% (the US) to 55% (Scandinavia) the amounts at stake are huge (even when divided per head) and deserve attention. You might have heard this, or perhaps have been screaming this to your friend and family: You or your friend’s vote alone will not affect the result. True, when...
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