Re: D-CENT: state of the art - not

Before trashing the technology solutions, perhaps it's worth noting:

1. D-CENT seems to be one of seven projects selected, competitively, 
under "objective 5.5. CAPS – Collective Awareness Platforms for 
Sustainability and Social Innovation and objective 1.7b – Internet 
Science -- the focus is application more than technology.

2. The focus of D-CENT is described as "New tools for direct democracy, 
participation, new economic models."

3. The project seems to explicitly build on current civic engagement 
projects in Spain, Iceland, and Finland - with some explicit goals for 
expanding on current activities and platforms.

In this kind of project, existing technology base seems to be a major 
consideration - with scaling, interoperability, and application being 
the appropriate focuses.  And I note that one explicit goal is scaling 
up the existing use of Ellg by the Spanish participants.

What strikes me as a lot more notable is that, given that the stated 
focus and goals are things like: "Open Ministry," "Crowd-Sourced 
Democracy," "Digital Currencies & Collaborative Consumption," and 
"incentive structures (for)linking civic action to collaborative 
economic models" - my reaction is more along the lines of 'way too much 
focus on technology, way too little on group process, economics, 
organizational design, etc.'

This reads like "let's throw a large-scale town meeting by throwing lots 
of people in an electronic room" with no thought about rules of order; 
and, at the same time, "let's design a new economy" with no thought 
about market structures.  "Build the right platform and it will solve 
all problems" seems a little thin.

Or, put another way, as Larry Lessig so aptly put it "code is law." The 
organizing principles that get built into a platform will 
dictate/constrain/influence its application.  I see very little 
attention to what organizing principles the D-CENT team are trying to 
encapsulate and apply beyond a few platitudes on their last slide (e.g., 
"community ownership of data and access to knowledge").  How about 
organizing principles for how the platform will actually support "direct 
democracy, participation, and new economic models.").

By the way, for those who bemoan dead projects - "electronic democracy" 
and such really hasn't made much progress since the 90s (speaking as one 
who bashed my head against such problems at the time) - the issues have 
very little to do with technology and much to do with politics and 
economics.  Arguably, the most effective results to date have been the 
use of twitter by revolutionaries in the streets, and the emergence of 
eBay and Amazon as new marketplaces.


Miles Fidelman





-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra

Received on Monday, 24 February 2014 13:41:31 UTC