>Hi Ed:
>
>Good points but --- the whole idea of this information age and governance
is
>not necesarily to compete with the experts but for the interested and -
>hopefully intelligent poster to give input and broaden the debate by
sharing
>their opinions and viewpoints. ... A common area or arena where
>debate can take place in which those who have interests, ie the experts and
>policy wonks and lobbyists have to justify their choices by critique by the
>citizen. ... but now those decisions are made in the backroom and
>not even the stakeholders who will be affected by the decisions have input
>other than to present proposals which disappear into a black hole - hardly
>acknowledged - never debated.
>
>but for the first time since the invention of representative democracy, a
>technological methodology makes possible the idea of a blending of direct
>democracy with representional democracy. ... we have to admit that their
will be
>changes and we - living now at the start of the Internet Age will be the
>pioneers who experiment. And that, to me is the key word - experimentation
>and when you experiment in the scientific sense, failure is an appropriate
>response which will eventually lead to success or other directions.
All good points, Thomas. But I'm a bit of a cynic living in some kind of
limbo. I have no use for direct democracy and have, I'm afraid, lost much
of my faith in representational democracy (though it is still the best thing
we have). Perhaps the internet will enable us to arrive at some better form
of governance, some means of debating policy issues that will lead to policy
serving people, and remove us a little further from the problem of people
being made to serve policy.
Ed Weick
