I first got excited by the potential of blogging and social media through a presentation by Lee Bryant a few years back. Lee manages to combine highly innovative social software development with Livio Hughes and colleagues at Headshift, with a continuing interest in international relations and the empowering potential of the Internet. He worked with humanitarian organisations in Bosnia during the conflict there - so I was particularly interested to hear what his reaction would be to Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne's ideas on "open source politics" at the RSA the other day.
As you can see here, Lee was enthusiastic about ideas for information access, and a move from a government-centric to a citizen-centric model that might combat people's scepticism about participation initiatives. He stressed the importance of open access to data, opening the way for e-democracy projects like those developed by mySociety, and open api that enables joining up of software applications.
Lee made the distinction between consultation - join in your system - and participation - join in a shared system. This meant that the ownership of political process and deliberation should sit outside Westminster, and political parties.
Lee also argued for more localised social networks to complement the global networks like myspace. These could contribute to genuinely deliberative democracy. At this point Lee threw in the example of the Swiss cantons, and the bottom-up jamahiriya decision-making in Libya. I think he particularly enjoyed tossing that one in.
He sounded a note of caution about the difficulties of managing online discussion, citing the way that the Guardian's Comment is Free online articles attract less than sophisticated comments.
Lee rounded-off his remarks with a heartfelt endorsement of possible changes in Government procurement of technology projects - advocated by George Osborne - under which currently a relatively small group of large companies manage to get the contracts. "Milking them for all they are worth" was the phrase I heard.
Apologies for the quality of the video - it was a bit of an experiment to see what I could capture from the second row with with my new toy, a tiny Sanyo Xactia. It has the facility to connect an external microphone, which I should try next time.
Technorati Tags: open source, snnonprofit, socialmedia
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