New Tools For Citizen Participation

Recently CBC has started the Great Canadian Wish List which has some of the ingredients of the above tools. They just call the citizen initiatives the "wishes" - wishes for Canada's future. It is done in collaboration with the social network Facebook, and so one has to have an account in Facebook to be able to enter or support a GCWL. CBC would be able to do all this with their in-house technology, without the need to use the platform of the US-based Facebook. But in spite of that, it is a very useful experiment.

If you are on already on the Facebook, or are willing to register there (it is quite easy), I invite you to also check and hopefully support my wish to introduce Direct Democracy in Canada. You are also invited to join the Facebook group Direct Participatory Democracy for Canada.

It would be nice if CBC created a permamnet institution where citizens could submit their ideas and initiatives. I think that CBC already has technology more suitable for this than Facebook, but they would probably need to get more funds to make it more secure adn serious. They could apply an approach similar to their past listener-rated music show or the recent Seven Wonders of Canada to deal with political questions that are important to citizens.

Listeners could nominate for dicussion the issues that are important or worry them most (by phone, online; any time). All would then be able to rate the importance to them of the issues already nominated (again by phone, online). The issues would be ordered according to the amount of support they get, and dealt in this order. Panels of experts would discuss each issue for some time on the radio/TV. Then listeners could take a vote on the issue. The results of such votes would serve as the database of citizen positions that should be respected by politicians.

Miroslav Kolar

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