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“Cognitive surplus (…) represents the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global projects (…) the Internet, mobile phones- that let us do more than consume (…) it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share.”

“What’s going to make a difference here is what Dean Kamen said, the inventor and entrepreneur. Kamen said, free cultures get what they celebrate (…) We can celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. And to the degree we’re going to do that, to the degree we’re able to do that, we’ll be able to change society.

“How cognitive surplus will change the world” by Clay Shirky. TED Talks.

“More participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action (…) social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world’s political movements (…) communicative freedom is good for political freedom.

“The political power of social media” by Clay Shirky, Foreign Affairs.

After reviewing Clay Shiriky’s materials, I felt compelled to dust off “Democratize it,” an idea, which I had put aside for a while.

Back in 2009 I gave a keynote at a private event in Spain, which was attended by executives in the telecommunications industry. I discussed a set of paradigm shifts that are shaping digital communications. One of which is an emerging mindset that transcends Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” to embrace the fact that a rapidly growing number of us “create and we share and, therefore, we are.”

A couple of years before that, I worked on a forward looking research project focusing on how people would best leverage the next generation of mobile broadband services

One of the use cases addressed casual citizen journalism: a student sharing a live video feed of a local demonstration, while her classmates complemented the “news” by providing links to related information as well as their own commentary in real-time, from wherever they happened to be. This scenario leveraged consumer electronics and collaborative social media. See video: 4:44 – 5:40 min.

The fact is that the 2008 presidential election in the U.S. became a turning point for social media: Internet campaigning energized grassroots supporters and delivered a record number of individual small donations.

In the aftermath, it became clear that communication tools such as mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and YouTube were broadly used for public discussions and political speech. Advocacy groups such as Move On.org and, most recently, the Tea Party movement are leveraging social media to mobilize their bases. Moreover, The White House has a YouTube channel.

After watching the “Speakers’ Corner” in action at London’s Hyde Park, one wonders whether the web is doing a better job at enabling public speaking and debate. If so, we should be able to go to a website to start an engaging discussion without that much of a problem. I also wondered if social media be leveraged in our schools as a teaching tool for children to experience participatory democracy.

In the world of Wikipedia and Wikileaks, there might be a need for something such as Wiki-Democracy. I just did a web search and came across the following:

• Democracy Wiki – a wiki
• Wikidemocracy.org – a blog
• Wikidemocracy.org – a LinkedIn group

Though, the “Wiki-Democracy” concept I am referring to is somehow different:

1. non-partisan, user friendly tool enabling anyone to start a public discussion and to get others to actively collaborate;
2. a single sign-on and profile management;
3. a portal with a consistent user interface and campaign management tools: messages, videos, surveys, actual meetings, etc. which this content management service would automatically further populate across mainstream social media channels such as: SMS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress and Meetup, as well as web conferencing tools such as Skype.
4. a dashboard based on a mash-up delivering social media listening and community management tools; easy to track analytics on how the conversation is being shaped and the resulting engagement levels;
5. a recommendations engine bringing up opportunities to extend the reach of the discussion, social network and/or campaign;
6. a cloud based open source platform

Since the above set of requirements didn’t happen to conform to what one would expect from a regular wiki, there was a need for giving it a more descriptive project name: “Democratize it” where “it” is whatever you are campaigning for. Someone suggested that “it” can also be read as “information technologies.” Either way, Democratize it.org would be thought out to advance participatory democracy.

Hoping that this project is of interest to some of you, I would really appreciate your comments and critiques on what it would take to make it happen.

J. de Francisco blogging from Chicago on January 25, 2011

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