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.