Crowdsourcing for democracy: Iceland takes the lead

The streets of Great Britain are filled with riots and fire. A German-French coalition, somewhat affectionately referred to as ‘Merkozy’, attempts to render the shapes of a new, more advanced and economically flavored EU-era. At the same time in The Netherlands – along with many other countries – local and national politics and public opinion appear to be more polarized than ever before. I am not a huge fan of the word ‘momentum’, but this sure feels like what – I think – can be held a true ‘momentum’ in the making: people appear to be tired with their current governments, lack of influence and politics, and they want change. True change , that is – no more panem et circenses.

This is not the announcement of Fronteer Strategy running for office – but somewhat two weeks ago, a close friend brought a news item to my attention that reported about The Constitution Council of Iceland that I couldn’t get it out of my head. This Council just handed over their a proposal for a new constitution, and even though this is an event that does not occur on a daily basis, the way that it was created made it even more special: they crowdsourced it.

A (very) brief history of Iceland may be in place in order to set the scene. Being a former dependency of Denmark, Iceland installed its first (and current, Denmark-inspired) constitution on June 17th, 1944. Although it was amended several times, no revolutionary changes were made. Then, some years later, dd 2008, Iceland saw its entire banking system collapse. An economic crisis was born – the collapse was relative to its size the largest economic collapse in economic history. The faith in the Iceland government dropped to a historical depth, and the distrust towards banks rose to unknown heights.

People in Iceland got tired. That much tired, that they decided real change was necessary, and so they did something about it in a rather pragmatic way: not by using barricades, riots and inquisitions, but by putting their constitution to the test. A Council, consisting of 25 members that were chosen democratically, was instructed to reconsider if Iceland’s current constitution was still up-to-date. But rather than doing this alone, the Council shared its progress with the Icelandic people. Using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube, every inhabitant with an internet connection (on a population of 311,058 inhabitants, 301,600 are connected to the internet – that’s a connective density of 96%!) was enabled to contribute to the process by writing comments and proposing new sections.

On Wednesday July 27th, the Constitutional Council presented its proposal for Iceland’s new constitution to the Speaker of Althingi, Iceland’s parliament. Now, isn’t that democracy? In a time where organizations almost languish with only the thought of the new possibilities that technology offers of being connected with their customers, governments still stay behind. Iceland was one of the precursors in the financial crises that spread worldwide; I sincerely hope that it, again, takes the role of precursor in their attempt to enable their people a way to influence government policy and legislation. Let’s co-create it!

So, the question is: should we in response put all our constitutions to the test? Or continue the way we are running politics now?

I don’t know – perhaps we should ask the people.

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