Articles
Iceland Constitution, Crowdsourcing and Gov 2.0
Constitute Now!
Yesterday, we posted 'Beyong Wargames', an essay in which Rushkoff wondered what civic participation would look like, if we suddenly began tapping into the possibilities offered by gaming and social platforms. Imagine a discussion of urban planning conducted through a simulation like SimCity. Or a model for local currency developed in a community within Second Life. How about, he asked, a bottom-up editorial process for amending the Constitution itself, pairing traditional legislative processes with the mass participation offered by wikis and other collective authorship tools.
Well, it seems that the future is much closer than I thought. In fact, the word is that Island is already months deep in a project to crowdsource the writing of a new constitution, using Facebook.
The recovering European nation's existing constitution is essentially a carbon copy of Denmark's, Iceland claiming independence from Denmark in 1944. There were slight adjustments, like replacing the word "king" with "president," but after the financial crisis that brought Iceland's economy to its knees in 2008, the country's decided to start from scratch.
The approach uses a combination of social media platforms--Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,Flickr--to gather suggestions from the citizens, and members of a constitutional council post drafts on their website every week.
The idea of using crowdsourcing to draft the document came about last year when the national government crowdsourced the brainstorming process of how to draft a new constitution. At a forum last year, 950 randomly selected citizens discussed the constitution, and in November the Icelandic parliament created a council of 25 to manage the process.
The much anticipated Change, which we have become obsessed with here at Gov2u, seems much closer now – What a relief!
P.S: If you're trying to figure out the link between online collaboration, constitutional ammendments, and Warholian depictions of Pirate Obama diguised as Abraham Lincoln - you can stop right there. There's no link at all. Abraham Lincoln was the 16th US President, he was not among the founding fathers and he has nothing to do with drafting the constitution. He was not even born.