Collaborative e-democracy
Collaborative e-democracy is a democratic conception that combines key features of direct democracy, representative democracy, and e-democracy. The concept was first published at two international academic conferences in 2009.
Collaborative e-democracy refers to a political system in which governmental stakeholders and non-governmental stakeholders collaborate on the development of public laws and policies. This collaborative policymaking process is conducted on a governmental social networking site in which all citizens are members.
While directly elected government officials would conduct the vast majority of law and policy-making processes, the citizens would retain their final voting power on each issue. Additionally each citizen would be empowered to propose their own policies to the electorate and thus initiate new policy processes where applicable. Collaboratively generated policies would consider the opinion of a larger proportion of the citizenry; therefore they may be more just, more sustainable, and thus easier to implement.
Theoretical background
Collaborative e-democracy involves following theory components:- Collaborative democracy, a “political framework where electors and the elected actively collaborate to attain the best possible solution to any situation using collaborative enabling technologies to facilitate wide scale citizen participation in government”.
- Collaborative e-policymaking is a software facilitated five phase policy process in which every citizen participates directly or indirectly. The process is conducted on a governmental social networking site in which all citizens are members. Each citizen can suggest issues, rank and evaluate the suggestions of others, and vote on the laws and policies that will affect them.
- Proxy voting and liquid democracy: Direct democracy would require each citizen to vote on each policy issue each time. As this would overburden most people, the citizens in a collaborative e-democracy delegate trusted representatives to vote on their behalf on all those issues and/or domains where they lack of time, experience, or interest for direct participation. Although the proxy votes on the principals behalf, the principal retains the final voting power on each issue. Thus proxy representation combines the best features of direct democracy and representative democracy on the social networking site.
Policy process
- Suggestion & ranking phase: Each participant is encouraged to submit policy proposals for how to solve the identified problem / achieve the goal. The submissions are ranked so that the policy with the most supporters appears on top of the others.
- Evaluation phase: For each top-ranked proposal the upsides and downsides of its implementation are defined so that the collective can evaluate how they would be affected by each policy. The evaluation process is supported by independent domain experts.
- Voting phase: Based on the co-created information the collective votes for the proposal that is considered to be optimal for solving the collective problem / achieving the goal. As a result, a new law is introduced or a new government action executed.
- Revision phase: A pre-determined period after implementation the collective is addressed to determine whether the problem was solved / the goal achieved by the selected policy or not. If yes, the policy cycle concludes; if no, the process starts over with the suggestion phase until the issue is resolved.
Principles
Collaborative e-democracy is based on following core principles:- Self-government, the ideal of direct democracy, and “quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur”, the ancient maxim from the Roman law that says “that which affects all people must be approved by all people”. This principle is in sharp contrast to representative democracy where the public policymaking process is biased by corporate lobbies.
- Open source governance, a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy.
- Aggregation: One function of the social networking site is to aggregate the citizens’ opinions on issues. Based on this communality people can form ad-hoc groups to address these issues.
- Collaboration: Another function facilitates the collaboration of likeminded people on common issues within aggregated groups and/or between independent groups. Besides groups with controversial strategies / perspectives which focus on similar outcomes compete with each other.
- Collective intelligence: The CPM process harnesses the peoples’ collective intelligence, i.e. a shared group intelligence that emerges from the aggregation, collaboration, competition and decision-making of the various stakeholders. This group intelligence is utilised to identify issues and to co-create solutions that are optimal / sustainable for most people. Collective intelligence reflects a design pattern of Web 2.0.
- Collective learning & Adoption: The direct democracy component of collaborative e-democracy shifts the responsibility of policymaking from government teams to the collective of citizens. As the people are confronted with the consequences of their own decisions a collective learning process is initiated. Collaborative e-democracy is not a static construct but flexible and open to change, by quickly integrating learning experiences and by collectively adopting to new social, economical or environmental circumstances. This principle reflects ‘Perpetual Beta’, another design pattern of Web 2.0.
Benefits and limitations
- Transparency and accessibility: The CPM process would be transparent and accessible for all citizens via the internet.
- Political efficacy: Allowing citizens to participate in government processes would increase the political efficacy and counteract the democratic deficit.
- Deliberation: The governmental social networking site as main platform for political information & communication would increase the quality of deliberation between the various governmental and non-governmental stakeholders of the nation.
- Collective awareness: Large scale online participation would increase the public awareness of the collective problems, goals, or policy issues and facilitate harnessing the nation’s collective intelligence for collaboratively developing policies.
- Constitutional limits: Most democratic nations have constitutional limits to direct democracy; governments may be unwilling to relinquish such policy-making authority to the collective.
- Digital divide: People without internet access would be disadvantaged in a collaborative e-democracy. Therefore, traditional democratic procedures would be made available until the digital divide is concluded.
- Majority rule: Such as in most democratic decision processes majorities could over vote minorities. The evaluation process would however give a fair warning when a minority group would be significantly discriminated against by a certain policy.
- Naivety: Voters may lack a thorough understanding of the facts and data surrounding their options. This could lead to misplaced votes which do not represent the voters' actual will. However, the proxy voting / delegation included in the system greatly mitigates this problem. Increased education, critical thinking and reasoning skills, and usage of the internet should also help reduce the problem. Also, the CPM process involves proxies and experts to inform people upon the implications of the suggested policies before a decision is made.
Research and development
- Petrik, Klaus “Participation and e-Democracy: How to utilize Web 2.0 for policy decision-making”; the in Puebla, Mexico;
- Petrik, Klaus “Deliberation and Collaboration in the Policy Process: A Web 2.0 approach”; in Vienna, Austria.
- A third publication appears in the .