Icelandic Politicians Ignore Crowdsourced Constitution; Pirate Party Rejoices

from the we-know-what-happens-next dept

Techdirt has been following the fascinating saga of Iceland's crowdsourced constitution for nearly two years. Back in October 2012, we noted that Icelandic citizens gave it a pretty big thumbs up. Reflecting that, it really looked like Iceland's parliament might pass the associated bill, and go down in the history books for this bold re-invention of itself.

But the politicians have just put a stop to that, as Thorvaldur Gylfason explains on his blog:

32 out of 63 members of parliament were induced by an e-mail campaign organized by ordinary citizens to declare that they supported the bill and wanted to adopt it now. Despite these public declarations, however, the bill was not brought to a vote in the parliament, a heinous betrayal -- and probably also an illegal act committed with impunity by the president of the parliament. Rather, the parliament decided to disrespect its own publicly declared will as well as the popular will as expressed in the national referendum by putting the bill on ice and, to add insult to injury, hastily requiring 2/3 of parliament plus 40% of the popular vote to approve any change in the constitution in the next parliament, meaning that at least 80% voter turnout would be required for a constitutional reform to be accepted in the next session of parliament.

In other words, not content with simply ignoring the will of the people to adopt this crowdsourced constitution, the Icelandic politicians have now made it even harder to bring in something in the future.

By a happy coincidence, a new Pirate Party has been formed in Iceland, and is already doing quite well given its recent formation, as Rick Falkvinge explains:

The poll gives the Icelandic Píratar 5.6% of the votes, translating to four seats in the Icelandic Parliament. This growth is nothing short of phenomenal, even within the Pirate Party movement, and it would seem that the Icelandic pirates will be the first to put people in a regular, proportional, national-level parliament. (Sweden was first with the European Parliament, Germany was first with state-level parliament, and the Czech pirates were first with a senator.)

As we've seen elsewhere, there's nothing like a little outrageous behavior from mainstream politicians to drive voters into the arms of the Pirates, so Falkvinge's understandably optimistic predictions may well turn out to be true. Let's hope so, if only as a punishment for the contempt shown by the Icelandic parliament for its people.

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Filed Under: constitution, crowdsourced, iceland, pirate party, public interest

Icelandic Citizens Support Crowdsourced Constitution

from the good-for-them dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about plans by Iceland to crowdsource its new Constitution, and over the weekend, residents in Iceland voted (overwhelmingly) to say that they were pleased with the result. Nearly half of Iceland's eligible voters participated, with 66% voting in favor of the new Constitution -- which was put together by a 25-person committee, but which made extensive use of social media and other means to crowdsource input. There are a lot of really interesting things related to the internet and internet freedom happening in Iceland these days, and countries that ignore what's happening there do so at their own peril.

Filed Under: constitution, crowdsourced, iceland, politics

DailyDirt: Tools For The Blind

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Visually impaired folks have access to more technology than ever before. Despite various setbacks that prevent some ingenious innovations, plenty of developers are still working on hardware and software tools to help out people with disabilities. Here are just a few examples of some interesting projects for the blind.

• An iPhone app called VizWiz helps blind users by letting them take a picture of something that is confusing -- and then crowdsourcing a helpful description to make things clear. This app uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain helpful people, and the average turnaround time for a description is 27 seconds. [url]
• The Poet image description tool is open source software that helps to crowdsource image descriptions for digital books. This tool is aimed at textbook illustrations that aren't too helpful for people who can't see them. [url]
• The Tacit project is developing a hand-held sonar device with haptic feedback -- a technological take on the white cane. It's still just a prototype device, but so far, users seem to be able to use it fairly quickly without much training. [url]
• Haptic shoes could help people navigate by vibrating different parts of the shoe to tell the wearer if there are obstacles ahead. These shoes, like the Tacit project's handheld, are based on open Arduino hardware -- allowing other developers to contribute improvements and build upon existing tools. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: arduino, blind, crowdsourced, haptics, hardware, innovations, mechanical turk, software, sonar, tacit project, tools, visually impaired, vizwiz
Companies: amazon

Crowdsourced Fact Checking

from the seems-like-a-good-idea dept

We've pointed out in the past that people seem to really like it when the press actually fact checks, rather than simply acts as a stenographer to record what everyone has to say about an issue. But, of course, fact checking is time consuming and difficult work -- and, in the end, no professional fact checker is ever going to be able to fact check anything as effectively as a wider group of knowledgeable people. It's one of the reasons why we've always considered this site to be a discussion and community site, rather than a "journalism" site. We post our opinions based on what information is out there, and we fully expect an engaged audience to discuss things in the comments, adding additional details, or flat out correcting factual errors in the initial reports we relied on. It's part of the overall process.

And, now it looks like some news organizations are looking to test out a more formalized version of this. The Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org are testing out a new system that crowdsources fact checking via its new Truthsquad effort. The idea is pretty much what you'd expect. The idea is to tap into the wider wisdom of the crowd to see if they can help break down various claims from politicians to see whether or not they're truthful or not. This isn't a total free-for-all, of course. It's simply asking the community for input and evidence.

Filed Under: crowdsourced, fact checking, journalism
Companies: poynter

If You're On A Jury, You Probably Shouldn't Ask Your Facebook Friends For Their Guilty/Not Guilty Votes

from the just-a-suggestion dept

Apparently, a woman in the UK came up with a rather novel approach to "crowdsourcing," when she used Facebook to ask her friends how they would vote in a criminal case for which she was on the jury. Not surprisingly, using Facebook in this manner got her kicked off the jury pretty quickly. Of course, I would guess this isn't the best way to get out of jury duty either, as I'd imagine such a stunt would put you at risk of getting charged with contempt of court as well.

Filed Under: crowdsourced, jury, poll, social network
Companies: facebook

Politics Can Be Crowdsourced, Too

from the changing-politics dept

Last week, Mike noted the latest example of the trend towards people wanting to share the news, rather than just consuming it. Now that two-way communications have become cheap and easy, people (especially young people) are growing accustomed to news reporting being a two-way enterprise, with them commenting on the news and sharing it with others rather than just passively consuming it. A recent Washington Post profile of the Obama campaign's online efforts suggests that something similar is happening in politics. The Obama campaign's fundraising efforts have put to shame those of the McCain and Clinton campaigns. The Post suggests that a major reasons is that Obama's campaign has been careful to cultivate a real relationship with its supporters, rather than just treating them like walking ATM machines. It notes that Obama's emails to his supporters are less likely to ask for money and more likely to invite them to attend a campaign event, watch a video, read an article, or volunteer time for the candidate. This is politics as crowdsourcing. Just as companies can build brand loyalty by cultivating an ongoing relationship with customers, so political campaigns can spark greater levels of support by making them feel like they have a greater stake in the campaign.

A particularly interesting part of this strategy was discussed is a recent edition of Don Marti's LinuxWorld podcast with Tony Steidler-Dennison, who talked about the Obama campaign's success with phone banking. The campaign has an online phone-banking system that allowed users to log into a website, get a list of phone numbers to call, and make the calls from the comfort of their own home. This saves the campaign the hassle of having to rent out space for phone banking, but more importantly it gets more volunteers the opportunity to participate, which gives them a stronger sense that they have a stake in the campaign. The net result will be that money will become less important, while volunteer engagement and enthusiasm will become a lot more important. Thanks to the Internet, campaigns that can energize large numbers of people will find it easier and easier to harness that enthusiasm and translate it into concrete results.

Filed Under: clinton, crowdsourced, mccain, obama, politics