More than a month ago the Great Canadian Wish List(GCWL) experiment was started by CBC in cooperation with Facebook, see: url]http://www.cbc.ca/wish/[/url].
I participated by entering the wish (initiative) to introduce Direct Democracy in Canada.

The GCWL has closed today. The results are here: [www.cbc.ca]

Total number of participants in this experiment was 19,865.

My wish to introduce Direct Democracy in Canada got 29 supporters (including myself), i.e., only about 0.15% of all the participants were interested in Direct Democracy.
However, the whole thing was driven by the campaign to ban abortion in Canada, and countered by the progressives' drive to keep abortion a matter of choice. These two groups tried to mobilize as many like-minded people as possible, many of whom, I suspect, have not paid any attention to other wishes, so it is not easy how many people really evaluated or even took note of the minor wishes like mine.

Altogether, 3204 wishes (initiatives) were made, some frivolous, but many other were thoughtful and very reasonable, and brought many new interesting ideas how to deal with public and environmental matters.

There were reported attempts of cheating and software problems that enabled such attempts. Also there was no way to make sure that only Canadians participated in GCWL. Suspicions were voiced that many Americans participated in the battle to ban abortion.

It was not all only about mechanical "voting". There was also a substantial deliberative part - there lively discussions about some wishes, and about the whole project. One participant was ecstatic that this is the first time in Canadian history that a completely uncensored discussion of public matters took place.

Again, without an official Internet registry of voters in a given jurisdiction (legalization of digital signatures), it is very difficult to say how meaningful any Internet voting results really are.

Also it was very difficult to follow all the 3000+ wishes, and thousands of discussion entries. This presents a big challenge how to organize such large number of citizen's initiatives and deliberations effectively so that everybody can orient themselves quickly in them and decide what is important for them, and how to best participate.

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2007 10:29PM by MiKolar.