Open innovation as digital democracy: Notes from ISDT
I'm currently in beautiful Porto, participating as a faculty member at the Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation. Yesterday I led a discussion on open political innovation. Slides above, and a summary of the session by rapporteur Kamran Hooshmand is available on the ISDT wiki.
The pitch: online open innovation platforms like Reykjavik's Better Reykjavik present interesting (and under-examined) opportunities for citizen engagement and the development of collaborative governance structures.
Follow the Twitter hashtag #isdt11 this week for more updates from this innovative event.
National Assembly 2010: Another step in Iceland’s political reboot
Word cloud from 2010 Icelandic National Assembly by Stjórnlagaþing
What will a political reboot of a stable western democracy look like? I'm watching Iceland to find out. To an American, the idea of tossing out the national constitution and writing a new one might seem blasphemous. Citizens elsewhere often have a more pragmatic attitude toward their governing documents, and occasionally update them to ensure they reflect the principles and ideas of their nation. Partly as a result of the national soul-searching that began following the financial collapse, Iceland has decided to produce a new constitution. There will be three major phases in the constitutional process: a National Assembly, an election of a Constitutional Assembly, and parliamentary discussion and voting.
The National Assembly (Þjóðfundar) is occurring today. Like the assembly that was held in 2009, this event brings together a large, randomly selected sample of citizens from across the country for a day-long discussion event. While today's assembly is somewhat smaller than last year's (1,000 participants rather than 1,300), the participants' task is more challenging. Rather than just determining a set of national values, today's assembled are tasked with generating principles for the new constitution.
A sophisticated system (scroll down the page for detail) has been developed by Guðjón Már Guðjónsson and his company Agora to manage the discussion among 1,000 participants over the course of the day. Participants are grouped at 128 tables, and a trained moderator at each table facilitates the discussion. In the morning session, participants were asked to determine the core values they wanted to see enshrined in the constitution. Almost-realtime data-entry and crunching by hackers from CLARA and elsewhere revealed those values to be morality / ethics; human rights; distribution of power, responsibility and transparency; democracy; Iceland's nature, its protection and utilization; justice, welfare and equality; peace and international collaboration; and the country and its people. In the afternoon session (occurring as I write this), the assembly is discussing these identified values in more detail. The outcomes of this assembly will be provided to the Constitutional Assembly to inform their work in writing the new constitution. For English-language coverage, Alda Sigmundsdóttir is tweeting the assembly as @icelandassembly and blogging on the assembly site.
The Constitutional Assembly will be elected by a general vote on November 27th. Voters will nominate 25 of the 525(!) candidates. Up to 31 representatives will then land on the Assembly, since the final number may be adjusted to promote gender equality. The Assembly will then have 2-4 months to draft the text of the constitution.
Finally, after some consulting with constitutional lawyers, the constitution will be presented to the Parliament, which is expected to vote twice to adopt the new constitution.
At least, that is the ideal plan (Icelanders, please correct me if I've misinterpreted anything!). I suspect the actual process may turn out to be more exciting. I'm keen to see the who Iceland elects to the constitutional assembly. There are some very savvy folks like Gunnar Grímsson and Smári McCarthy who have thrown their hats in to the ring, and whose agendas are based on architecting better democratic processes (and not on protecting any particular political interests). Many of the Icelanders I met a few weeks ago were fairly optimistic about the Assembly and the people who were hoping to be involved. However, many candidates are also running on a platform of "don't change anything" -- so negotiations within the group will likely not be easy.
The formal Act on a Constitutional Assembly is available in English here (PDF).
Facebook, Wikipedia and Iceland’s upcoming constitutional review
Reykjavik graffiti
I'm in Reykjavík for a few days collecting data on several political projects. This afternoon, I stopped by the CLARA office to learn more about their work. In addition to getting some first-hand translations of fascinating projects like this (visualizations of some political mashup data), I learned a little more about the upcoming constitutional committee elections.
In November, Iceland will elect a special committee tasked with reviewing the Icelandic constitution. Rather uniquely (in Icelandic elections), citizens will cast their votes for individuals and not for parties. The threshold for getting on the ballot is low -- someone said it required 30 signatures on a petition (I'm not sure if that statement was tongue-in-cheek) -- and over a hundred candidates have thrown their hats in for one of ~30 spots on the committee. The official site for the committee was found lacking by the candidates, in that it won't make the candidate list officially available for several weeks. So the candidates are collaboratively editing a page on the Icelandic Wikipedia. This page contains a table with each candidate's name, sex, district, interest keywords, and application status. Links to the candidate's main web presence are provided when available, which contain a very high proportion of Facebook pages (perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that Iceland has an extraordinarily high Facebook penetration rate). I doubt an appropriation like this would survive long on the English Wikipedia, but it's great to see this work here.
There's nothing especially novel about any of this, of course, but it's fascinating how quickly and casually Facebook and Wikipedia were moved to the core of this national election.
“Rebooting Iceland” made the SXSW cut!
Þjóðfundur 2009 by briansuda
I'm not the only one who thinks Iceland's participatory political developments are interesting: the SXSWi panel I put together with Finnur Magnusson was selected as one of the first confirmed sessions for SXSW 2011. I'm delighted that Iceland's innovative political projects will get a stage in Austin. This is the pitch that caught the voters' and organizers' attention:
In the US, social media innovators are changing the way people work and play. In Iceland, these innovators may offer the best hope of rescuing an entire nation. Iceland emerged in the 1990s as a financial powerhouse after a thousand years on the sidelines of global history. Icelanders became one of the world’s wealthiest and happiest nations. In 2008, three of its banks collapsed, sending the national economy into a tailspin and shattering the people’s trust in government and industry. The government was quickly replaced by one promising transparency and reforms, while a protest party headed by a comedian took control of the Reykjavik city council. This new cast of politicians is not alone in their efforts to move Iceland out from under the economic cloud. Members of the country's tech and entrepreneurial sector, which saw explosive growth in the lead-up to the collapse, have emerged as leaders in grassroots efforts to set Iceland on a sustainable path. Last year a loosely-organized group calling themselves the Anthill convened a “national assembly” of 1,500 citizens. The day-long event, based on Agile methods and crowdsourcing theory, resulted in a coherent set of values, vision and ideas. Now the government is planning a similar meeting in preparation for rewriting the constitution. Inspired by open-source processes and leaning heavily on social media technologies, these citizens are rapidly prototyping new forms of democracy utilizing the web and open innovation.
Rebooting democracy in Iceland: Bibliography of post-kreppa crowdsourcing news
Eyjafjallajökull by fridgeirsson
While the Eyjafjallajökull eruption seems to have subsided, the Icelandic people continue to reckon with the aftereffects of their country's financial collapse. Although currently overshadowed by the woes of the Eurozone, the economic situation for Icelanders remains grim. While the economic crisis or kreppa is ongoing, there have been several encouraging narratives that have caught my attention and interest. The kreppa is generally understood to be a problem of opaque, corrupt politics as much as it is one of economics. The Icelandic media is eager to identify green shoots of progress, particularly those in the form of grassroots organizing, small businesses, and tech and media entrepreneurship. Many Icelanders hope that they can innovate their way out of this crisis. My interest focuses on this unusual confluence of populist demand for political reform with a surprising array of commercial and noncommercial initiatives to promote economic and political innovation.
One of the leitmotifs of kreppa blogosphere chatter is that Iceland has nowhere to go but up, thus there is nothing to be lost in sociopolitical experimentation. With a highly literate national population of just a few hundred thousand and excellent communications infrastructure, radical ideas and plans seem to move quickly from planning to implementation. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, for example, aims to legally establish Iceland as a jurisdiction that radically supports investigative journalism and free expression, and has attracted significant support. Other "experiments" seem to have lost steam as participants can quickly realign their attention and priorities. One influential institution in the area of entrepreneurial experimentation and political "crowdsourcing" has been the Ministry of Ideas (Hugmyndaráðuneytið). While I plan to write more about the Ministry and its innovation and crowdsourcing efforts in the future, I currently have a small bibliography of media reports in languages I can read. Maybe this will be useful to others.
Gehrman, A. (2009, November 19). Einmal über alles reden. Zeit Online. http://www.zeit.de/2009/48/WOS-Island?page=all
Gudjonsson, G. M. (2009, June) Ministry of Ideas: Overview of grassroot activities in Iceland (slides). http://www.slideshare.net/gudjon/ministry-of-ideas-overview-of-grassroot-projects-in-iceland-june-2009
Holmsteinn, G. (2010, April). Ministry of Ideas explained. Gunnar Holmsteinn talks. http://gunniho.com/post/486461365/ministryofideas
Iceland's government to cooperate with the anthill. (2009, November 24). Iceland Review Online. https://secure.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16567&ew_0_a_id=352443
Integrity named Iceland's most important value. (2009, November 16). Iceland Review Online. https://secure.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/search/news/Default.asp?ew_0_a_id=352029
Knight, S. (2009, November 13). In Iceland, trying to reprogram government. OhMyGov!. http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2009/11/13/in-iceland-trying-to-reprogram-government.aspx
Knight, S. (2010, June 10). Banksters, Corrupt Politicians Face Prosecution - in Iceland. truthout. http://www.truth-out.org/special-investigative-report-inspires-reformers-terrifies-powerful-iceland60279
Legaspi, A. (2010, January 11). The many ants of Iceland. Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/11/the_many_ants_of_iceland
Pfeil, M. & Roloff, L. Y. (2009, July). Alles auf anfang. brandeinsOnline. http://www.brandeins.de/archiv/magazin/bewegt-euch/artikel/alles-auf-anfang.html
Quinn, B. (2010, March 4). After banking bust, Iceland turns to free-market innovation. Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-Issues/2010/0304/After-banking-bust-Iceland-turns-to-free-market-innovation
Sigmundsdóttir, A. (2009, February 14). Ministering to the grass root. Iceland Weather Report. http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/02/ministering-to-the-grass-root.html
Sigmundsdóttir, A. (2009, November 11). Tired of waiting, Icelanders gather to create a roadmap for the future. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alda-sigmundsdottir/tired-of-waiting-icelande_b_349420.html
Sigmundsdóttir, A. (2009, November 15). A rundown of the Assembly results. Iceland Weather Report. http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/11/a-rundown-of-the-assembly-results.html