Monthly Archives: November 2010

Participatory democracy

Alberta, Politics, Reason Vancouver

I had originally written this article for Canadian Atheist as a way to start branching out beyond atheism, but given that I’ve already scheduled two posts for tomorrow and already have one up today, I’m going to post this here.

I want to comment today on a political movement that I watched start to emerge in Alberta just before I left, which has since begun to really take off, but also put it in perspective with a post that I read at POGGE.

The latter frames it as “participatory democracy,” and outlines a system where traditional top-down political parties and decision making is replaced with a bottom-up approach that calls for individuals to contribute ideas to the system and to suggest multiple alternatives, and shuns simple yes-no dichotomous voting.

I’m not sure if a subscription is required, but this paper in the European Political Science journal looks like it also tackles a portion of the problem.

In Alberta, as with most of Canada, citizens are becoming increasingly disenfranchised with existing political parties, and especially the young are eschewing the entire process. Even the upstart Wildrose Alliance is only appealing more to the rich and elderly-curmudgeon crowd. Voter turnouts are drastically down.

But some smart people started getting together in Alberta a couple years ago, first for Reboot Alberta unconferences, and soon for Renew Alberta unconferences. At the same time, an unconference called ChangeCamp was held in Calgary, which began the path to the mayor’s office in Calgary for Naheed Nenshi.

For those who don’t know, an “unconference” is a participant-driven conference where the barrier to admission is set extremely low (the events are typically free), and average attendees provide most of the content in short, interactive presentations.

Each of these events focussed on slightly different areas, but they all had in common a commitment to bringing progressive values back to politics in Alberta. Of course definitions on progressivism range from socialism to soft-conservativism (i.e. fiscal, not social conservativism), but nearly all participants agreed that the present model in Alberta wasn’t working.

Renew Alberta moved quickly after its first couple events and merged with the remaining shell of the Alberta Party (which was a right-wing fringe party) and gutted the existing infrastructure. The rebuilt Alberta Party ejected all its policy and set out on a quest to do something revolutionary in politics – listen to the public.

With their “Big Listen” project they held small meetings in kitchens, community centres, or wherever was comfortable and simply listened to what mattered to Albertans and what they thought should be done about it. The party took no positions and simply compiled notes.

They then compiled all these notes and presented them at their policy conference a few months ago, which resulted in a policy document that they are using not as a final say, but more as a first step toward further consultation and idea generation.

And I must admit, I was quite skeptical initially that the wisdom of crowds wouldn’t be all that much and that what they generated would be a vague and vacuous document. Instead, I’m quite impressed that what exists is a relatively forward thinking position that balances many competing interests.

Add to this, the electoral win of Naheed Nenshi who is actually given credit for running “the campaign in full sentences,” and I think there may actually be a chance for this sort of system to succeed.

I think that’s enough for today, but I do also want to explore the concept of non-partisan politics (and why I’m warming to the concept but hate that phrase) and how these systems can be incorporated into an evidenced-based party like Reason Vancouver.

Where have I been?

Personal, Site

Damn, no posts here in over a month. Did not mean for that to happen.

This is not to say I haven’t been blogging. Most of my writing has just been shifted to Canadian Atheist, where I’ve tried to consistently get at least a couple posts per week there. Of course it’s mostly on atheism/freethought/skepticism but there are still a lot of political opinions I have but time is always short, so they’ve fallen by the wayside.

It makes me tempted to advocate for splitting CA up a bit into more of a blog aggregator like Science Blogs where each author gets their own space to talk about anything they want and the front page simply highlights the different topics/authors. Then I could basically park this blog over there and say everything I want. However, ideas always seem to come with work in the volunteer sector, so unless I work on the implementation it may not happen. And maybe it is just better to keep these blogs separate for now.

In terms of politics, I’ve been quite busy launching Reason Vancouver, and after this past weekend where I attended a productive Olympic Dialogue (which I’ll try to write up later), I think may be the right thing at the right time for this city.

I also have to admit that after my initial scepticism of the “Big Listen” project, I’m really starting to like the direction the Alberta Party is headed and with the potential success evidenced by Naheed Nenshi’s win in Calgary, I think they’re really on to something. Although I may never come around to using the buzz phrase “post-partisan politics,” I do think they are on to something (which is another post I need to write up).

As for graduate studies, despite my committee meeting being thrice rescheduled, things are progressing well, and I was happy to receive the second place award (first for visuals) for student seminar talks this term (out of 10 talks) in my department, losing only to my fiancée. Perhaps if I really feel like I have too much time on my hands I’ll write that talk up with the slides so there can at least be a text-representation of it (I won’t just post the slides since they are almost meaningless without a dialogue to follow).

So don’t take this as a pledge that I’ll write more often here, since bloggers often make the false promise of “I’m going to post here more often” and then you don’t hear from them for another 6 months, but merely take this as a “I’m still alive, writing and busy, and if possible I may post some more here, but no promises.”