[pp.int.general] Fwd: [liberationtech] Fwd: Democracy crowdsourcing in Estonia

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

Hi Märt:

Wow, that was quite a response! Thanks for the time you took to write all
those details about the process. I really appreciate it, I'm very
interested in this kind of things obviously. May I forward it to the
original mailing list?

Regards,


On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 9:15 PM, Märt Põder <boamaod at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's a long story with lots of details, but we can start from the fact
> that the process was split in phases [1]:
>
> 1. Gathering the proposals (so called co-creation or crowdsourcing,
> everybody eith eID and Internet could participate).
> 2. Sorting/analysing the proposals from a strictly neutral/impartial
> perspective (experts).
> 3. Neutral/impartial impact assessments of the sorted proposals (experts).
> 4. Seminars with selected experts to rank the proposals (another set of
> experts).
> 5. Deliberation day to select the proposals to be handed to the parliament
> (unbiased sample of population).
>
> 1. The proposals were gathered using a flavour [2] of Your Priorities
> software [3]. You could log in with national eID service. In the end there
> were about 2000 proposals (from which 1300 were analysed). They were voted
> up and down, commented on etc. There were lot of duplicate proposals and
> there was no real possibility to discuss the proposotions because of
> duplication, bugs and the format that encouraged making self-sufficient
> points (arguments) instead of threaded discussions or something similar.
> So, from my perspective it was just mass posting proposals, that could be
> done with random forum software. The topics were agreed to be (1) funding
> of political parties, (2) laws about political parties, (3) election
> mechanisms, (4) participation processes, (5) forced politization of
> society. Not relevant proposals were sorted into section "varia".
>
> 2. This was the point where I started to severely doubt the process. Some
> of my own proposals were already lost in this phase and there was already
> some kind of prioritizing, although this wasn't what was promised. Some
> people complained about these problems, but since the results were
> published in an obscure manner and in several parts, not many people
> bothered to pay attention at all. The original proposals had pro/against
> votes, pro/con arguments and duplicates (had to be detected by analysts).
> Somehow the analysts explained that they treated duplication of proposals
> as main criterion to evaluate "prevalence" of the proposal, although this
> is counter-intuitive (spamming was the way to success). Besides that, some
> of the proposals were sorted into section "Overall state issues" which in
> fact meant that they were just censored from the next phases. Note, that
> among others all the proposals to use liquid democracy or something similar
> were put into that pile of proposals by "the experts".
>
> 3. The impact assessments were the next step to censor the proposals,
> because the experts brought their understanding and presumptions of those
> general political issues and although the resulting assessments were not
> stupid, some of them were highly debatable.
>
> 4. In this phase another set of chosen experts and some makers of
> proposals were invited to live seminars to select the most important topics
> to be discussed in deliberation day phase. From each of the five categories
> 2-4 most important issues were sorted out to be voted on later. They used
> the materials produced by 2nd and 3rd phases.
>
> 5. On deliberation day there were 550 people invited who should have
> represented all areas of the society. Only a bit more than 300 came. Those
> 2-4 most important issues of five categories were voted on using the
> prescribed multiple choice answers (whoever created those). This made the
> process highly manipulative, the participants were there just to discuss
> the topics using the materials provided by organizers and vote on
> predefined options. After the last vote the organizers were all rejoicing
> on Twitter and Facebook that the crowd was so "intelligent", since it
> didn't vote for direct election of the president, although the public
> opinion in Estonia is for direct election. If this is not an example of
> manipulation, it's at least clear indicator of the will to manipulate. But
> some people who were present actually say that it was good company and the
> discussions were led professionally, so it wasn't that bad either.
>
> ===
>
> There is also a background story to this. There were anti-decitfulness
> protests in Estonia in November 2012 [4], which were sort of benevolently
> hijacked by certain group of intellectuals and political activists under
> the name of Charter 12 [5], which led to the crowdsourcing process under
> the presidental blessing. I was in touch with the organizers of the
> protests as well as later took part of some of the meetings to start the
> crowdsourcing process.
>
> Although I was a bit disappointed by the hijacking part, I didn't really
> make an issue of it, because the organizers of the protests didn't have
> better plan anyway. On the first meeting of the crowdsourcing initiative I
> proposed to have an intelligent discussion evironment with the process that
> would contribute to the quality of proposals and discussions. But the
> initiative group didn't care much about that. Instead they already had the
> proposals that they wanted to see handed to the parliament in the end and
> they wanted to create a process that would lead to the desired result. And
> they were more interested in numerically gathering more proposals (lot of
> participants as some kind of mandate) than enabling intelligent process. My
> argument was that if the process were designed well enough, the need for
> experts would be minimized and everybody would be in the same position to
> gather support for a proposal. We even managed to discuss Lessig's "Code is
> law" argument, but in the end that was just intellectual entertainment for
> them.
>
> Since the organizers had their own plan to influence the political regime,
> I dind't try to engage in the process later on. Some Estonian pirates who
> wanted to do that anyway, they were kept away from mailing lists etc, so I
> might have been blocked too, I'm not sure. The process was said to be open,
> transparent, grassroots etc, but it really was (and still is, because it
> hasn't ended) a regular manipulative political process. Anyway, I didn't
> want to undermine their project, I kept low profile and just criticized
> some parts of the process in discussions on social networks, university
> seminars etc.
>
> In the beginning we reported on the progress of People's Assembly in our
> Pirate Party channels, but after the 2nd phase ended, I stopped doing that.
> Some of our members have criticized the process in their blogs and
> suggested that in the end it is just poll of public opinion and as that
> even not a decent one. I'm also on a position that the process had very
> little to do with democracy, I cannot even agree that it was an experiment
> in direct or participative or deliberative democracy. Actually, they could
> have skipped all the phases from 1st to 4th and just organized a nice
> manipulative deliberation day.
>
> You should also know that most of the public criticism of the process is
> either that (a) it doesn't lead to the changes promised because the
> proposed changes suck and parliament won't agree with them anyway or (b)
> the crowdsourcing and Charter 12 hijacked and discharged the protests
> against our neo-liberal+conservative government which may have led to
> something better and besides that the fake crowdsourcing is actually
> election campaign for our social democrats.
>
> For me the main problem is the non-democratic nature of the process which
> noone outside the Pirate Party really seems to care about. And from that I
> also have some kind of ethical dilemma, if I should remain silent on the
> issue and therefore silently support the process (hoping that parliament
> will take some of the good proposals and implement them, for example
> lowering the threshold used in elections) or publicly condemn it (joining
> the conspiracy theorists and doomsdayers) with the chance of helping to
> stall the initative and ruin the chances of public support to whatever
> direct democracy initiatives that might appear in the future (we have two
> of them failed already, besides the one we're discussing now).
>
> So our People's Assembly is not totally evil, but nothing to be proud of
> either. That should be enough for the start. Anyway, some notes and trivia
> for the conlusion...
>
> * The Charter 12 people composed their manifest and vanished giving their
> place to some ad hoc group of activists who were hanging around at the
> president's place anyway.
> * The preparation of the crowdsourcing process by these activists was
> rather non-transparent.
> * Everything was done in a hurry and therefore resulted lots of problems,
> technical as well as substantial.
> * The rhetoric that it was first implementation and therefore had flaws
> and next time we do even better is not to be taken seriously, because there
> was no intention engage specialists from universities to make it better etc.
> * There was no proper definition of the process, it constantly changed,
> 4th and 5th phases were invented/decided ad hoc after the 1st phase was
> over.
> * Although the 1st phase of the process was quite open in a sense (you can
> exactly see who voted, argued, proposed what), rest of the process was
> rather untransparent and there was no way to participate in it.
> * There were also problems with AGPL licensed source code, which was not
> published because of "intensive development process" as they explained it.
> * One of our members (I think he's also reading this list) even used
> presidental reception to put on an artistic performance for writing citizen
> initiative into proper law to making our People's Assembly really binding
> and transparent. [6]
>
> [1] http://news.err.ee/Politics/f1fb8b53-d0ff-4582-99f0-83de232b9201
> [2] https://github.com/cenotaph/rahvakogu
> [3] http://www.yrpri.org/home/world
> [4] http://news.err.ee/politics/64bff71c-3716-42a0-ad54-7724b8c43555
> [5]
> http://www.opendemocracy.net/ahto-lobjakas/charter-12-estonias-stab-at-direct-democracy
> [6]
> http://news.postimees.ee/1151090/surprise-guest-in-protest-action-first-lady-s-hand-ignored/
>
> ____________________________________________________
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> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
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>
>


-- 
Eduardo Robles Elvira     +34 668 824 393            skype: edulix2
http://www.wadobo.com    it's not magic, it's wadobo!
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