Back in April, the Commission launched a new scheme called European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs). The idea here is that, if a proposal for a new pan-EU law gets support from at least a million citizens spread across at least seven member states (out of a current total of 27), the Commission will have to “give serious consideration” to the proposal. If they decide not to push forward with it, they’re obliged to explain themselves.

As with the Finnish system, support can be gathered online. The Commission has come up with open-source software for this and, in July, it invited people to use its own servers.

And today a Luxembourg-based initiative called Fraternité 2020, to do with boosting exchange programs within the EU, became the first ECI to start collecting signatures on the Commission’s servers. A previous ECI called ‘Right 2 Water’ is already running on private hosting.

“This result proves that the Commission is absolutely determined to make this new instrument of participatory democracy a success,” EU vice-president Maroš Šefčovič said in a statement.

Can it work?

This scheme is obviously a very different affair from the crowdsourced politics initiatives going on in Finland and Iceland, and frankly I’m a lot more sceptical about this one.

For a start, this is the first I’ve heard of the entire ECI system – and I only learned of it today because I was in the mood to pore through obscure European Commission press releases. Many people in the EU are barely aware that the Commission exists and, given the scanty coverage that the ECI has received, I’m pretty sure that few people are clued up about the opportunity. Is that deliberate? Hard to tell, as the Commission is not great at communications at the best of times.

A related problem is the size and cohesiveness of the populace that’s being invited to participate.

Finland has just over five million citizens and Iceland has not many more than 300,000. Both are relatively tight societies. The EU as a whole has more than half a billion inhabitants, and cohesion is… an issue.

And what happens when you have a mass-participatory system like this that few people are really paying attention to? You get a golden opportunity for lobbyists to game the system.

In theory, the Commission should catch such attempts, but that’s a big ‘should’. This is the final and perhaps most deadly problem: the EU’s executive branch is, sadly, unelected. Many if not most people do not trust it, and that’s a pretty huge barrier to participatory democracy, no matter how technologically-enabled it is.

There are other problems, too. A huge part of the EU’s cohesiveness challenge is down to the spread of languages across the union and, although the Commission has to screen all the initiatives that go up, it’s refusing to handle translation.

That means the organizers need to translate their initiatives themselves – a barrier that you can see for yourself on the list of open initiatives. It’s hard to get support from people in other countries when they can’t read your proposal.

Time will tell. The first deadlines for signature collections will hit in May 2013, and we’ll see after that whether this online citizens’ initiative drive is worth the pixels it’s written on. But I suspect that the challenges presented by the extremely challenging European Union will make this a whole different ballgame from the ones being played in Northern Europe’s smaller societies.

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And it seems to be paying off. On Saturday the country held a referendum asking voters six questions about the draft, the first of which was whether they wanted to go ahead with using it as the basis for their new constitution. Two thirds voted yes.

Which makes sense, if you think about it. Give the people a chance to feed into the drafting, taking advantage of the internet’s convenience and low barriers, and they’ll stand behind the result.

Out of the ashes

Here’s a quick run-down of the background to all this. Iceland’s banking system collapsed right at the start of the financial crisis, taking the country’s government with it. The new leadership decided to go the open route, not least because secretive dealings were largely to blame for the banking fiasco.

There were two technologically interesting spinoffs of this situation. One was the creation of the Modern Media Initiative (now the International Modern Media Institute), a Wikileaks-inspired free speech drive – the idea here is to turn Iceland into an haven for free speech by inviting media organizations from around the world to host their sites in Iceland’s green data centers and enjoy the country’s strong new protections for whistleblowers and the like.

The other was the constitutional crowdsourcing. Iceland’s old constitution was based on that of former master Denmark and was seen as out-of-date, so 25 citizens were brought into into a Constitutional Council to help create a new one. The council took the ideas raised online by their fellow citizens and delivered the resulting draft in July last year. It took a while to ask the voting public at large what it thought of the result, but Iceland now has its answer to that question.

According to reports, nearly half of Iceland’s 235,000 eligible voters took part in the referendum, and 66 percent of those people said they wanted the new official constitution to be based on the crowdsourced draft.

But that result is non-binding, and the parliament now has to decide whether or not it’s going to turn the draft into reality.

As in the case of Finland’s crowdsourced laws, elected representatives are given the final say over proposals made online. In a representative democracy, that’s pretty much how things should work – if you elect people to represent you, you’re entrusting them with doing just that.

The important thing in both the Icelandic and Finnish cases is that technology is being used to give more normal people a say, while ensuring that the politicians are forced to listen and cannot just sweep popular proposals under the carpet. Because the clever thing with crowdsourcing is that the proposals are public and open and impossible to ignore.

Now it’s up to the Icelandic parliament to show it’s taking this process seriously. We won’t have long to wait to see whether or not this is the case: the constitution is supposed to be finalized before the next election, in the spring of 2013.

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Earlier this year, the Finnish government enabled something called a “citizens’ initiative”, through which registered voters can come up with new laws – if they can get 50,000 of their fellow citizens to back them up within six months, then the Eduskunta (the Finnish parliament) is forced to vote on the proposal.

Now this crowdsourced law-making system is about to go online through a platform called the Open Ministry. The non-profit organization has been collecting signatures for various proposals on paper since 1 March, when citizens’ initiatives came in, but a couple of days ago the government approved the electronic ID mechanism that underpins the digital version of the platform. That means it can now go live on 1 October.

“The National Communications Security Authority audited our code, our security policies and our service/hosting providers to ensure that the details of citizens are safe and can’t be hacked into,” Open Ministry founder Joonas Pekkanen told me via email. “[The system verifies] the people’s identity through the APIs offered by banks and mobile operators. So people can sign the initiatives online with the online banking codes or their mobile phones.”

What’s more, the banks and operators are providing the use of their strong verification APIs for free, as part of their social responsibility policies. Welcome to Finland!

Could it work elsewhere?

There are clear similarities to be found between the Finnish model and that being experimented with by the German Pirate Party, but the Open Ministry platform is somewhat less radical and less likely to be derailed by endless collaborative editing. The first batch of proposals on the Finnish platform is pretty varied: a ban on fur farming, a requirement for all public software procurement to take into account open data and APIs, a ban on energy drinks for under-16s, and a referendum on Finland’s restrictive alcohol laws (the government has a monopoly and prices are sky-high).

Assuming they get their 50,000 signatures (the fur-farming one has already amassed 43,500 paper signatures), each will have to be voted on by the Eduskunta. Compare that with, for example, the UK system – there, an e-petition that garners 100,000 backers wins the grand prize of being considered by a government back-office and maybe being discussed in Parliament.

But could it work elsewhere? On a technical level, there is little reason why not. Indeed, the Open Ministry platform is (naturally) open-source and available on GitHub. “We encourage anyone to fork and contribute to it and use it in other countries also,” Pekkanen said.

But a lot of this drive for openness has a cultural and political basis. Perhaps it has something to do with the cold winters (as suggested to me by representatives of the Finnish Innovation Fund in Helsinki this week) or their small-ish populations, but the Nordic countries tend to have relatively close societies where people are enthusiastic about pitching into civic life. Politically, Iceland provides a great example with its partly-crowdsourced constitution.

And in terms of civic-minded tech projects that capitalize on open data, Finland has a particularly impressive roster. Just a few examples:

• The Helsinki Region Infoshare project, which collates and offers up municipal datasets.
• APIs for official campaign-funding audit data.
• The crowdsourced digitization of Finland’s national archives.

That’s give-and-take activity, with some projects engendering trust between citizenry and government, and others benefitting from trust being there in the first place – people are less likely to contribute to an officially-sanctioned project if they think it’s pointless or exploitative. By way of a slightly frivolous example, where but somewhere like Finland would you find a national patient health records co-operative with this tagline?

Tech-driven democracy fans in other countries may not find the environment as conducive to crowdsourced legislation right now, but on the other hand they just got themselves a model to study. If crowdsourced legislation is going to work anywhere, Finland would be the right place for it to happen.

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The new facility, to be located on an old NATO base in Iceland, will run solely on geothermal and hydroelectric power, the availability of which make Iceland attractive for building data centers. 

Colt built the 37 modules that will make up the 500-square-meter facility and will ship them to Keyflavik, Iceland, for installation next month and to be operational within four months, according to a blog post by Bernard Geoghagan, executive vice president of Colt’s data center services.

Geoghagan wrote:

This will be the first wholesale data centre space in Iceland, and the first dual sourced 100% renewable powered data centre in the world.

Data center energy use is in the spotlight, especially as cloud computing initiatives ramp up. In 2010, data centers worldwide used 1.5 percent of all electricity, up 56 percent from 2005.

Colt built and will assemble the containers and foundation infrastructure–power supplies and cabling; HVAC; security and monitoring systems; lighting and flooring for the facility. Verne will supply the computing resources and fiber optic cabling on site.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Martin_VMorris

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Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early supporter of WikiLeaks, said that despite having had a falling out with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his role in the organization, she is willing to “stand up and stick my neck out for him” and defend the document-leaking entity against attacks by the U.S. government and others, because doing so is her duty. “We must all stand behind WikiLeaks and defend freedom of information and freedom of speech,” Jónsdóttir said in a presentation at the University of Toronto on Tuesday night, in which she also called on media outlets to support the organization. Jónsdóttir also said “even if they chop the head off WikiLeaks, a thousand more heads will come out.”

The Icelandic MP didn’t talk a lot about the WikiLeaks leader, except to say that “WikiLeaks is bigger than Julian Assange.” But she did talk about how she met him at a conference in 2009, while she and her party were developing proposed legislation in Iceland called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and Assange was looking for a “transparency haven” that could help the organization. The IMMI legislation is aimed at helping to protect freedom of information and whistleblowers like WikiLeaks who leak documents — something Iceland as a whole is also interested in, because many believe that more whistleblowing could have helped the country avoid its financial meltdown in 2008.

Jónsdóttir and Assange started working together, and in the spring of last year he showed her a copy of the infamous U.S. military video of American bombers firing on a civilian vehicle during an attack in Iraq. The Icelandic MP described how she watched the video in a crowded cafe and began to cry — and at that point decided to help WikiLeaks get publicity for the video, which she said she was afraid would get lost amid all the other leaked documents on the organization’s website. Jónsdóttir spent her Easter holiday editing the video, including pulling out still photographs to send to various media outlets. WikiLeaks even sent people to Iraq to the village where the attack took place, to confirm whether there were children in the van.

WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange

That video was the beginning of an explosion of interest in WikiLeaks, which culminated with the leaking of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables late last year, and the current attempt by the U.S. government to mount a case against Assange under the Espionage Act. As part of that effort, the Department of Justice has gotten a court order that compels Twitter to release certain information — including messages, IP addresses and other details — about the personal accounts of Jónsdóttir, Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and American programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Jónsdóttir has said that she will resist this order, and has hired the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help with her defense.

In her talk, Jónsdóttir also freely admitted that she was completely unprepared for entering government. A member of a loosely-affiliated group of human rights protesters known simply as The Movement, she only volunteered to run for office because there weren’t enough female candidates, she said — and “to my great shock, I actually won, and I was in parliament two weeks later.” But the MP, who is an author and a poet, said that she believed her ignorance of the ways of government was a benefit rather than a disadvantage, because it meant that she could look at everything with fresh eyes and try things that others might not, including pushing forward the idea of the IMMI legislation.

Jónsdóttir said the idea behind the initiative — which was unanimously supported by the Icelandic parliament in a vote last summer — is to create the most advanced freedom-of-information and whistleblower-protection legislation in the world. The group looked at laws protecting freedom of speech and freedom of information in dozens of major countries and cherry-picked what they thought were the best ones. “The Internet is becoming industrialized and corporatized,” she said. “We need to make sure we don’t lose our freedom of speech and freedom of information.” Here’s a video interview that Jónsdóttir did with the public television station TVO while she was in Toronto:

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Voltairenet

Updated: Does the world need a refuge for information provided by whistle-blowers and others who leak or publish sensitive and/or secret documents? Iceland’s parliament seems to think so — they have just overwhelmingly approved a bill that would create exactly that kind of refuge, an initiative that started with a proposal from Wikileaks, the secretive organization that has quickly become the leading source of such material. Whether anyone wants to join Iceland and Wikileaks in this crusade remains to be seen, however.

The Icelandic bill is the product of something called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which was apparently jump-started by technology guru John Perry Barlow when he spoke there in 2008, according to The Economist. The project says its goal is to find ways to “strengthen freedoms of expression and information freedom in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers,” and is based in part on laws in several other countries such as Sweden, which makes it a criminal offense for a journalist to reveal a source. The initiative goes on to say that:

We can create a comprehensive policy and legal framework to protect the free expression needed for investigative journalism and other politically important publishing. While some countries provide basic measures, Iceland now has an oportunity to build an internationally attractive legislative package built from the best laws of other nations.

Wikileaks started talking with Iceland about its role in such a venture last year, and the idea was described by founder Julian Assange at a hacker conference in December (video of which is embedded below). Ironically, the northern nation’s interest in the proposal was sparked in part by that country’s experience with the international banking crisis, in which several of Iceland’s banks lost billions. Critics within Iceland argued that there was not enough public information about the investments, and the country’s public broadcaster was actually prevented from talking about it by one of the major banks.

Wikileaks, meanwhile, had been looking for support for its mission, which is to bring to light information about corporate and governmental malfeasance and corruption by releasing secret and classified documents. The group’s current claim to fame rests on a video that it obtained which showed American troops firing on unarmed civilians in Iraq. The provider of the video has since been identified as U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who has been arrested. Manning also apparently gave the group a number of other classified documents, including videos of a military attack in Afghanistan.

It’s easy to see why Iceland was persuaded by the Wikileaks story, given the country’s experiences during the financial crisis. Whether its attempt to become an oasis for secrets and other confidential data will have any impact outside Iceland is another matter entirely. But given the kinds of corporate and governmental cover-ups that have occurred over the past few decades, starting with Afghanistan and the Enron debacle and going all the way back to the My Lai massacre and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers (to which Wikileaks and the current military video have been compared), it’s encouraging to see that someone is at least trying to create such a thing.

Update: Silicon Valley Watcher notes that Iceland is bandwidth-constrained, which would have an impact on anyone who chose to locate media servers in that country, although Iceland has been laying cables in an attempt to build up its hosting abilities.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Amy

The Icelandic volcano eruption that stranded hundreds of thousands of travellers in Europe and elsewhere on Friday showed no signs of letting up on the weekend, continuing to belch a plume of ash that covered much of the European continent. Airlines — which by Friday evening had already canceled more flights than at any time since the attacks of September 11 in New York — were still refusing to take bookings for new flights into next week, stranding passengers for days without connecting flights. Some took matters into their own hands: comedian and actor John Cleese, for example, hired a taxi to take him from Norway to Belgium, at a cost of almost $7,000.

Others turned to Twitter and Facebook to try and find rooms for the night, or alternate travel plans involving boats, trains and other forms of transportation. In addition to the hashtag that had quickly come to be used after the eruption on Friday — #ashtag, which continued to gain steam — another also started to take hold on Saturday: @getmehome, as well as #roadsharing and #stranded. Travellers asked for accomodations, others offered them, and groups helping those stranded co-ordinated their actions using social tools, including the Roadsharing site. On Sunday, Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum posted a message saying that Twitter “has been an incredible lifeline these last few days.” He later wrote a blog post about his experiences with social media. (David Weinberger was less impressed with the way the rest of the Internet handled the volcano disruption).

Some, like Rita J. King, CEO of Dancing Ink Productions, blogged their predicament (King said she is planning to turn her blog post into a talk at the impromptu TEDxVolcano event in London on Sunday night). Others shared photos of their surroundings, or of the volcano itself, including an incredible image of lightning forking through the clouds of ash (there are also some great photos of the ash cloud posted to Flickr by Baldvin Hansson, who flew over the volcano). Someone even set up a Twitter account for the ash cloud, which had over 1,000 followers by the end of Saturday. Information is Beautiful chose to look on the bright side and calculated the positive side of the lack of airplane traffic, and First Round Capital decided to have an impromptu meeting with startups, since some of the firm’s VCs were stuck in Europe by the ash cloud. The New York Times has a map of all the affected airports, which it is updating regularly as new reports come in.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Cessna 206

Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group and its volunteers, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their production meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. In a blog post on the Wikileaks site, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the spying “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.”

Wikileaks believes the surveillance campaign is driven in part by the fact that it has obtained “a classified military video showing civilian kills by U.S. pilots” in Afghanistan. The group has said that it plans to release details about the video in a press briefing on April 5. In the blog post, Assange alleges that a Wikileaks volunteer was recently detained by police on a “wholly insignificant matter” and was shown photos of Assange outside the Icelandic Fish & Chips shop in Reykjavik, where a production meeting had been held to review the bombing-run video. Wikileaks later described this incident on its Twitter feed, saying, “We have been shown secret photos of our production meetings and been asked specific questions during detention related to the airstrike.”

In another Twitter message, the group said, “If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film.” Assange also says in the blog post that after taking a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen to speak at an investigative journalism conference, the group got a tip that they were under surveillance and checked the records for the flight (he doesn’t say how this was accomplished) to find “two individuals, recorded as brandishing diplomatic credentials, checked in for my flight…under the name of ‘US State Department.’ The two are not recorded as having any luggage.”

According to the Wikileaks blog post, there are a number of possible reasons for the U.S. government to be spying on the group, including:

• the classified film “revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S. general, David Petraeus.”
• the release of “a classified 32 page U.S. intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks”
• the release of “a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the UK over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.”
• pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic “oligarchs”

Assange says that Wikileaks has been the subject of a number of suspicious government-related spying attempts, intimidation and harassment over the years, including what he describes as the assassination of two human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March and an “armed attack on my compound there in 2007,” as well as an attack by Chinese computers on Wikileaks servers in Stockholm after the site published photos of murders in Tibet. He also says that a Wikileaks member was “ambushed” in a Luxembourg parking garage by a “James Bond” character.

Wikileaks has recently been raising money to continue its efforts, and has also been working with members of the Icelandic government to try and create an “information haven” in that country.

Post photo courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver_2000, thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user practical owl

According to recent statements by an Icelandic member of parliament, described in a post at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab blog, that country’s government plans to put forward legislation on Tuesday that could create an international repository for leaked documents, exposed corporate and government secrets, and other information provided by investigative journalists and whistle-blowers alike. If that sounds a lot like what the Wikileaks web site does, it should — the founders of Wikileaks have been instrumental in pushing Iceland to make the proposal.

Iceland has been receptive to such ideas because the country’s economy has been shattered by the recent banking crisis, which many believe was the result of government incompetence and exacerbated by corporate and governmental secrecy. It led to a change in government and a series of legislative moves to protect whistle-blowers, freedom of information, etc. It’s not clear how the Wikileaks founders got in contact with Iceland’s political representatives, but talks have reportedly been continuing for some time.

Wikileaks has been engaged in a struggle for funding to carry on its non-profit crusade to expose corporate and government corruption and ineptitude, a crusade that has gained a high profile through such incidents as the Trafigura scandal in Britain, the release of thousands of text messages sent during the 9/11 attacks, and a case involving former presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account. Wikileaks recently said it had received enough financing to continue operating.

On a somewhat ironic note, given the freedom-of-information slant of the news, the Nieman Lab post appears to have broken an embargo on the story to which some other parties had agreed. Nieman Lab head Josh Benton justifies his decision in a comment on the blog post, saying that: a) he didn’t agree to any embargo, b) the information involves a government and is therefore newsworthy and arguably not subject to embargoes, and c) the information is already widely known.

Although it’s not clear whether the proposed legislation will be successful in Iceland, the Nieman Lab post says the idea has the support of the leaders of the Left-Green Movement, the Social Democratic Alliance and the Citizen Movement, representing a total of 38 of Iceland’s 63 parliamentary seats. In the video below, from the 26th Chaos Communications Congress — an annual hacker conference held in Berlin — two of the founders of Wikileaks describe their vision of what a freedom-of-information haven in Iceland might look like and how it might function as what they call a “Switzerland of bits.”

http://www.youtube.com/v/VWNfIvG4z-g&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user orvaratli

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