Awesome digital democracy
This graphic made me pause:
What’s missing? It seems that digital democracy has finally killed off politics: there is no mention of politics or political parties.
The diagram is from Delib, a company which produced software behind the UK Treasury’s Spending Challenge. They also sell their digital consultation software to lots of local authorities and governments.
So this white paper could just be read as marketing. However, I think it encapsulates a prevailing attitude on how government should work.
I’m not against these sort of deliberative efforts in themselves. I think, when it comes to policy implementation, getting the people affected involved is a very good idea. But the model proposed here eoncompasses far more than mere implementation.
If the new digital politics looks something like this then I have some questions. Who defines the problems government ‘faces’? That’s important because there are lots of different, and slanted, ways of describing any problem. What is the scope of this ‘platform’? Is the platform itself beyond challenge? What place does persuasion have?
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6. October 2010 at 07:36
This technocratic view of government is a worry, isn’t it? Especially the way all of us are at the top there, and once we’ve stuck our ideas in the suggestion box there’s no way into the impenetrable Kafkaesque factory/castle thing. I suppose this is there the alleged “death of ideology” gets you.
Still, it looks like they provided us with parasols and — ooh, are they mini-pizzas?