Green Party of Canada Living Platform
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The Green Party of Canada Living Platform is a wiki used to employ participatory democracy in the writing of this political party's electoral platform.
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[edit] Significance
It was notable for being the very first attempt to create a binding political platform entirely on the Internet. Following the election in June 2004, the party's Shadow Cabinet expected to have the first such platform ready in time for the federal election, using a wiki to enable members to collaboratively write the platform. While Green Party leader Jim Harris had been a vocal supporter of the Living Platform Project (see www.backbonemag.com/php_site/home.php?m_column_id=php_news/wmview.php?ArtID=1081), there continues to be a controversy over whether the project was suppressed by the GPC's current management team in favour of more traditional approaches to platform development.
[edit] Initiation
The Living Platform project was initiated in November of 2003. Party activist Michael Pilling, who had worked closely with Jim Harris in the Ontario Green Party and in subsequent non-party business activities, developed a proposal to create a participatory platform process using a wiki as the main collaborative tool. The plan would include diverse party members, from across a very large country, with a minimum of expense, and together they would draft a platform on participatory principles. It was well received by the Federal Council.
Starting in December 2003, Pilling was hired (initially on a part time basis) to coordinate the project. The result was the 2004 "Someday is Now" platform, in which the planks were drafted by member/volunteers via a wiki and then edited for continuity and length by GPC staff. "Someday is Now" was well received by party members and voters - unscientific polls from the party's website recorded over half of the planks in that platform were approved of by over 80% of those who chose to vote. The project was profiled in a Globe and Mail article from which the name "Living Platform" originated. Following the election of a minority government, the Living Platform's Process committee, led by Pilling, planned out and began to implement a more sophisticated process that further increased participation in the project, and improved upon the transparency and democratic continuity.
Though it is still visible to the public, the project effectively ended February 9, 2005. In the midst of an internal governance crisis (see below), a harshly worded memo was written by party financier Wayne Crookes a day earlier in which he claimed that "dysfunctional" elements of the party were "driving out the talented". Pilling was fired, Living Platform went down for days and returned with every single web address changed. Its traffic fell from about a dozen edits per day to only about one or two per month as most Greens stopped participating in protest, and because their input would no longer be officially considered input to the platform. In a document sent to the Canadian Parliament outlining Crookes' influence on the party, advocating barring creditors from operational roles, Dan King was quoted as saying that he had "never seen so much value destroyed by a single decision" as the decision to shut down Living Platform.
[edit] Technology
The basic technology of the platform is tikiwiki but mailing list, teleconference and chat media are also used.
[edit] Use in outreach and lobbying
Though the Green Party of Canada received only 4.3% of the popular vote in the Canadian federal election, 2004 and is not in the Canadian House of Commons due to Canada's "first past the post" voting system, it is an active lobbyist and has achieved some victories by working through members of other parties - see Canada Well-Being Measurement Act. This is an admirable step into the federal stage for the Canadian Greens.
Until current Green Party Media Team leader Dermod Travis ordered otherwise in February 2005, the Living Platform was open to non-members of the party as well as to non-citizens and even non-residents of Canada as anonymous individuals who could add comments. Currently, only those who are registered with the project can edit the actual wiki pages, or make comments. Some pages are restricted to allow only members, advisors or specific committees within the party to view them.
There were also criticisms of its systemic bias, but also proposals to correct that bias via a "mark up and mail back" and "rank a plank live" system - and of course, live meetings have their own biases, too. The Living Platform had not been voted upon by the membership at a General Meeting.
[edit] Feedback-oriented Terms of Use
The Terms of Use combine the Creative Commons CC-by and CC-by-nc-sa open content Creative Commons Licenses in a way that encourages maximum sharing of policy papers and feedback, potentially among many players in the noncommercial sector. Contributions by any individual may be copied anywhere as long as attribution is preserved, but commercial use of any combination of works by multiple parties is reserved to the Party. However, any noncommercial purpose - such as other parties' debates or NGO position discussions or academic research - may freely redistribute all the content.
Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and Common Content, and a notable critic of monopolies on information, has pronounced the terms of use as "cool". CC's own wiki debates on terms of use have similarly focused on this distinction between what a participant commits to the group and what the group commits to the public, the latter being Share Alike to ensure that the group creates a shared resource that is continuously available to its non-members, even if some rights in that use are reserved to the group.
[edit] 2005 - The Winter of the Living Platform's Discontent
By January, 2005, the Living Platform was being used by some members to debate political party governance. This was part of the mandate of the democracy and governance committee and also relevant to the GPC's own policy of behaving according to the policies that it advocates for government. Some argued that this use went beyond the original purpose of the wiki, but many including party leaders and Issue Advocates argued that it was inevitable and necessary. The strongest critics of the Living Platform were the executive committee called the Election Readiness and Campaign Team (ERCT), whose members were selected at the discretion of the leadership, and whose de facto Chair, Wayne Crookes, is one of the GPC's major creditors.
The governance uses of the Living Platform included the use of the platform by deputy leader Tom Manley to debate party governance, its use by GPC Council member Sharolyn Vettese to debate a Code of Conduct for that Council, its use by the party's office manager to detail staff priorities to the members, by a women's caucus to build their agenda, and its use by members using it to discuss and develop alternative directions for the party (some of which were critical of the existing leadership).
Some pages were openly critical and satirical about the party and about party figures; these were soon removed by the administrators (as per the sites "terms of use"). Some documents which the ERCT had wished to remain secret were posted. Furthermore, many of the pages that were critical of the leader and ERCT were open to the public to view.
The Problem of the appearance of these pages was discussed at a meeting of the lving platform's Process Committee in January 2005, and it was decided by that committee that controversial pages would be tolerated until another wiki, as proposed by Party Fundraising Chair Kate Holloway was made available to integrate all political party governance in a similar framework. Some users of the Living Platform considered the adoption of the technology for governance beneficial - the Green Party was practicing the transparency it advocated.
This variation of Living Platform dubbed the Living Agenda. This approach was also approved by the party's IT department and media chief Dermod Travis, but has never been impliemnted as of 2006. It could have been the Party's venue for dealing with internal governance questions as raised by membership, and bringing maximum expertise to bear on decisions presently monopolized by the ERCT.
In January 2005, a budget was prepared by Dermod Travis which reduced funding for the living platform project and IT department, while increasing funding for (his own) media department. Communications Chair Dermod Travis, Pilling's boss, presented to the process committee, an alternative plan to the Living Platform, called Project Fig Leaf, under which a media team staff person of Travis's choosing would write the platform in place of the volunteers, in case of a snap 2005 election. The motion, prepared by Travis and put forward by Tom Manley, found no seconder.
Meanwhile, opponents of consensus decision making such as Bill Hulet spoke in favour of the closure of the Living Platform, arguing that "it is clearly not in the interest of the Green Party of Canada to use its scarce resources to advertise inflammatory comments about its duly elected leadership."
Others questioned the need for restrictions on freedom of speech in the Green Party's forums.
In late January, party chair Bruce Abel blocked any executive interference in the Living Platform, and ordered the webmaster to keep it running and intact with all comments remaining on the record. This was meant to prevent hearsay, rumour, and CC-by violations from occurring. The process committee of the Living Platform met again in early February and voted to make some sensitive pages inaccessible except by request. Most of the pages would remain available so as not to interrupt the mission-critical work of the Shadow Cabinet, those working on the ERCT, and a new GPC Council Code of Conduct. All of this work was wholly dependent on the Living Platform.
On February 8, 2005, Travis suddenly ordered Pilling to delete all pages that suggested any policy or governing direction different than that advocated by the ERCT itself. This seemed to most members to be directly triggered by Crookes' demands, though Crookes had ceased to head the ERCT after the election. The facts are:
- On February 9, 2005, the Living Platform was abruptly shut down temporarily, for reasons which were never made clear by the ERCT.
- Also one day before the shutdown on February 9th, members of the Federal Council (the party's top decision making body) attempted to assert is power to fire usurpers on the ERCT and protect "whistleblowers," such as Head of Platform and Research Michael Pilling. In an apparent reversal of his own recent position, the Chair, Bruce Abel, ruled the motion "out of order."
- On the same day, Abel (in an email titled "A line in the sand") and defacto ERCT chair Wayne Crookes sent emails to top level party officers, insisting that the party was sliding into anarchy and that immediate deference to the ERCT's authority was required.
As the ERTC (a committee of Council) was composed of sitting Councillors, staff members, creditors and volunteers, the reporting relationships were never clear, and were never clarified. This lack of transparency and void of accountability resulted in the controversial firing of one Party employee and the securing of the job of another, who (as an ERCT member) sat on the very committee he reported to.
[edit] Firing the Head of Platform, GPC management withdraws its support.
The Living platform was shut down for approximately 48 hours. Volunteers who were working on the project expressed shock and frustration over this act, and many subsequently left the project. Since January 2005, there has been a sharp decline in activity on the site, a reversal from the prior months. When reposted, observers noted that the only content that immediately deleted were paged critical of the Media Team and Dermod Travis, with the most controversial pages about Harris and party chair Bruce Abel still as thew were before the interruption. No definitive explanation was ever given to members or participants, apart from a vague statement about administrative deficiencies.
The Living Platform creator and project lead, Michael Pilling, was fired the same day that the platform was taken down. Pilling had been an effective employee for the GPC, successfully producing a strong and popular platform for 2004 and leading the development of the next one, a project of much greater scope which was beginning to bear fruit. A month previous to his dismissal, he had been personally thanked for his work by the Shadow Cabinet, which leads policy development in the GPC. (The Shadow Cabinet also requested Council refrain from dismissing whistleblowers.)
No reasons for Pilling's firing were ever put forward by the ERCT, even to Pilling. Allusions were made by party chair Bruce Abel that staff had been negligent but never referred directly to Pilling, nor presented any credible evidence. Pilling claimed he received no direct orders to edit or remove material from the ERTC until Feb. 8th and at that point he followed them, adding that the logs automatically maintained by the software could be easily used to verify performance.
Following the temporary shutdown of the Living Platform, Travis withdrew all staff support from the Living Platform, leaving volunteers struggling to pick up the burden of managing the project. In a February 2005 meeting, the "emergence of a new and improved Shadow Cabinet" was defined as one of the LP's most important goals. Operation Fig Leaf went ahead despite the objections of volunteers, with increased funding.
[edit] Remainder
Summer of 2005 saw the resignations of many prominent GPC volunteers, including much of the Shadow Cabinet, several Councillors, and numerous candidates and EDA presidents. These continued well into December, when the election call for January 23, 2006 drew increased activity and interest in the GPC. The 2006 platform was produced in an ordinary word document, by media staff person. As of January 2006, the living process appears to have been abandoned, at least for the time being.
