With the election of new Slovenian prime minister we also got formal release of a Coalition agreement. Since it’s a 72 page document, I was wondering what keywords would stand out. Here is the result:
Pogodba za Slovenijo 2012 - 2015 - word cloud (top 80 words)
As a response of 11th of March 2004 bombing in Spain, there were big demonstrations. Vast majority of people were summoned through a viral SMS and/or word of mouth.
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E-participation
Formal/accepted/tested:
Official web pages
Online administration
Online petitions
Electronic votes
Referendums/polls
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Civils/grassroot organisations:
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News
Forums
Mailing lists
Chats
Chain emails
SMS
Blogs
Videos
Social networks
3D worlds
Wikis
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Interesting problem of electronic voting: it requires electricity. This can be a real problems in some parts of the country.
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Coordination: Vivienda digna (Street demonstrations for a decent house)
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Origins started in an email chain message. Calling for a sit-in demonstration, positive demonstrations. Wiki of a famous blogger hosted the content and it was increased and more detailed crosspostings.
There was organical growth of related issues:
Open lists (organizing other places, blogs, press, logos, etc.)
Lawrence Lessig, founding father of Creative Commons, announced his new initiative – change-congress.org. It’s an idea to promote basic reform of United States Congress and fundamental principles that in reality steer it – corporate money. The campaign is using basic technological tools like Google Maps mash-up, together with Wiki’s and pledges to start building public awareness and help keeping track of who said what and how they kept with their promises.
This is an idea that I’m deeply excited about. Even though hanging US congress does not affect me, I love it for the meme it brings to the world. As with Creative Commons that started as US initiative and then with time ported to most of the World countries, it brings the hope, as collateral damage, also to countries like Slovenia.
While I am not a lawyer or a political scientist, I like to think myself as a hacker and with that it makes me want to build similarly inspiring things in my local environment. It also allows me to take a look what other fellow hackers built and then start asking locals here, how this ideas map to our situation?
My call out to Slovenian and also Europeans (regarding the EU legislation) that are more intimate with political scene:
what is our equivalent regarding US PACs and lobbyists?
do we have “earmarks” problem?
what are local initiatives for more transparent parliament?
and how do we compare regarding the public funding of elections?
(adopted from C-C.org)
With some help of a local groups like e-demokracija.si or kiberpipa.org, we could firstly map in a wiki-like the differences and then start forming local issues. Hopefully with time people won’t think anymore that our Slovenian government is fully corrupt and bad because thee will be full transparent accountability that is not felt right now.