P.S. Re: [WDDM] Great Canadian Wish List

["M. Kolar" <wddm(at)mkolar.org>]

P.S.   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.

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.

This is the same challenge we are facing here even with a much smaller
amount of traffic and have not yet been able to make much progress on it.

Mirek


M. Kolar wrote:

> More than a month ago I wrote here about the Great Canadian Wish List
> (GCWL).
> Since then I introduced there the wish (initiative) to introduce
> Direct Democracy in Canada.
>
> The GCWL has closed today. The results are here:
> http://www.cbc.ca/wish/2007/07/the_top_30_wishes.html
>
> 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 it. 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Mirek