{"id":317,"date":"2003-04-20T11:28:52","date_gmt":"2003-04-20T16:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=317"},"modified":"2003-04-20T11:28:52","modified_gmt":"2003-04-20T16:28:52","slug":"emergent-democracy-theory-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"Emergent Democracy: Theory and Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was some hullabaloo last month, when Andrew Orlowsky <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/content\/6\/30087.html\">made fun of<\/a> the emergent democracy proponents as a bunch of techies who wouldn&#8217;t recognize politics if a ballot box fell on our heads.<br \/>\nIn the real world, here&#8217;s how techniques of emergent democracy are being used in real live politics, helping activists combat the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freedom-to-tinker.com\/superdmca.html\">state-level DMCA<\/a>.  (An Orwellian bill which says that <i>anything you do with your internet connection that is not expressly permitted by your ISP is forbidden.<\/i>)<br \/>\n* I met the crew at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.effaustin.org\">EFF-Austin<\/a> by going to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meetup.com\">meet-up<\/a>.<br \/>\n* Was alerted to the state-level DMCA by email from EFF-National<br \/>\n* Use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freedom-to-tinker.org\">Ed Felten&#8217;s blog<\/a> the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eff.org\">EFF website<\/a>, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicknowledge.org\/education\/super-dmcas.php\">Public Knowledge website<\/a> to follow the bill&#8217;s progress in other states, share resources and network.<br \/>\n* Co-ordinate locally with a mailing list, and post local resources to a wiki.<br \/>\n* Work locally with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aclutx.org\/\">ACLU<\/a> to inform legislators about the bills.<br \/>\nIn practice, the emergent properties are more human and less AI.<br \/>\n* The net helps people with common interests find each other and get together<br \/>\n* Blogs, mailing lists, and wikis help people share and refine ideas<br \/>\nIn practice, electronic channels interface with physical channels in traditional ways.<br \/>\n* Citizens visit, call and write legislators<br \/>\n* Supporters donate money to candidates<br \/>\nOver time, we may develop more sophisticated methods for aggregating conversation, enabling a broader and richer process of deliberation. Over time, the tools may be used for referenda and greater use of direct democracy.<br \/>\nThe vision of the will of the citizenry, emerging from a million electronic messages, is science fiction today.<br \/>\nFor now, emergent democracy enhances citizen participation in representative democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was some hullabaloo last month, when Andrew Orlowsky made fun of the emergent democracy proponents as a bunch of techies who wouldn&#8217;t recognize politics if a ballot box fell on our heads. In the real world, here&#8217;s how techniques of emergent democracy are being used in real live politics, helping activists combat the state-level &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=317\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Emergent Democracy: Theory and Practice&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-57","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}