Digital Democracy and Open Parliament

Garth Turner brought the system out of the dark by reaching out on his blog. This week, he’s shutting it down. What remains will be a record of what he set out to accomplish by using technology to communicate with the people of Canada. He states on his Website that he’s received 60 million hits over the past 4 years – that is a significant amount of traffic!

Our current mainstream political parties are very much about control. Everything must go through the proper channels and no one should go off on their own without expressed permission of the party leadership.

During the recent federal election, most parties used the internet in some form or fashion to communicate their message, but in most cases, it was very much a one way conversation. The Bloc and the NDP were much more engaged, but the Conservatives and Liberals did not invest much time in listening to the electorate. The Greens have connected better through technology and have made significant inroads (http://danforthgreens.ca).

The notion of Open Parliament does exactly that, it opens channels between the people and its members of Parliament. No longer are MPs required to do everything by handshake, hold town hall meetings, or spend a significant amount of time in their constituency offices. There will always be a need for some of that, but as the digital divide shrinks, there are more opportunities than ever to engage their constituents and open the channels of communication. It also means more transparency, which is not a good thing for many politicians.

Garth paid the price for doing what he thought was right, but he also stood up and said “I believe there is a better way”, which is what we want to see more of.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 and is filed under transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.