Group items tagged

"E-democracy is a combination of the words electronic and democracy. In an evolving political and technological landscape here on Earth, many are fighting over the definition of this term. But a logical definition adheres to the word itself: a democracy that has "electronic" characteristics. E-democracy does not equal e-government, but is a form of it. It does not equal "wikigovernment" but is a form of it. Of course, defining "e-democracy" can be just as difficult as defining democracy when you get down to brass tacks. But because the Internet connects millions of people and can be a tool for governance, e-democracy has the potential to become one of the first forms of large-scale direct democracy on Earth. Canada and Sweden are now both trying to enact forms of this system of government, by working within the traditional political process to elect e-democracy friendly politicians, with the ultimate goal of overhauling the entire system of their nations' governments. Sweden's party Aktiv Demokrati aims to build a genuine direct democracy; Canada's Online Party has taken a milder approach with citizens in a more advisory capacity."

Concerning the abstraction of industrialized objects and devices, here the quote of German Sociologist Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, 1919. Quote: "Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may 'count' on the behavior of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools".

"Open-source governance is a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit to the decision-making process and improve democracy.[1]"

Here a Ted conference of Jeremy Rifkin, a very popular American economist, writer, public speaker and political advisor. He also wrote a book about the empathetic cracteristic of the deep human nature: The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis, 2010

"Consensus Democracy focuses on the need to reengineer the approach to local decision making in the 21st Century. It assumes the present system which emphasizes political parties and simple ideology is unable to be effective in a fast-paced age in which constant change creates a new level of interdependency and complexity. It assumes that the old idea of checks and balances will create tremendous gridlock in a society increasingly diverse. "

"Collaborative governance is a process and a form of governance in which participants (parties, agencies, stakeholders) representing different interests are collectively empowered to make a policy decision or make recommendations to a final decision-maker who will not substantially change consensus recommendations from the group.[citation needed] Governance can employ different degrees of public consultation and participation,[1] ranging from non-participation (the community is unaware of any decisions taken), informing (telling the community what is planned and to understand problems, alternatives and solutions), consultation (to obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions), collaboration (to partner with the public to develop alternatives, identify preferred solutions, and make decisions), to empowerment (placing final decision-making into the hands of the public). Collaborative governance is governance with characteristics of both collaboration and empowerment.[citation needed] Some models of collaborative governance have been criticized as allowing ad hoc deliberation to drown out minority opposition.[2] "

The key of values, by FSF : "The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution."