Public Meeting: Why don’t the people decide state policy?

by T Thu Nov 29, 2012 21:14

The CPPC distributed an A5 flyer at the anti-austerity protest last week which makes a good case and contains good points. You can read the contents of that here:
http://www.cppc.ie/let-us-adopt-the-solution-that-leads...nt-2/

However dealing with the practicalities of people deciding state policy and I think the CPPC are on the right track, one model on how to do this is that people should adopt the "Wikipedia" model.

The Wikipedia model refers to many aspects of the phenomena of Wikipedia and that is, it is one of the few social projects that almost everyone is capable of contributing to, it is largely voluntary, the results are available to all for free and it harnesses the full diversity of opinion and knowledge and not just experts, within the general population.

In the case of applying this model to democracy and just taking the budget as an example, one possibility would be to setup a wiki on a website and its pages would contain a breakdown of the state costs and budgets. So it would have sections for each department and sub pages for each sub-department and could be filled with summary tables at each level to show where the money goes, how it is spent, who gets it and so on. By harnessing the knowledge of everyone, they would help provide some of the figures which could be extracted from all the different layers of government by virtue of people having direct access and people going through reports and other public information and freedom of information derived data.

It would then shine a light into every layer of the state and because of this, it would be easier to see what the needs are and what the real priorities. The other benefit is that it is harder for state officials to hide stuff. After-all a democracy is not just about citizens making decisions but about fully informed citizens making decisions. In any walk of life trying to make a decision about something over which you have little knowledge is hazardous at best and probably relies on chance to make a good decision, but when you are informed and know something about the subject area, then it is likely you can make a better decision. And so likewise for the process of democracy itself.

This same concept could and should be applied to discover how much money really has gone to the banks, developers, bond-holders and all the rest as I am sure the public is only aware of the very tip of this giant iceberg. Indeed every aspect of public life and the workings of the state should be laid out and picked apart by the collective body of the public working along lines like this.