Lawrence Lessig, founding father of Creative Commons, announced his new initiative – change-congress.org. It’s an idea to promote basic reform of United States Congress and fundamental principles that in reality steer it – corporate money. The campaign is using basic technological tools like Google Maps mash-up, together with Wiki’s and pledges to start building public awareness and help keeping track of who said what and how they kept with their promises.
This is an idea that I’m deeply excited about. Even though hanging US congress does not affect me, I love it for the meme it brings to the world. As with Creative Commons that started as US initiative and then with time ported to most of the World countries, it brings the hope, as collateral damage, also to countries like Slovenia.
While I am not a lawyer or a political scientist, I like to think myself as a hacker and with that it makes me want to build similarly inspiring things in my local environment. It also allows me to take a look what other fellow hackers built and then start asking locals here, how this ideas map to our situation?
My call out to Slovenian and also Europeans (regarding the EU legislation) that are more intimate with political scene:
- what is our equivalent regarding US PACs and lobbyists?
- do we have “earmarks” problem?
- what are local initiatives for more transparent parliament?
- and how do we compare regarding the public funding of elections?
(adopted from C-C.org)
With some help of a local groups like e-demokracija.si or kiberpipa.org, we could firstly map in a wiki-like the differences and then start forming local issues. Hopefully with time people won’t think anymore that our Slovenian government is fully corrupt and bad because thee will be full transparent accountability that is not felt right now.