Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, The Copenhagen Voice, 8 May 2009

The internet and the services offered on it such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube have grown sharply in popularity in recent years. This growth has been paralleled by a rise in participatory websites and by the start of participatory democracy.

Participatory websites are places on the internet where people help each other - examples range from allowing strangers to overnight in their homes (such as www.couchsurfer.com), to providing small amounts of money to help finance small businesses or even banks (such as the social finance company called Zopa, www.zopa.com) to managing a football team (such as Ebbsfleet United, www.ebbsfleetunited.co.uk/).

‘Participatory’ here means giving and receiving and – often – having a say. As illustrated in the film ‘Us Now’, this is actually ‘big businesses’ in the making, often early in their lives – but these businesses have a social side that many mainstream businesses do not have.

The film also illustrates aspects of participatory democracy, where voters mail and get responses from their members of parliament and ministers, helping form policies and to a limited extent taking active part in democratic decision-making – rather than letting MPs elected under representative democracy decide everything.

Although participatory democracy has had a slow start, the internet had a leading role in US President Barack Obama’s campaigning last year, and the internet and viral marketing can be expected to be important in coming elections in both the United Kingdom and Denmark.

How quickly participatory democracy will catch on is a different matter. As the British Conservative MP George Osborne notes about participatory democracy in ‘Us Now’, “It is a threat to the way way that government has always worked, but I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing for governmental politics.”

Bottom-up introduction of participatory democracy through voters pushing for it will inevitably lead to members of parliament and finally governments changing the way they work. (And this also applies in local politics, where the response may be quicker and more willing, and local decision-making has occurred through participatory democracy.) Looking at the website of the British Houses of Parliament gives the impression that Britain is far ahead of Denmark in terms of involving voters.

But problems remain to be solved: not everybody is on the internet and not everyone is ‘minded’ for this form of participation. There are also matters of ensuring internet security and confidentiality.

The Copenhagen Voice videoed a debate that followed the screening on ‘Us Now’ in Copenhagen. We also interviewed the film’s director, Ivor Gormley, Yildiz Akdogan, Member of Danish Parliament for the Social Democrats, and Kirstine Rask Lauridsen of the Cevea think-tank, one of the arrangers of the screening.

For the debate video go to: http://qik.com/video/1625389, http://qik.com/video/1625436 and http://qik.com/video/1625530

For the Ivor Gormley video go to: http://cphvoice.ning.com/video/social-media-participatory-1#

For the Yildiz Akdogan video go to: http://cphvoice.ning.com/video/us-now-debate-social-media-w

For the Kirstine Rask Lauridsen video go to: http://cphvoice.ning.com/video/social-media-participatory

For the film’s website go to: http://www.usnowfilm.com/

For Cevea’s website go to: www.cevea.dk

For the Houses of Parliament website go to: http://www.parliament.uk/