Open Source Democracy?
October 3, 2007 by Tim Hollo
Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo kindly gave me space for this guest post today to talk about GreensBlog.
The post is pasted below, too, and I’d love to hear from people about what you’d like to see from GreensBlog.
“The recent birth of GreensBlog has already been noted by a couple of LP regulars, and now Mark has very kindly given me the space to, in a sense, launch the new blog here. Since it was LP that opened my eyes to the potential of pollieblogging, this is a tremendously exciting opportunity. Thanks, Mark!
GreensBlog, the official group blog of the four Australian Greens Senators and their staff, is born of the natural match between web communication and the Greens’ fundamental principle of grassroots, participatory democracy. Blogging is the ideal medium for the Greens. As the only party currently allowing critical comments on our YouTube videos, for example, (although we do delete outright abuse and irrelevant attacks), we aim to see debates as lively on the blog as we have in our council meetings! Other than Andrew Bartlett’s admirable personal role model, none of the other parties are willing to open themselves up in this fashion.
GreensBlog also, frankly, comes from a growing frustration with the mainstream media’s failure to seriously grapple with and analyse the issues we campaign on. The image of the Greens as media tarts with superficial, tele-friendly messages could not be further from the truth. In reality, the 5 second grab is terribly unfair to us – more often than not, we come out looking like we’re always saying “stop”, when in fact we’re saying “let’s think about this differently”, putting forward a carefully reasoned position that may only make sense when properly explained in context. The old parties’ positions are steeped in the existing culture and framing, so short grabs are enough for them to get their message across. We want to create a paradigm shift. It’s hard to get that across in 5 seconds…
Now, as the mainstream media becomes more superficial, web 2.0 begins to offer greater opportunities for in depth discussion and analysis. We’d love to see GreensBlog become a vibrant hub for discussion of Greens-related issues, what’s been going on in Parliament and our constituencies, and how the Greens might address issues of the day.
But our ultimate, and most exciting aim is to go beyond discussion, way beyond message dissemination, and use the blog to develop something new: open source democracy. We want ideas – suggestions for parliamentary motions, for amendments to bills. We want to post policies in development so that the hivemind can help us develop them. If, as we believe is possible, we achieve balance of power in the Senate after this election, GreensBlog as envisaged could have a real impact on the choices Australia’s Parliament makes in the coming years.
For this to become a reality, of course, we need a critical mass. So far, the comments we’re getting tend to be from appreciative members, grateful for the information about what we’re doing and the space to comment. If GreensBlog is to grow to the point where we can develop open source democracy, we need much more than that.
Please, everyone, come and look around GreensBlog, check out the posts that are there already, and help trigger some discussions in your inimitable LP style! If you want to get more involved, please consider joining the Facebook group to suggest topics for posts and make constructive criticism. We’re also calling out for techie people to offer help developing widgets, screensavers and anything else that can help build GreensBlog’s profile.
Thanks to the LP collective for your support. Onward to open source democracy!
I likely wouldn’t have heard about this blog were it not for the LP guest post, for a little while at least, so thanks for that.
I think your sentiments regarding a more sophisticated model of online journalism/discussion/democracy are very interesting. I’ve lately thought of blogging as taking up the slack with respect to sloppy journalism, though of course there is a lot of nonsense out there and everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.
I’ve often described blogging as ‘grassroots journalism’, partly because people who write about highly specialised topics can collectively aggregate all the coverage they see regarding their highly erudite topic and discuss it. There’s a healthy, if not small, community of Australianist linguist bloggers (i.e., linguists working on Australian languages) and it has proven to be an excellent medium of propagating information that would have otherwise gone under the radar. Of course, mailing lists and so on also do this, but the public nature of blogging also means it’s accessible to anyone who’s interested; it’s open-source.
I look forward to reading more!
GreensBlog is a welcome new initiative, and it’s good to see graceful acknowledgment of Andrew Bartlett’s efforts in this area as well.
I think your idea of using the blog not only to gain feedback, but also to invite policy suggestions and debate, is a very strong one. At this early stage, I think it might be useful to expand on this idea, comparing it with, and distinguishing it from, the current Government’s proposal to use blogs as an consultative tool.
Of course we have very good reasons to be sceptical of any Government claim to better consultation, but a critique of the discussion paper here might well highlight the strengths of your approach. The paper can be found at:
http://www.agimo.gov.au/services/consultation_blog
Good luck with GreensBlog!
Jangari, thanks for the cross-link from your blog, and I look forward to your ongoing comments.
Darren, at first glance that discussion paper looks really interesting. I’ll read it properly soon and post some comments.
Congratulations on this little flowering of grass roots Green democracy, just before the election, Tim.
After the election, are you able to guarantee that this site, will remain, so that old/ new Green senators will be available, online, for the kind of discussion that Andrew Bartlett has provided for quite some time?
That is absolutely the intention, Joe2. This is a long term plan!