History
The "Imagine Halifax" project was designed to create a citizens' forum for elections in Halifax, Nova Scotia in fall 2004. Founded by the widow of Tooker Gomberg, a notable advocate of combining direct action with open politics methods, IH brought a few dozen activists together to compile a platform (using live meetings and email and seedwiki followup). When it became clear that candidates could not all endorse all elements of the platform, it was then turned into questions for candidates in the election. The best ideas from candidates were combined with the best from activists – the final scores reflected a combination of convergence and originality. In contrast to most such questionnaires, it was easier for candidates to excel by contributing original thought than by simply agreeing. One high scorer, Andrew Younger, had not been involved with the project originally but was elected and appeared on TV with project leader Martin Willison. The project had not only changed its original goal from a partisan platform to a citizen questionnaire, but it had recruited a previously uninvolved candidate to its cause during the election. A key output of this effort was a glossary of about 100 keywords relevant to municipal laws.
The 2004–05 Green Party of Canada Living Platform was a much more planned and designed effort at open politics. As it prepared itself for an electoral breakthrough in the 2004 federal election, the Green Party of Canada began to compile citizen, member and expert opinions in preparation of its platform. During the election, it gathered input even from Internet trolls including supporters of other parties, with no major problems: anonymity was respected and comments remained intact if they were within the terms of use at all. Despite, or perhaps because of, its early success, it was derailed by Jim Harris, the party's leader, when he discovered that it was a threat to his status as a party boss. The Living Platform split off as another service entirely out of GPC control and eventually evolved into OpenPolitics.ca and a service to promote wiki usage among citizens and political groups.
The Liberal Party of Canada also attempted a deep policy renewal effort in conjunction with its leadership race in 2006. While candidates in that race, notably Carolyn Bennett, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, all made efforts to facilitate web-threaded policy-driven conversations between supporters, all failed to create lateral relationships and thus also failed to contribute much to the policy renewal effort.
Numerous very different projects related to open-source governance collaborate under the umbrella of the Metagovernment project; Metagovernment uses the term "collaborative governance", most of which are building platforms of open-source governance.
- Aktivdemokrati is a Direct democratic party, running for the parliament of Sweden Democracylab.us is a Portland Oregon nonprofit (501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, partnered with the Oregon 150 Project, building an online public think tank in which the votes of users determines policy, seeking to connect the values people hold to their positions on issues and the policies they advocate. Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels. The White House 2 was a project which crowdsourced the U.S. agenda, "imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people on the internet." Wikicracy has developed a Mediawiki-based platform using most of Open politics criteria These grassroots efforts have been matched by government initiatives that seek similar goals. A more extensive list of these and similar organizations is available externally.
Future Melbourne is a wiki-based collaborative environment for developing Melbourne's 10 year plan. During public consultation periods, it enables the public to edit the plan with the same editing rights as city personnel and councilors.
The New Zealand Police Act Review was a wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.
Read more about this topic: Open-source Governance
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“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
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—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
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