Tag Archives: Democracy

Farewell, Dynamic Democracy

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Back in April, the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill was rushed through the wash-up pro­ce­dure of the out­go­ing gov­ern­ment with­out the due debate and con­sid­er­a­tion that I and oth­ers believe such a far-reaching bill deserved. My dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the gov­ern­ment decision-making process over the fol­low­ing week led me to set up and announce a new site, called “Dynamic Democ­racy”. It was an exper­i­ment to see what would be dis­cussed if every­one was involved — on an anony­mous basis — rather than just our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives that often do not do a good job of rep­re­sent­ing us anyway.

The site allowed all users to cre­ate and com­ment on ‘Bills’, encap­su­lated ideas or laws that they would be push­ing for if they were in power. Reg­is­ter­ing gave users the abil­ity to vote bills (and com­ments) up and down, lead­ing to a list of highest-ranked bills that rep­re­sented the users’ favourite poten­tial policies.

Dynamic Democ­racy saw lit­tle suc­cess, pos­si­bly because writ­ing a full, well-thought-out bill rep­re­sented sig­nif­i­cant effort that a casual browser would be unlikely to com­mit. ‘Karma’, the point sys­tem that aimed to encour­age users to sub­mit bills and com­ments, did not prove to be a good enough incen­tive as there were so few users to com­pete with and no direct reward was ever imple­mented for reach­ing high karma levels.

What the site did bring, how­ever, was a num­ber of enquiries from like-minded indi­vid­u­als all over the world, keen to dis­cuss the ideas behind the site and whether or not some­thing like Dynamic Democ­racy could ever be imple­mented as a real gov­ern­ment policy-making tool. One of the more notable con­tacts, Denny de la Haye, stood as a can­di­date for Hack­ney South and Shored­itch in the gen­eral elec­tion and promised to imple­ment a crowd-sourced vot­ing sys­tem sim­i­lar to Dynamic Democ­racy for his con­stituents to voice their opin­ions in Par­lia­ment through him. (Denny, who sadly did not win his seat, now rep­re­sents the UK arm of polit­i­cal party DemoEx.)

I have decided that today is the day to close the Dynamic Democ­racy exper­i­ment, because today the UK gov­ern­ment announced their “Your Free­dom” web­site. While largely focussed on repeal­ing or chang­ing laws rather than the com­plete free­dom to sug­gest any­thing you like, Your Free­dom is cer­tainly in the same vein as Dynamic Democ­racy, with the cru­cial extra fea­ture that is endorsed and used by our gov­ern­ment and thus ideas pro­posed there stand at least some chance of mak­ing it into offi­cial gov­ern­ment policy.

Time will tell whether that really hap­pens, or if like the No. 10 Peti­tions site, sug­ges­tions will be responded to with an e-mail from the Prime Minister’s office explain­ing why thou­sands of users are all wrong. But I do still hold out hope.

Did Dynamic Democ­racy influ­ence the gov­ern­ment in their deci­sion to cre­ate Your Free­dom? Almost cer­tainly not. As my dis­cus­sions with vis­i­tors to the site have shown, I am far from the only per­son to have come up with this idea, and nei­ther am I the only one to have coded up a web­site around it. No — this is sim­ply an idea whose time has come. A vast gulf exists between West­min­ster and the world out­side, just as it always has, but these days the pub­lic are com­ing to ques­tion why that is and if we can do some­thing to cor­rect it. And nowhere is the desire to bridge that gulf stronger than among the tech-savvy youth that have the drive and the abil­ity to use the inter­net to that end. Sites like these will come and go a hun­dred times over the com­ing years and decades, and slowly but surely we’ll reshape our gov­ern­ment into what we want it to be.

So to every­one who con­tributed to Dynamic Democ­racy: thank you, and goodbye.

If you’d like to con­tact me about Dynamic Democ­racy (or any­thing else), you can still do that here. If you’d like to help get the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Act repealed, please vote up and com­ment on one of these ideas on Your Free­dom. If any­one would like use of dynamicdemocracy.org.uk until my own­er­ship expires in 2012, let me know. Stay tuned for the announce­ment of another project that bridges pol­i­tics and the inter­net in the next few weeks.

An Experiment in Dynamic Democracy

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Dynamic Democracy

Dynamic Democ­racy

I’ve been an advo­cate of open­ing up our democ­racy and involv­ing the pub­lic in gov­ern­ment decision-making for some time, with­out doing any­thing par­tic­u­larly con­crete about it besides plac­ing my vote. The Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill fiasco showed us that, really, we’re not involved with the day-to-day work­ings of gov­ern­ment at all, and born of that is this experiment.

I’d like to know what we, the peo­ple, think our gov­ern­ment should be talk­ing about. I’d like us ordi­nary peo­ple to sub­mit our ideas, vote on other people’s ideas, and come up with some idea of what we really care about. And so here we are:

Dynamic Democ­racy

This is all very exper­i­men­tal at the moment — please sign up, post ideas, vote on other people’s ideas, and if it proves pop­u­lar I’ll take it on as a per­ma­nent project. Let’s do this!

Welcome to the New Digital Economy

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Despite its spon­sor­ship by a twice-disgraced and unelected politi­cian, despite the fact that it was trans­par­ently lob­bied for by com­pa­nies rep­re­sent­ing the record labels, despite it car­ry­ing dis­pro­por­tion­ate pun­ish­ments for file-sharers, despite it seek­ing to under­mine the work of con­tent cre­ators, despite a promise to oppose it from the Lib Dems, still the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill passed through the Houses of Parliament.

In the end it became not even a mat­ter of the con­tent of the bill itself, but of its inclu­sion of in the out­go­ing government’s “wash-up” process that would allow it to be passed with­out proper scrutiny by the House. Surely a bill with so many far-reaching impli­ca­tions should be treated to the proper debate it deserves? But no.

Organ­i­sa­tions such as the Open Rights Group and 38degrees have cam­paigned long and hard. 20,000 peo­ple wrote to their MPs ask­ing them to demand that the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill get proper scrutiny, and hun­dreds made phone calls. There were protests in the streets in West­min­ster. 38degrees asked for £10,000 to pay for adver­tis­ing, so that “on the day of the vote they’ll see our oppo­si­tion over their corn­flakes, on their way into work and over tea in Par­lia­ment”. They raised more than dou­ble that fig­ure in two days.

How many MPs turned up to the sec­ond hear­ing last night to vote on whether this cru­cial piece of leg­is­la­tion is allowed to pro­ceed? About thirty. Tonight, for the third hear­ing? Maybe forty. Uses of #debill on Twit­ter were run­ning above 1 a sec­ond; we were hav­ing much more of a debate than the House was.

Some good argu­ments were put for­ward by those that did see fit to turn up, rais­ing hopes that the assem­bled MPs might realise how flawed the bill really is. Tom Wat­son deserves par­tic­u­lar credit, but even John Red­wood expressed his reser­va­tions about push­ing the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill through.

But in the end, that’s what it came down to. Maybe ten of the 50 clauses in the bill received any kind of debate what­so­ever, the rest were blazed through in five min­utes by a com­bi­na­tion of John Bercow and some doubt­less super-strength cof­fee. Some things went our way — par­tic­u­larly the loss of the con­tro­ver­sial ‘orphan works’ clause, clause 43.

The House went off to vote on whether to accept the bill on its third read­ing, and though the major­ity of those actu­ally present at the debate seemed in oppo­si­tion to it, the final tally stood at 189 Ayes, 47 Nays. 189?! Where did they come from? Oh, right, the bar.

Just as we expected and feared, the gov­ern­ment waited until the wash-up to put this bill before Par­lia­ment so that it would receive as lit­tle debate and as few amend­ments as pos­si­ble before being pushed through by a horde of MPs who didn’t even care enough to sit in on the debate.

We failed.

But what more could we have done? I don’t recall as great a pub­lic demon­stra­tion of oppo­si­tion to a sin­gle bill since fox-hunting, and yet still we have had vir­tu­ally no impact on its progress. Must we sim­ply accept that, hav­ing voted for our MPs in an elec­tion, we can have no real effect on them for the next five years; these peo­ple who sup­pos­edly rep­re­sent our views? Do they just set­tle in for five years of rep­re­sent­ing the views of the party Whips instead?

Well that’s that, I guess. Leave your tor­rent client at the door, and grab as much of Wik­ileaks and Rapid­share as you can before the gov­ern­ment realises it now has the power to block them. Wel­come to Man­del­son and Murdoch’s Dig­i­tal Economy.

Dial M for Mandelson

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I can’t be the only one think­ing along these lines right now, so… have blog, will rant.

I think Peter Man­del­son has too much power.

First off, he’s unelected, not hav­ing been a Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment since 2004. So how come he man­ages to be such a promi­nent fig­ure in the Gov­ern­ment? How is he even still heav­ily favoured by the Labour Party, despite hav­ing resigned (twice) over involve­ment with var­i­ous scan­dals? How come his anti-filesharing agenda, which head­lined the Queen’s Speech, seems to be being calmly accepted as the law-to-be despite the fact that is was trans­par­ently influ­enced by lob­by­ing from the enter­tain­ment indus­try? To say noth­ing of how much of an insane over­re­ac­tion his anti-piracy plans actu­ally are (but that’s for another post, one I’ve prob­a­bly already made some months ago).

And now this? If there’s any truth in that, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a brazen and dan­ger­ous power-grab. We didn’t vote Man­del­son in, we can’t vote Man­del­son out, and now he’s aim­ing for the power to make laws and impose them on ISPs and indi­vid­u­als in the name of pro­tect­ing copyright.

Am I the only one think­ing this isn’t quite the Democ­racy we had in mind?