“Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. We envision this site as one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens.”

“Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to experiment with various ways of nurturing and expanding this conversation, ranging from blogging to investigative journalism, interviews, profiles and guest columns. The focus is going to be on new tools, processes, uses and trends–not on scoring partisan political points. We value your input and ideas.”

More Perfect is an interesting new site for collaboration on policy prototypes. Built on MediaWiki, the site allows anyone to add or change issues or policies. For example, you can rewrite the United States Constitution, and you can question/discuss changes or additions. This is potentially a great tool for evolving policy with a high degree of openness, transparency, and citizen participation.

In the words of More Perfect’s co-founder and CEO Tim Killian “We want to become the place were people gather to discuss, improve and create better laws and public policy. More people. More ideas. More perfect.”

More Perfect has just announced its first direct partnership, with the People’s Waterfront Coalition (PWC) in Seattle to facilitate citizen involvement in a “transit and streets” proposal for replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. There are sections for defining the problem, setting goals, and determining a plan for action. Much of the content already on the site focuses on Seattle and Washington State, but there’s sections for all states to have voters’ guides and townhalls. The site also integrates a WordPress blog and phpBB forums.

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Video games have long entertained users by immersing them in fantasy worlds full of dragons or spaceships. But Peacemaker, a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is part of a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.

Games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. Video games also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective.

Featured games:

• Peacemaker (a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)
• Food Force (a UN released game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones)
• A Force More Powerful (a game to teach the methods of influencing or changing the political environment using nonviolent methods)
• Darfur is Dying (a narrative based simulation about surviving in a Darfur refugee camp)
• September 12 (a simple game to explore some aspects of the war on terror
• Madrid (a newsgame about the 3/11 terrorist attacks in Spain)

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“Extreme democracy” is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues.

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We want to start a new political party that will focus on formulating political agendas rather than fielding candidates for election. The Participatory Democracy Party (PDP) will be a genuine grass roots effort; the party membership, organized into task forces focused on particular areas of concern, will identify problems that the political system can address, evaluate proposed solutions, and define a political agenda to apply the best solutions to the problems. The party’s influence on events, then, will depend on its ability to get elected officials to adopt and implement the agendas it develops. The work of the party task forces will be done through email and telephone conferences, managed and facilitated by web-based technologies. The PDP will be a transparent effort: all party communications will be publicly archived.

This site presents a proposed structure and operational methodology for establishing the PDP.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has recently announced Campaigns Wikia, an effort to bring political discourse to the masses using the humble wiki as the platform.

“Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.”

“[It is] a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.”

“This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.”

“Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.”

- Read Campaigns Wikia mission statement
- Read background article

This focus area of Carnegie Mellon’s InSITeS (Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society) embraces the topics commonly referred to e-government and electronic democracy.

“Although the phenomena overlap, e-government generally refers to IT-enabled service delivery, procurement, and internal government management. Electronic democracy generally pertains to the use of new information technology to facilitate political engagement by the people, whether communicating with official government organs or among themselves.”

“We are concerned with discovering the circumstances under which people are most likely to resort to the Internet as a significant medium for meaningful community engagement, and with developing tools to help citizens identify, discuss, and resolve issues of public policy.”

A few progressive [public authorities in the USA], such as VA’s Memorial Affairs, have taken a step beyond early e-gov programs, using the Web as a platform for delivering interactive services, aka Web 2.0. These new services, or Web applications, make better use of an agency’s data and other resources, including human resources, by creating bridges from public-facing Web sites to back-end databases. And increasingly, thanks to a slew of new open-source and commercially available tools, government Web applications can be as rich as software run on a PC.

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Government 2.0: Using Technology to Improve Education, Cut Red Tape, Reduce Gridlock, and Enhance Democracy
by William D. Eggers.

A well-written, lively, optimistic book that calls for the transformation of technology in government from lipstick on a bulldog to total information awareness. This book is proactive in nature (see what these governments are really doing), does not call for a wholesale and costly transformation, and employs a subtle shaming of those governments that have not yet joined the 21st century. William Eggers’s argument, conservative in nature, states that the world of politics would quickly and markedly benefit from this digital transformation in terms of a fiscal payoff, but a more profound change would result as governments become more transparent, more democratic, and more efficient.

- Amazon link
- Book website
- Article by the book author

This blog is designed by James Scott, Associate Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri-Columbiato, to support his research and teaching on the use of the web in government and politics, in civic engagement and public involvement in local and regional governance.

To speak of new democracies is to refer to two inter-related phenomena, write the author Professor Stephen Coleman and Ildiko Kaposi in the introduction to the report ‘New Democracies; New Media: What’s New?‘.

Firstly, there is the wave of democratisation that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in which states as diverse as former Soviet satellites, Latin American military dictatorships and developing African nations came to adopt the formal tenets of liberal constitutional democracy: elections based on universal suffrage; competing political parties; accountability of governments to governed; the rule of law; and basic civil liberties.

Secondly, there is the sense in which twenty-first century democracies are departing from the traditional model of state-centred sovereignty and adopting new forms of substantive democracy characterised by participatory methods of policy-making and centrifugal delegation.

In advanced democracies, these modernising strategies tend to be associated with the collapse of traditionally centralised sovereignty, whereas for newly-democratised states, innovative approaches to policy formation and decision-making are seen to constitute evidence that power has passed from unaccountable elites to the civic grass roots.

In this second sense, the notion of ‘new democracy’ raises important questions about the extent to which governance need be characterised by elitist characteristics that we have come to regard as politically inevitable.

For example, even in the most historically developed democracies, the process of government policy formation and decision-making has tended to operate at some distance (physically, culturally and politically) from most citizens; official information has tended to be scarce and unequally distributed; opportunities to influence government agendas have been limited to political insiders and professional lobbyists; political culture has tended to be exclusive and unwelcoming to the demos who should (normatively) be at the centre of the democratic stage.

Are such characteristics inherent to the governance of mass democracies or might new democracies do things differently? Or, to state the question in socio-technical terms, are there ways of designing democratic regimes in ways that place the demos in a more central political role?

While nonprofits and campaign organizations are still focusing on top-down organization to raise money and build support, other groups are working to build environments for a deeper kind of democracy that’s based on collaboration, talking, listening, and learning, much of it mediated by social technology.

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Wikis, blogs and other interactive tools are making it easier to find out what people really think of their government and its services.

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Is Web 2.0 in government an oxymoron? It would seem that Uncle Sam in particular could easily fall out of step with a “new” Web of blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS. Yet last week’s “Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Government” in Washington, DC, suggests that federal Web managers are indeed exploring Web 2.0 technologies.

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