Open politics

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The open politics theory combines aspects of the free software and open content movements with multilateral assumptions of postmoderism. It promotes decision making methods claimed to be a more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues. The cost for these advantages is reliance on social software, with accompanying systemic biases that open politics advocates seek to overcome in various ways.

While it can be confused with the vaguely defined idea of "open source politics", open politics is not so much a movement as a theory based on participatory democracy and deliberative democracy, informed by e-democracy and netroots experiments, applying argumentation framework for issue-based argument as they evolved in academic and military use through the 1980s to present. Some variants of it draw on the theory of scientific method and market methods, including prediction markets and anticipatory democracy, even on wiki troll culture.

Online services that include or included some elements of open politics include makethecase.net, openpolitics.ca, dkosopedia.com, sourcewatch.org, anarchopedia.org, debatepoint.com, wikocracy.org, yoism.org, longnow.org, Imagine Halifax and Green Party of Canada Living Platform. wikinfo.org and Wikipedia are also sometimes cited as examples, though opinions vary widely.

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[edit] Goals

Rather than enabling advocates or candidates, open politics aims to enable the casual user, critic, journalist, voter to examine and dissect positions taken by advocates and candidates. It may be more related to discovery of information about political events, and perhaps most applicable to online journalism:

If parties or the candidates use open politics methods, it is to expose their positions in advance and by so doing gain the advantage of encountering objections to them early, and formulating a response. It exploits mass peer review in ways that may resemble open source software, open content and reality game shows.

[edit] Criteria

Open politics can be reduced to a list of criteria:

  • anyone can participate, including anonymously
  • all participants are equals, and resolve disputes via equal power relationships
  • all actions are transparent, and no one has more power to review them than anyone else
  • all contributions are recorded and preserved, and these records cannot be altered
  • all deliberation is structured, or can be put in structured form to resolve disputes
  • all content is re/organized and refactored by participants
  • partisan behavior is limited by the format, rules set by factions themselves, and laws extant in the society or community which will be affected by the political decision
  • control of the forum can, at least in theory, pass to the most trusted users, not the ones who started the forum

Some experts apply strict criteria of democracy, rootedness, legality, equality of access, and even ecological integrity, so as to ensure that there are absolutely no rights lost in moving polity into an online arena. In other words, they wish to expand participation to mobile and remote persons, including disadvantaged ones, and undo some of the inequities inherent in using electronic media. Including the danger of disenfranchising local voices.

[edit] Underlying preferences and ideals

Underlying these criteria in turn are ideals and preferences that resemble those of other democratic political movements:

  • decentralization of authority: giving the widest and most potent franchise to citizens is thought to minimize what economists call the principal-agent problem, or the tendency for managers to abuse authority.
  • centralization of information: the use of information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process.
  • equality of opportunity: anyone can participate in deliberation, with the expectation that people themselves select to participate on issues in which they have the greatest stake, expertise or both. Open politics treats the expert and the citizen as equals, implying that the experts are obliged to convince the citizens directly, rather than using representatives as intermediaries/brokers of policy. This use of peer review is emphasized as the best method to determine what is true or good (with the understanding that this should change over time).
  • encouraging diversity of thought, such that multiple positions and arguments are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.

Some theorists describe the ideals as similar to libertarian and green politics with the emphasis on peer review and scientific method within political science. However, the idea that political science could apply falsificationism is controversial, and despite an invitation to contradict and counter arguments, the rigorous application of scientific method is not part of every open politics service.

[edit] Implementation

These criteria are generally satisfied by a wiki or some other collaborative workspace in which multiple points of view are conveyed and reviewable in "living documents" that reflect, on an ongoing basis, what the community thinks.

They are not generally satisfied by any type of blog or other threaded media, which have editorial problems that prevent equal power relationships from operating.

Some theorists believe open politics ideals require wiki troll culture to be fully implemented - a group of persons actively conspiring to reject all authority involved.

[edit] History

Open politics theory grew from earlier work in online deliberation and deliberative democracy, which in turn drew on research in issue-based argument and early hypertext and Computer Supported Cooperative Work research of the early 1980s.

The 2003–04 effort to build some support behind Democratic Party dark horse Howard Dean is widely considered to be the first serious attempt at open politics - and not coincidentally the origin of the term netroots as well. It was largely an emergent, unplanned effort. In fact, meetup.com simply applied its ordinary stupid algorithm to a number of members who had listed "Howard Dean" (a mere text string to that algorithm) in their list of interests. It obediently buzz-clicked out a scheduled time for a live "meetup", and open politics history began, with no intelligence being directly involved at all (which some find ironic, and others, fitting).

However, users of blog technology associated with Dean hijacked the open politics element, created Deanspace, which later grew into civicspace. By this point the effort had abandoned the equal power assumptions inherent in its origins with meetup.

The Imagine Halifax project was another relatively pure example of open politics in that it was temporary and designed only to create a citizens' forum for elections in Halifax, Nova Scotia in fall 2004. Founded by the widow of the late Tooker Gomberg, a notable advocate of combining direct action with open politics methods, IH brought a few dozen activists together to compile a platform (using live meetings and email and seedwiki followup). When it became clear that candidates could not all endorse all elements of the platform, it was then turned into questions for candidates in the election. The best ideas from candidates were combined with the best from activists - the final scores reflected a combination of convergence and originality. In contrast to most such questionnaires, it was easier for candidates to excel by contributing original thought than by simply agreeing. One high scorer, Andrew Younger, had not been involved with the project originally but was elected and appeared on TV with project leader Martin Willison. The project had not only changed its original goal from a partisan platform to a citizen questionnaire, but it had recruited a previously uninvolved candidate to its cause during the election. A key output of this effort was a glossary of about 100 keywords relevant to municipal laws.

The 2004–05 Green Party of Canada Living Platform was a much more planned and designed effort at open politics. As it prepared itself for an electoral breakthrough in the 2004 federal election, the Green Party of Canada began to compile citizen, member and expert opinions in preparation of its platform. During the election, it gathered input even from Internet trolls including supporters of other parties, with no major problems: anonymity was respected and comments remained intact if they were within the terms of use at all. Despite, or perhaps because of, its early success, it was derailed by Jim Harris (politician), the party's leader, when he discovered that it was a threat to his status as a party boss. The Living Platform split off as another service entirely out of GPC control and eventually evolved into openpolitics.ca and a service to promote wiki usage among citizens and political groups.

Today it is largely at openpolitics.ca that the theory of open politics is debated. Their definition of the term itself is "a methodology to achieve good government" but of course any political party claims to have such a method or system. However, the history of open politics has been driven more by reactions and spontaneous events than by any explicit experimental or theoretical program.

As if to make that true once again, in 2006 Green Party of Canada financier Wayne Crookes sued several people in an attempt to compel silence about his own role in the GPC. As in the Dean case with meetup and the ImagineHalifax case with the shift of goal and recruitment of new candidates, open politics methods created their own advocates: Michael Geist and other Canadian bloggers sued in SLAPP efforts combined forces to raise funds to continue the effort to expose political activities via open politics methods.

[edit] Successes

Today the dkosopedia.com project to document all Guantanamo Bay detainees is probably the most notable and worthy open politics project. It is supported by the ACLU and former President of the United States Jimmy Carter and is associated with the DailyKos bloggers' project.

The openpolitics.ca service documents issues of concern to Canadians and has the most explicit summary of open politics theory, though it is not as sophisticated as the dkosopedia in relating it to deep framing and has less critical mass than dkosopedia.

Due to its pioneering of adversarial process for dispute resolution regarding articles, and its vast content of interest in political matters, Wikipedia can be considered an open politics project. However, advocates of the Wikipedia community often like to deny that any factions or bona fide political disputes actually exist about its content. That is, they do not acknowledge that multiple views may simply be irreconcilable within a single presentation of the issue not open to everyone to edit.

The Sourcewatch project also reasonably qualifies as open politics.

Other projects that experiment with innovative forms of debate and prediction can be reasonably thought of as open politics experiments, but not as full fledged successes.

[edit] Failures

The Green Party of Canada Living Platform was a notable but failed open politics project, one in which a political party in Canada attempted to author its actual platform for an election using the methods of open politics. The effort was successful in exchanging answers to citizen questions, but the platform that it was authoring was rejected by party financier Wayne Crookes and leader Jim Harris at the behest of the party's press handlers and staff. As of September 2006 the party was unable either to shut it down or reactivate it.

Israel: The Democratic Choice Party attempted but failed to implement a version of an open politics agenda. In September 2005 party leader, M.K. Dr. Roman Bronfman and his team began using blog and podcast facilities, followed with a personal diary (blog and podcast) by the internet campaign facilitator, then a wiki. The party ended its experiment with open politics and implemented the civicspace social software instead - not a viable platform for open politics work, because of its lack of equal power assumption, though it is sometimes claimed that civicspace is working towards many of the same ideals.

The Liberal Party of Canada also attempted a deep policy renewal effort in conjunction with its leadership race in 2006. While candidates in that race, notably Carolyn Bennett, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, all made efforts to facilitate web-threaded policy-driven conversations between supporters, all failed to create lateral relationships and thus also failed to contribute much to the policy renewal effort. The technologies used were incompatible with each other and with the technologies used by the party itself in its policy work. In the end, all positions were advanced by uneditable plain old PDF files released after the consultations were done. It was unclear if the renewal effort would continue after the leadership convention.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading

  • Berry, D M.& Moss, Giles (2006). Free and Open-Source Software: Opening and Democratising e-Government's Black Box. Information Polity. Volume 11. (1). pp 21-34.
  • Jane B. Singer (2003) "Who Are These Guys? The Online Challenge to the Notion of Journalistic Professionalism" by Jane B. Singer. Journalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, 139-163 (Sage: 2003)
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