Online democracy: what could it look like?
Shauna Concannon
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Seen by 282
The basis of this workshop idea is something of a thought experiment that would get people from a range of research areas to collaborate ideas on the following proposal:
A new political party that engages with as many people as possible and aggregates all of their opinions to create policy - true democracy or a terrible idea?
If we imagine that: a) we ensure that everyone has access to a computer and the internet (facilitated sessions for people who face barriers to this); b) we are a democratic party interested in harnessing the opinions of all the people and c) we were elected as the political party in charge of the UK...
How would we go about creating a system to capture as many people's views on as many policy issues as possible? How could such a network support facilitated discussions with access to all issues, not only the ones that gain attention in mainstream media. Could digital technologies help to empower individuals with the agency to shape the policies of an online political party? And what would happen?
I imagine this as a workshop to discuss the concept of digital citizens, and what steps are needed to support the use of online technologies for democratic purposes. I would like to avoid focusing the discussion on practical barriers of access, but rather focus more on the mechanics of engagement and the potential pitfalls, as well as possible ways to counter these. Although, this is very much a starting point and I would certainly welcome other people’s input on this.
Some key questions off of the top of my head:
What methods from offline activity could be adapted for online purposes? And how could they scale?
How do we engage people in critical debate online?
What are possible codes of engagement that would help to foster good discursive practice?
What would be the benefits of an online political party?
What would be the challenges and potential disasters?
Outcome: a speculative brief for a system that could support e-democracy
Shauna Concannon Mon 4 Apr 2016 3:14PM
Hi @zanderwilson - glad to hear you are interested. It sounds like your background would be really useful in shaping this, so it would be great to work with you on this.
I think the format is an important thing to think about so that there is structure to the speculative. Needs some thought.
Nikolai Gad Wed 6 Apr 2016 5:00PM
This sounds very interesting @shaunaconcannon! In my Phd I'm actually looking at how new political parties across Europe is using digital technologies trying to be more inclusive so that is quite close to what you are describing as a thought experiment - for example parties like Podemos (Spain), Five Star Movement (Italy), Pirate Parties (Iceland, Germany, Sweden), Alternativet (Denmark) etc. I was just about to suggest another workshop on digitally enabled political engagement and democracy, but I guess it makes more sense to join forces on one workshop in this field. Have you got any thoughts on how to run the workshop? Would it be a sort of "role play" of an constituting general meeting of this imaginative party where we imagine how such a party would decide on rules, political platforms, decision making procedures etc? Some of my ideas for activities was to perhaps invite practitioners of digital democracy (online activists, politicians, activist developers/hackers/coders etc), or have some training in methods for empirical studies of democracy (like the Deliberative Quality Index for instance), but I'm not sure if something like that would fit in with this concept?
Zander Wilson · Mon 4 Apr 2016 1:17PM
Sounds like a really interesting space to explore @shaunaconcannon - allowing ourselves to get out of what's practical and think about what's possible. I've a background in town planning, and I'm often thinking about, in a perfect world, a system like this might look like (how we might get citizens involved in decisions made in their local area).
I'd be very interesting in helping you with a proposal to think about the 'perfect' technology for citizen participation online - and whether there could ever be such a thing.