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Back in 1994 when we started Minnesota E-Democracy the Internet was a total novelty. Now in the year 2000, the Internet is playing a fundamental role in how agendas are set, who has power and influence, and how people organize to be heard in democracy. As a radical incrementalist who asks that you not confuse notions of direct electronic democracy with efforts that promote online participatory democracy, I encourage you to do what you can in your community to build citizen participation through the Internet today. Public expectations about how the Internet is used are being set and cemented into place. It is five times more difficult to attract people to civic efforts online now than five years ago when there were at least five times fewer people online. For those who envision sustainable local/state content, interaction, and applications (non-commercial in particular) online it is time to get cracking. President Clinton recently mentioned in an interview with Stateline.Org that some day we may even have an "electronic town square" along with e-commerce. I believe with a lot of hard work, every community can have their own interactive public commons. People just need to set aside their institutional mind sets and political axes to build new mediating institutions that are "of" the Internet and not just "on" the Internet. The online commons or electronic town square needs to be built as a partnership with non-profits, governments, and commercial groups with pooled resources to provide trusted leadership. If everyone continues to seek narrowly seek their piece of the pie we will fight the good fight to broaden access yet find that we have built the new interstates that virtually rip people's time and attention away from their local communities. The potential to design compelling online content, interaction, and tools that make the Internet a communities network by nature exists but it is quickly slipping away. Now that our online commons in Minneapolis (St. Paul and Duluth have a long way to go) has moved from being an alternative civic space to become an essential part of our local democracy and public discourse, the lack of broad access means that those who have the most to gain by raising their voices are rarely heard from. I'd rather have this problem than not, because without the local commons the issue of the local digital divide would have no voice or audience with decision-makers. Some might suggest that we wait until everyone is online to develop meaningful democracy online efforts, but I feel we are at a turning point. Either we figure this out now or we wait twenty or thirty years to develop visionary "public interest" applications enabled by the medium (versus the transfer of existing public service to the online world). I'd rather we not follow the same slow path as the development of public broadcasting that we saw after the birth of radio and television. In this era of flowing venture capital we need to pinch ourselves and start asking "What do we want online?" after things we like are discovered to not be commercially viable. Cheers,
Steven Clift I wanted to take a minute and encourage you to visit the E-Democracy 2000 effort and online U.S. Senate candidate debate: http://www.e-democracy.org/2000
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