Wed, 03/03/2010 - 17:19
The internet provides exciting new ways of doing democracy and for organising society in general. The central idea is that the internet allows people to organise and make decisions in ways that involve large numbers of people. This is a radical change from having power held in the hands of a few.
Information was once collated and accessible by established elites. Medicine, science, politics, journalism and law were effectively inaccessible to most people. It was genuinely harder for common folk to engage in these areas than the privileged few. But now information can be collated more effectively by the highly-networked masses, than it can by small, well-funded elites. This information can also be organised more effectively, and usefully, by the wisdom of the crowds. And it can be made available to anyone with internet access, for free.
Internet technologies can also help to explore ideas that solve problems. Large numbers of participants, with the aid of intelligent algorithms, can make better decisions than a small group of politicians. The collective knowledge of the crowd is much more extensive, and is able to examine problems in much greater depth. Many projects are experimenting with different algorithms that facilitate this mass decision-making.
One of the projects we are building the technology for is Give Your Vote. The UK elections have real effects not just on people living in the UK, but also those across the world. If people in London give their votes to people in Baghdad, foreign policy towards Iraq suddenly becomes an extremely high-priority issue. International issues are usually overshadowed by domestic concerns in UK elections. This project seeks to change that. We're building the system using the open source CMS, Drupal, and the open source SMS server software, FrontlineSMS. Elites and institutions are nowhere to be seen in this whole picture.
Another project we helped in the early stages was Vilfredo Goes To Athens. A clever algorithm for identifying ideas with the biggest potential for consensus helps participants find a solution that they are all willing to accept. The basic system worked well straight away, and now a growing user base is experimenting with how to use the system. Getting consensus is always hard, but Vilfredo and the systems that will come after it are making it much easier.
Wikis have proven themselves as an excellent way to collaborative author an extensive encyclopedia, as well as countless, more specialised, knowledge repositories. The same technology is being harnessed to write party policy statements, lobby politicians and explore the arguments for and against policy positions. The TIPAESA deliberatively structure, developed at Berkley in the 60s for complex problem solving, has been used with wikis to enable radical new forms of debate. Participants can add arguments for and against (sometimes simultaneously) multiple positions. Anonymity, combined with an effective structure, allows people to contribute to opposing positions - freeing them from the trap of entrenched mud-slinging. Notable examples of this approach have been the Canadian Green Party's Living Platform and Open Politics.
These are just some of the projects we've been involved with, but there are many more. In the run up to the 2010 General Election, we'll feature more of initiatives that are trying to make 'the system' more democratic.