Democracy again - let’s do this!
Ok.. I’ve been as good as dead in the last few months - if you measure my hearbeat by my blog activity. But my brain is going bananas with, you guessed it, web-democracy.
So here’s the deal: after years of thinking about this topic I yesterday stumbled upon O’Reilly’s strong efforts on this topic, mostly concentrated on Septembers Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit, which - if I get the money for it - I will really love to attend. And I saw a bunch of institutions and platforms going in this direction - mainly in the US.
Some of you heard about my ideas during this Spring’s BarCamp in Coimbra, Portugal, and having regional elections in Portugal at the end of this year, but not only because of that, I think the time has come to put my money (my time, that is) where my mouth is.
So, dear summer: you won’t be about holidays, but about trying as hard as I can to bring to life this weird project I just can’t get out of my head. And heck, I’ll even give it a try on Ruby on Rails, which I started to learn last week (so far so good, ‘though it’s a huge jump coming from ASP 3.0).
It’ll be something that promotes a closer relation between citizens and deciders. That focuses on democratic decisions, and not about its’ discussion (for which we have tons of other platforms). That promotes transparency and accountability, and rewards intelligence and seriousness. And that is not focused on politics, but rather on decisions. But then again, “Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.” (wikipedia of course), so I guess yeah - it’s about true politics.
And if it does just that, I’ll live happy for another year. Will keep you posted on this, wish me luck!
