Nicolas Holzapfel, Co-Founder of YooMoot, discusses direct democracy without slaves and the messy conversations that get in the way…

The Internet has made everything participatory. We read books, we listen to the radio, we watch TV but we use the Internet. These days, newspapers are shamed if they don’t allow comments on their online articles and, in this age of Twitter, we’re not even sure there even exists a special class of ‘journalists’ any more.

Unsurprisingly then, the Internet has helped revive the old dream of participatory democracy, where everybody plays an active role in government, instead of just writing ‘X’ every four or five years (assuming they don’t get locked out of the polling booths). The Greeks had it three millenia ago, why can’t we?

Well, quite a few reasons actually. Athenian citizens had slaves and wives to do the boring work and free up plenty of time for dedicated politicking. Give modern citizens real power via referenda, as has been tried in some US states, and they tend to vote for more schools, hospitals and prisons, and less taxation. But there is at least a strong argument for providing more effective channels for citizens to raise their concerns and be given some real power. Why has progress in this area been so limited?

The answer becomes quite clear from a quick glance at the few tentative steps that have been taken in that direction. Just before he was inaugurated as president, Barack Obama’s team created an online forum on which the American public were invited to comment on his policies. On one level it was an enormous success, with thousands of people commenting in a matter of days. But this very success only served to illuminate the major pitfall on the road to the digital democracy: thousands of people commenting amounts to an enormous mass of undifferentiated text which only the most dedicated researcher can be bothered to sift through. It wasn’t anything like a coherent debate. It was just lots of people airing their particular grievances and a few short-lived one-on-one debates which petered out and then reoccurred with different participants who hadn’t noticed the same debate 50 comments earlier. It’s what happens on all popular Internet forums: overwhelming mess and endless repetition. The Internet has allowed huge numbers of people to come together at the same time, but we haven’t learnt how to actually talk to one another on that scale. We can’t have any kind of mass-participation in government unless we solve that problem.

Fortunately, it is a problem which, I believe, can be solved. The Internet is still new and we need time to evolve new tools and new ways of thinking which are fully adapted to the brave new world of mass-participation the Web has created. Then we can start thinking about participatory democracy.

I hope the discussion tool I co-created, yoomoot.com, will be a part of that evolution. It’s essentially a new way of having long and complex discussions which is suitably adapted to mass-participation. By creating certain limitations and by offering certain features, it allows massive debates with many participants to be rapidly scanned and understood. This is the key to having meaningful debates on a massive scale.

One of the many unusual features of the recent British elections was the series of televised debates between the three main party leaders. As much as I enjoyed these, I hope that one day, the focus of the nation will not be on televised “leaders’ debates” but on genuine “citizens’ debates”. I hope that politicians will have to engage with citizens not as “viewers” and “voters” but as “participants”.

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