Over the last few years, we’ve seen new and exciting
experiments in direct democracy emerge: the Open Ministry – Crowdsourcing legislation
site in the Finish Parliament; the Icelandic e-democracy and participatory
budgeting website Better Reykjavik; Podemos, the new decentralised Spanish
political movement and the municipal citizen-led coalitions Barcelona en Comu
and Ahora Madrid.
You could also include Italy’s Five Star Movement in the range
of options springing up that use technology to engage directly with people. Since
the Brexit decision in the UK the world of politics has got a little potty and if
the craziness continues you can expect a further proliferation of options.
Clandestine political
meetings
I was introduced to one such option in clandestine
circumstances this week, under the guise of hearing Paddy Ashdown’s post Brexit
views on the tech sector. Imagine my
surprise when we were given an early introduction to More United. This being a new platform that aims to influence
politics without being a political party. The concept being that the world of
politics needs to innovate to bring everyman back into the centre, rather than
the extremist or populist end of the spectrum. A key aim is to enable people
like to participate in and change politics in a way that has never been
possible before. One of the principals of More United is for A United Kingdom
that welcomes immigration, international co-operation and a close relationship
with the EU.
A crowded space in the
new world of politics
One aspect I did find interesting was how More United (if it’s
not a political party) positions itself next to https://www.change.org/ and Steve Hilton’s Crowdpac, a Silicon Valley political
tech start-up. He was formerly a
visiting professor at Stanford University and the senior advisor to David
Cameron and played a leading role in the modernisation of the Conservative Party
and the implementation of its government reform programme.
Hilton also recently wrote More Human, in which he argued
that the frustrations people feel with government, politics, their economic
circumstances and their daily lives are caused by deep structural problems with
the systems that dominate our world – systems that have become too big,
bureaucratic and distant from human scale.
He was also a prominent supporter for the leave team in the referendum.
Decentralised Citizen
Engagement Technology
These could both be part of Francesca Bria’s Europe-wide
project D-CENT. The project investigates opportunities
for technology to re-energise democracy and politics. D-CENT gathers
citizen-led organisations that are transforming democracy and looks to help
them develop the next generation of open source, distributed and privacy-aware
tools for direct democracy. These tools,
innovative in both the commercial and public sector domains, are spreading
across the political spectrum, governments, parliaments and the public shaping
the new political institutions of the 21st Century.
Do good. Make Money
Whilst I’ve been unpacking the rise of new open social
democratic platforms this trend cross pollinates into the rise of the
mission-driven business, where purpose and something of meaning is part of the
powerful draw to start and create innovative solutions across the world to
deliver change.