How will policy-makers keep pace with today’s rapidly changing world and bring greater agility and dynamism to public responses to monumental challenges like climate change, food scarcity and the spread of infectious disease? How can citizens and others stakeholders feed their knowledge and experience into the policy cycle and how can policy-makers tap the collective […]

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When Estonians regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991 they not only acquired new political freedoms, they inherited a mass of rubbish–thousands and thousands of tonnes of it scattered across illegal dumping sites around the country. When concerned citizens decided that the time had come to clean it up, they turned not […]

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President Bush recently called for the US administration to dramatically curtail earmarks (essentially pet spending projects that members of Congress insert into the federal budget), saying he will veto any appropriations bills that don’t cut the number of earmarks in half when they come to him during the remainder of his days in the White […]

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Written petitions have long been an important means by which citizens can bring their concerns to public officials. Petitioning was common in 18th and 19th century England and is thought to have played an important role in enabling working class movements to force significant social and political reforms, and eventually universal suffrage. The tradition was […]

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Since September 19, thousands of Burmese protesters have poured on to the streets of Rangoon to demand freedom from military rule. On September 26, the Burmese military government responded with violence. Thousands of protestors have since been seized and taken away. Yesterday, campaigners in 30 cities around the world showed solidarity by organizing local demonstrations […]

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A few weeks ago the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office opened an online forum where citizens can contribute their thoughts on the government’s foreign policy priorities. Several hundred comments have been posted to date.
Such forums have become more numerous as governments have slowly awakened to the opportunities that the Internet provides to exercise the democratic […]

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Since posting my thoughts on YouTube’s activities around the presidential candidates race, I’ve been in conversation with Stacy Becker who runs the Minnesota Anniversary Project (MAP150), a forum for reinventing policy-making by reconnecting the vision, values and voices of Minnesotans with policy-making on the issues that matter most to their future.
Like me, Becker worries that […]

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Twentieth-century political communication has been described as a ‘oneway conversation.’ Instead of inclusive deliberation — the substantive element of democracy — professionally produced and polished declarations of policy were released for public consumption via mass media. For most people political debate was perceived as something to watch - or switch off.
YouTube is trying to change […]

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Another Wikinomics reader Stacy Becker wrote in to alert us to a Minnesota-based citizen’s project called Map150 that is working to reinvigorate local democracy. Becker rightly argues that “citizens have tons of really important information that never finds its way into expert-driven policy-making processes.” “This information is critical,” she says, “if we are to solve […]

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