The virtual parliament : The Internet revolution reaches politics

The virtual parliament : The Internet revolution reaches politics

Internet's influence on the political process continues to gain ground, to which such phenomena as the growing number of Wiki pages addressing political issues, and more recently the U.S. political debates being viewed via YouTube® attest. Socracy believes this movement will continue to gain momentum, and eventually the Internet will become an integral part of the process used to create, deploy and operate political programs:

Any citizen can and should be able to contribute to the generation of new ideas.

• Today, political proposals are generated within political parties, or by think tanks. In both cases, the members of these organizations share a passion for politics and devote tremendous time to this activity. Unfortunately, there exist many citizens who would like to participate in the process, but whose free time is limited. There are also those citizens who wish to contribute only to topics of particular interest to them or in areas in which they have expertise. By not leveraging the contribution of "the ordinary citizen", we run the risk of never hearing opinions and ideas from people who are often close to the everyday reality of things, who possess valuable insight, or who may be genuine topic experts.
• Web 2.0 collaborative tools provide a quick and easy means to navigate information. The same tools allow anyone to contribute, with minimum effort, to topics in their personal areas of interest, and to receive immediate feedback from the community. With a bit of organization, we see the potential to leverage the know-how and energy of all citizens to help resolve key challenges of our time.

The Internet will enable us to gain a greater knowledge and deeper understanding of each other's opinions.

• The games of politics are such that more time is spent on disparaging and distorting the views of others than seeking true dialogue. By not having at their disposal an up-to-date database of key political proposals from all sides, the media often relay and amplify the views of each camp without really discussing them in depth.
• An open and unrestricted freedom of expression has become one of the fundamental rights of the Internet user. Today it is possible to find, on any topic, some form of feedback from different stakeholders. Unfortunately, the feedback is not always in a format that can be used efficiently by a journalist or a politician, because the information is too fragmented and it is unknown what percentage of the population shares the same view. Web 2.0 collaborative tools can overcome these problems by centralizing information, performing a sort by subject, promoting constructive comments and providing assessment tools, eliminating spam and distinguishing facts from opinions.
  Such a confrontation of opinions, when managed, can enrich the dialogue instead of fuelling the controversy. The authors of new ideas can rapidly identify the areas of agreement and disagreement, and are then free to guide their thinking in the direction of a greater consensus.
• By collecting and sorting this information, a Web 2.0 collaborative tool should also allow the major media outlets to have a quasi-exhaustive overview of all proposals from major political families (even informal e.g. a virtual party existing only on the Internet), and assess how representative they are of the population. This should help to enrich and make more thorough all political commentaries.