Crowd Sourced Constitution for Iceland
Crowd Sourced Constitution for Iceland
Crowdsourcing is becoming a supremely popular resource for online developers. Even Mozilla is leveraging the option with their new mobile OS project Boots 2 Gecko. But in a first, the Government of Iceland has just received a new draft for the constitution of the country.
The draft was submitted by a 25 member committee and the masses were allowed to chip in with their own two cents via Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr. The social media was used extensively during the last presidential election in the United States of America to have a bearing on debates and questions posed to the contestants. But to our knowledge, this is the first time the general population is having a direct effect on what is considered the domain of the government.
For those who want to read a translated version of what the 25 member committee came up with, they can find it here. It is still to be seen if the new draft is accepted by the government. We will have to wait for further developments and to see if this trend is actually picked up by other countries. The draft will be reviewed on the 1st of October 2011. It seems that crowdsourcing can make democracy literally live up to its ethos of being by the people, for the people.
Source: engadget.com