Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude is responsible for the U.K.’s Government Digital Service and is a co-chairman of the Open Government Partnership, an international body that aims “to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.”
But somewhere along the line the terms “open government” and “open data” have been conflated. While governments have thrown out gigabytes of data “to promote transparency,” few — Finland being among them — have done much truly to “empower citizens,” and certainly not the U.K.
While the award-winning GDS has been successful in digitizing the processes of government, Mr. Maude was clear about its aim: delivering services “better, cheaper, quicker, in a way that is likely to be more equitable and more accurate,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “We are not changing the nature of democracy.”
When asked how the citizen, having been empowered to do the business of government in a better way, is empowered to change the business of government he replied tersely: “Through elections.”
Given the response to previous attempts at opening up democracy, maybe his distrust in participatory democracy isn’t unreasonable. On coming to power in 2010 the coalition government launched a website to ask the public to nominate what laws it wanted repealed. But there was no promise that its choices would be enacted. Perhaps as a consequence there was a campaign to demand the overturning of the second law of thermodynamics. The website has since closed.
The problem, said Joonas Pekkanen, a democracy campaigner in Finland, is that there is no sense of empowerment. “Why should the people take it seriously if the government doesn’t take it seriously? You need to change the constitution and give people enough power that they feel they have actual power.”
Finland has done exactly that. Last year it passed the Finnish Citizen’s Initiative, which allows citizens to draft legislation that has to be debated by Parliament.
The idea is powerful because “the politicians now have lost their monopoly on setting their own agenda,” Mr. Pekkanen said. “Now they can be forced to take a process, suggestions that they would never want or come around to putting on their agenda.”
To-be-debated proposals must garner the support of 50,000 people within six months. Although the first proposal, on fur farming, was voted down by Parliament, two more have passed the threshold, one on same-sex marriage and one on copyright laws. They will both be debated.
Mr. Pekkanen said the power lies in crowdsourcing actual draft legislation, not merely in instructing Parliament to debate a topic.
Pretty much every new technology since the printing press has promised to change government; few have. Why should the Internet be any different?
“Now we have easy and cost-efficient crowdsourcing,” said Tanja Aitamurto, a researcher at Stanford University. “You don’t need to have $1 million to build something. In Finland we are licensing the technology for $2,000 a year.”
“It is also so much easier,” she continued, “to access any type of online platform than it was even five years ago. The Internet is now available to so many more people and it means your voice can be heard outside of the urban centers where the politicians work.”
Douglas Carswell, a member of Parliament for the U.K. Conservative Party, the larger party in the governing coalition, said crowdsourcing impacted the very core of government.
“One of the reasons you have a government is because in the provision of certain public processes you assume there is a greater wisdom in the official mind than exists anywhere else,” he said. “We begin to realize that in this world of collective wisdom the official mind isn’t as clever as we thought it was.
“Think about the phrase in English: ‘It’s official’. That is supposed to be the clincher in an argument. Imagine a world where the official mind isn’t the wisest? Government is going to have to take into account that its word isn’t final.”
But is there a danger of cyber-utopianism in all of this? What about trolls, or single-issue obsessives? Is Finland, a relatively homogenous society, a false model? Will it work in more politically divided communities?
“Of course there is risk of getting too excited too early,” said Mr. Pekkanen. “It takes a lot of time and testing how the things should work. But there is no reason to consider that the democratic system we now have is the ideal model.”
There is a precedent for this, according to Beth Noveck, who led President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. Speaking to an audience in Edinburgh recently, she pointed to the invention of the jury system by Henry II, a king of England in the 12th century.
This was a “powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens. Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries…we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance.”
There is much to be gained.
Almost without exception, trust in the political system is falling. Since 1979 turnout at European Parliament elections has fallen from 62% to just 43% in 2009. In Slovakia only 19.6% of voters could be bothered to cast a vote, according to EU data.
“Turnout has fallen not because people don’t care, but because they know it is pointless,” argues Mr. Carswell. “But boy do people care passionately about the world about them, the future of their children. [But] does anyone expect energy prices to go up or down as a result of how they vote in a general election?”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ben Rooney
Quelle/Source: Tech Europe, 15.08.2013
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