In the modern era, how can a troubled nation that’s seeking to overhaul its government reboot its constitution in a way that involves the input of as many citizens as possible? Why, propose to draft the constitution online, and crowd-source the document from your constituents! That’s precisely what Iceland is doing — after weathering a couple nasty natural disasters and a devastating banking crisis, the small island nation is rebuilding its constitution with input from citizens on social media sites.The Guardian reports:In creating the new document, the council has been posting draft clauses on its website every week since the project launched in April. The public can comment underneath or join a discussion on the council’s Facebook page. The council also has a Twitter account, a YouTube page where interviews with its members are regularly posted, and a Flickr account containing pictures of the 25 members at work, all intended to maximise interaction with citizens.Meetings of the council are open to the public and streamed live on to the website and Facebook page. The latter has more than 1,300 likes in a country of 320,000 people. The crowdsourcing follows a national forum last year where 950 randomly selected people spent a day discussing the constitution. If the committee has its way the draft bill, due to be ready at the end of July, will be put to a referendum without any changes imposed by parliament – so it will genuinely be a document by the people, for the people.Public officials say they’ve been pleasantly surprised by the degree and quality of the interaction the project has ushered in — and indeed, it marks an intriguing new step in the evolution of technologically-enhanced democracy. Social media often gets too much credit in the press for merely garnishing more substantive processes. But here, seeing how the fawned-over social media element is being paired with other, genuinely experimental ideas for enhancing democracy (the random round-up of citizens meeting with policymakers is a great idea), Iceland is giving us a glimpse of how technology can help expand the horizons of democracy.It’s the real deal: the citizens in Iceland are actually helping to create the framework by which their society will operate, and social media has helped make the process efficient and easily understood by all. Crowd-sourced, online constitution construction is the future indeed.Follow the Utopianist on Twitter and Facebook.
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