phillyharper.com

Hello.

It should come as no surprise that the election system doesn’t work.  How is it the Liberal Democrats can win 22.9% of the nations vote, and secure only 51 seats in Parliament? Whilst Labour who won just 29.2% can secure 247 seats? It only makes sense within the archaic rules and traditions of British Parliament.

We needn’t look too heavily into the detail of why it works that way, instead lets take a very broad analysis of how Parliament works. I am Phillyharper, I live in Phillyharpers town, and I have many personal beliefs and values. I vote for Jo Crotty (whose policies are as close a fit to my own beliefs as I can find) to go to Westminster on my behalf and shout at people on the other side of the room. The ruling government make up a new law and Jo Crotty then votes on that law on my behalf.

In the name of being succinct I’m skipping over things like lobbying, political donations, cash for honours, chief political whips, expense plundering, bribery, blackmail and sleaze, but if it makes it more real you can assume that throughout that process all of the above was going on.

In a nutshell we elect people to represent us in a room full of old men who sip gin and tonic and shout at each other.

Aged 24, I’m the crashing tip of a huge wave of global youth that have grown up being able to debate anything they want, with anyone they want, anywhere in the world, instantly. I’ve grown up with a technology that provides me with crowd generated, crowd edited, and crowd distributed content tailored exactly to my interests. I’ve grown up as a major player in a digital society where my views are entirely my own and form part of a valid, powerful, and totally free social sphere. I grew up in a generation that created the worlds most accurate encyclopaedia from absolutely nothing in less than ten years. I grew up in a generation that wrote operating systems, wrote books, created games, made films, developed entire new worlds and generated an entire new economy – all through collaboration.

Having made so many industries irrelevant, created so much and entirely sidestepped the mass-mind right, I look at British Politics and think “Why do I need someone to represent me? I can represent myself!”  The digital tidal wave has its eyes firmly set on Westminster and collectively thinks “you’re next”. It’s the logical conclusion to everything that has happened before today – we will consume politics and make it our own.

When Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia in 2001, the general consensus was “it will never work” – but he proved everyone wrong and the doubters are now laughing out the other side of their face. Even Nature Magazine concluded that Wikipedia was about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  In 2010, the idea of a digital collaborative government might garner a reaction familiar to Jimmy Wales, but I believe it can work, but more than that, I believe it has to. The doubters are people who don’t understand how we work.

We looked at the way parliament works from a very broad sense and we can do the same for a digital collaborative government. Rather than the detail, lets start with the building blocks needed for it to work. We would need an open source web application that let policies be generated, molded, edited, and eventually passed as law all through mass collaboration. That’s the first step, and it’s a step we’ve made dozens of times before. A story posted on reddit.com (hi reddit!) is like a policy – the community then discusses it and votes it up and down. The technology already exists, we just need to purpose it exactly to our needs. Reddit.com would be a great technology to start with, their comment and discussion system is widely regarded as one of the best on the internet.

Online communities are like much more efficient houses of parliament – decisions get made faster, debate is healthier, and everyone gets their say.

Then we’d need an open taxation system that allows the entire budget to be interacted with, moulded, shifted and voted on, to determine where money (or resources) were sent. Every single loophole, penny and waste pot would be accounted for, because rather than just Alistair Darling or (heaven forbid) George Osborne staring at it, the whole nation gets to see to the penny where their taxes went in an open source online web application. If they want to change it they’re just one click away. Tax levels are set at a level determined by mass collaboration – if we need more taxes then people suggest and vote for more, if people at the bottom are being squeezed too much they suggest less and vote for less. The system would move at lightspeed compared to two week tennis matches that go on with Parliament (again forgetting all the special interests at play). We could tax to meet our needs exactly to the penny, changing the rate daily like a stock market changes.

We build it agile – like everything else. Build a feature, put it live, test it and refine it. We do the same again and again for each new feature, so our government system grows naturally and organically as it needs to. We’d do the same with ideas and policies, using the machine we craft to generate nurture new ideas from their inception through to mass acceptance, and eventually a new arm of government is born. We could link science, education, communication, play and governance all into one.

The system shouldn’t be a prescriptive one, I’m already describing how it should work. I’m actually describing how it might work, but with your input the digital collaborative government might look entirely different. Like any great collaborative product, we don’t start with an end goal, we start with an inital idea. Where it goes from here is anyones guess, but if we work at it we’ll end up with a political system that includes everyone, quite literally built by the people, for the people.

It’s easy to get washed along with the excitement of an election and to feel as though your vote really makes a difference. Despite knowing that our political system is broken I voted Lib Dem, they seemed the best candidates for change. I’ve always liked Jiddu Krishnamurti thoughts when he said “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society“. In our case, I guess we voted to make adjustments to fit a profoundly broken system.

I’m writing this blog to suggest we fix the system by crafting a new one that includes all of us. Proportional Representation 2.0.

All great projects start with a great idea. You’ve probably got a million questions and ideas about how a digital collaborative government might work and I’d encourage you to leave those questions in a comment. If people are interested, I’ll set up a wiki, a chipin, and everything else we’d need to get this going. Don’t let negative comments or thoughts deter your ideas. If you think it could work, we can make it work.

We don’t need crooks, liars and thieves. We can do this ourselves.