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Iceland, a democratic laboratory

We are no exception and we do consider that democracy should be upgraded: and coming from Iceland there is a reason for that. In 2008, Iceland - rightly considered as one of the most privileged countries in the world - experienced not only the worst financial crisis of its history but also the deepest crisis of trust in the political system.

If most of the Icelandic citizens’ trust in their elected representatives drastically shrank back then, this crisis was also seen by some people as an opportunity to renew democracy. In particular, in 2009 we launched a website called ‘Shadow Parliament’ whose aim was to enable citizens to have a shadow vote on the topics debated in Alþingi, the Icelandic Parliament. We thought that given the political context this website would automatically get popular support … which didn’t happen. This helped us to realise that getting people to participate in e-democracy would be a major challenge.

In spring 2010, while Iceland was still in the middle of the crisis, city council elections were due. Two weeks before the elections in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, we launched a new website, ‘Better Reykjavik’, where all running parties were offered their own space to crowdsource ideas for their campaign. Only The Best Party, the joke party established by Jón Gnarr (self-described as an anarcho-surrealist performer) to ridicule traditional political parties, used this platform when it became obvious that they would win seats on the city council. They realised that this platform gave them an opportunity to implement what they had been calling for: ‘a full-scale cultural revolution’ in the political system.

The Best Party eventually won six of the fifteen seats on Reykjavik City Council and Jón Gnarr became Mayor of the Capital of Iceland, the second highest position in Icelandic political life. Jón Gnarr called on Reykjavik citizens to use the Better Reykjavík online platform during the coalition talks that happened after the election. Over the course of a month (right before and after the elections), forty per cent of Reykjavik’s voters used the platform and almost 2,000 ideas were added.

This success led to Reykjavik City Council considering formalising the collaboration with the Citizens Foundation during its mandate. In October 2011, the cooperation was formally established. In particular the City Council committed itself to review, every month, the ten ideas which had received the most votes on the online platform and to give feedback to citizens on the outcome of this review (whether the Council adopted the ideas or not). In total, 257 ideas have been formally reviewed and 165 accepted by the City Council.

An online participatory budgeting tool, Better Neighborhoods, was also developed for the city of Reykjavik so as to involve citizens in allocating funds to the ideas crowdsourced on Better Reykjavik. Better Neighbourhoods has seen over 200 different project ideas come to fruition following an investment totalling EUR 5.7 million from the city.

Can this work out of Iceland?

As successful as the Icelandic example is (Your Priorities has been used in other Icelandic towns since its inception), one could argue that Iceland is a very specific case. And it surely is. Yet, we quickly thought that what had worked in Iceland could well function in any other community, for the tool is easy to use and the need to involve citizens in decision-making is shared in most countries.

Another political crisis proved us right. In 2012, Estonia was caught in a political maelstrom which revealed the corruption in the country’s political life. This led the President, Mr Toomas Hendrik Ilves, to ask a grassroots organisation, Rahvakogu, the People’s Assembly, to crowdsource proposals for legal reform that would be handed over to the Estonian Parliament.

The process used the Your Priorities platform, and in April 2014 two of the eighteen proposals emanating from this consultation were adopted by Parliament: one on the financing of small political parties and one enabling any petition with 1,000 signatories to go forward to Parliament.

When officially handing the proposals to Parliament, President Hendrik Ilves delivered an interesting speech in which he underlined the current challenges when it comes to talking about representative and participatory democracy. In particular, he mentioned that "the Popular Assembly is not an alternative decision-making organ to the Riigikogu (the Estonian Parliament), one that would compete with it and oppose itself to the Parliament. It is an additional opportunity in our developing democratic state that seeks new solutions in order to give real meaning to popular concepts such as ‘participation’ and ‘involvement’."

Can e-democracy work without a crisis?

Although the architects of e-democracy would find that President Hendrik Ilves’ words are more common sense than revolutionary, e-democracy is far from being available in most countries.

We do not see e-democracy as a means of tinkering with the edges of the way politics functions at present but as a clear and strong trend in the very practice of democracy. In fact, just as our lives have gone digital in many ways, democracy has to move online too. For us, e-democracy is ‘traditional’ democracy taken online with the same basics mostly applied but with different specifics, particularly when it comes to the methods of participation.

E-democracy is indeed our best hope for increasing participation, from the very local level to national government. And this is exactly where the democratic challenges currently are. Whilst conventional participation (voting in particular) is decreasing, particularly among young people, citizens’ participation has moved to taking part in protest actions while the majority appears disillusioned with politics.

E-democracy is certainly not a miracle solution, yet it represents a new - and needed - way to bring citizens back to the core of democracy, where they belong. And this is not a cosmetic change, it is a fundamental one, which probably makes it difficult to grasp. What can also be difficult to grasp is the fact that if e-democracy can easily been described, there are many digital tools - not to mention directions - that can be adopted with quite different potential outcomes. For instance, some e-democracy projects clearly call for ‘direct democracy’ which is not the case with Your Priorities.

In our view, representative and participatory democracy need to be better articulated so that the democratic system can be fundamentally renewed to include all citizens on an equal footing. This vision concretely impacts the way we develop our tools. For Your Priorities to work effectively in the long term, it is fundamental that decision-makers (whether it is a city council, a national parliament or an organisation’s board of directors) commit to take into account the proposals, provide feedback to citizens and keep them informed on the implementation of their ideas.

Our experience has shown that implementing e-democracy is a demanding process because it breaks most people’s habits. There is a choice to be made: do we want decisions affecting us to be made in the most ‘effective’ way or do we want them to be made in the fairest way? It is also demanding because engaging with people needs a continuous effort to leave behind the unfortunate political tradition of stonewalling and of using administrative technical jargon.

To those who will argue that e-democracy is too complex to be effectively implemented, we would reply that not only is complexity inherent to humanity but that these requirements mainly show that the need to review democracy is high. In most countries, renewing the trust of citizens in their political representatives will require strong efforts that, we think, are actually made easier by e-democracy.

This is a deliberate choice and a system such as Your Priorities will not work if imposed from outside. It has to be a conscious process and what we have observed so far is that it works best when authorities, non governmental organisations and citizens co-operate in order to reply to a community’s needs. The different uses of Your Priorities have indeed shown that it is effectively working at different scales (from a classroom in India, to cities in the USA or Iceland or to the national level in Estonia) provided there is a will and commitment to make the tool work effectively.

Technology with a conscience

Indeed, what is particularly important to focus on when talking about civic technologies is the fact that if e-democracy is nothing but democracy in the twenty-first century, the digital tools used are, themselves, nothing but tools. They can therefore be used to oppress people (US Blue Coat surveillance in Syria in 2011 is an example) or to ensure equality in society by giving every citizen the opportunity to contribute and to be listened to.

Our stance is twofold. Firstly, politics is too important to be left only in the hands of politicians. Secondly, technology is playing an increasingly central role in society and in our lives and the only way to regain control (over technology, over society, over our lives) is to use it for the common interest and not let it be in the hands of those who pursue private interests.

As underlined by Jón Gnarr after his mandate, "the only thing that can create meaningful change is a shift in attitude. A balance must be created. This is what we stood for on the municipal level, and this is what needs to happen on a global level. Balance and equilibrium." Your Priorities has shown that ‘collective intelligence’ is not a mere abstract analytical tool but that when people are provided with opportunities to put forward ideas and to debate, they are very constructive in their arguments and are willing to work for the common good rather than to push forwards their own ideas.

Let’s be honest, digital tools will not automatically solve the current and upcoming democratic challenges only by being implemented. They require a strong will from those implementing them to be adopted by citizens in the first place and a strong commitment to ensure that these tools are being taken seriously in the long run. In the meantime, what is obvious to us is that democratic challenges will not be solved without digital tools and that e-democracy is actually an underlying long-term trend. Democracy is a process and e-democracy is one of its stages. It is much more than a geek’s whim or a buzzword, it is a model of participation that can help us bring back to ‘democracy’ its core meaning, that is ‘the power of the people’.

By Robert Bjarnason of Citizens Foundation Iceland