How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era

Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.

I have the feeling that we can all agree

that we're moving towards a new

model of the state and society.

But, we're absolutely clueless as to what this is

or what it should be.

It seems like we need to have

a conversation about democracy

in our day and age.

Let's think about it this way:

We are 21st-century citizens, doing our

very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed
institutions

that are based on an information technology of the 15th century.

Let's have a look at some of the

characteristics of this system.

First of all, it's designed for an information technology

that's over 500 years old.

And the best possible system

that could be designed for it

is one where the few make daily decisions

in the name of the many.

And the many get to vote once every
couple of years.

In the second place, the costs of

participating in this system are

incredibly high.

You either have to have a fair
bit of money

and influence, or you have to devote your entire

life to politics.

You have to become a party member

and slowly start working up the ranks

until maybe, one day, you'll get
to sit at a table

where a decision is being made.

And last but not least,

the language of the system —

it's incredibly cryptic.

It's done for lawyers, by lawyers,

and no one else can understand.

So, it's a system where we can

choose our authorities,

but we are completely left out on how
those authorities

reach their decisions.

So, in a day where a new information technology

allows us to participate globally
in any conversation,

our barriers of information are completely lowered

and we can, more than ever before,

express our desires and our concerns.

Our political system remains the same

for the past 200 years

and expects us to be contented with being
simply passive recipients

of a monologue.

So, it's really not surprising that

this kind of system is only able to produce

two kinds of results:

silence or noise.

Silence, in terms of citizens not engaging,

simply not wanting to participate.

There's this commonplace
[idea] that I truly, truly dislike,

and it's this idea that we citizens are naturally

apathetic. That we shun commitment.

But, can you really blame us

for not jumping at the opportunity of going

to the middle of the city in the middle

of a working day to attend, physically,

a public hearing that has no impact

whatsoever?

Conflict is bound to happen between a system

that no longer represents, nor has any dialogue capacity,

and citizens that are increasingly used

to representing themselves.

And, then we find noise:

Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico
Italy, France, Spain, the United States,

they're all democracies.

Their citizens have access to

the ballot boxes. But they still feel the need,

they need to take to the streets in order
to be heard.

To me, it seems like the 18th-century

slogan that was the basis for the formation

of our modern democracies, "No taxation

without representation,"

can now be updated to "No representation
without a conversation."

We want our seat at the table.

And rightly so.

But in order to be part of this conversation,

we need to know what we want to do next,

because political action is being able

to move from agitation

to construction.

My generation has been incredibly good at

using new networks and technologies

to organize protests,

protests that were able to successfully

impose agendas,

roll back extremely pernicious legislation,

and even overthrow authoritarian governments.

And we should be immensely

proud of this.

But, we also must admit that we

haven't been good at using those

same networks and technologies

to successfully articulate an alternative
to what we're seeing

and find the consensus and build
the alliances that are needed

to make it happen.

And so the risk that we face

is that we can create these huge power vacuums

that will very quickly get filled up by de facto

powers, like the military or highly

motivated and already organized groups

that generally lie on the extremes.

But our democracy is neither

just a matter of voting once every

couple of years.

But it's not either the ability to bring millions
onto the streets.

So the question I'd like to raise here,

and I do believe it's the most important
question we need to answer,

is this one:

If Internet is the new printing press,

then what is democracy for the Internet era?

What institutions do we want to build

for the 21st-century society?

I don't have the answer, just in case.

I don't think anyone does.

But I truly believe we can't afford
to ignore this question anymore.

So, I'd like to share our experience

and what we've learned so far

and hopefully contribute two cents

to this conversation.

Two years ago, with a group of friends
from Argentina,

we started thinking, "how can
we get our representatives,

our elected representatives,

to represent us?"

Marshall McLuhan once said that politics

is solving today's problems with yesterday's tools.

So the question that motivated us was,

can we try and solve some of today's problems

with the tools that we use every single
day of our lives?

Our first approach was to design and develop

a piece of software called DemocracyOS.

DemocracyOS is an open-source web application

that is designed to become a bridge

between citizens and their elected representatives

to make it easier for us to participate
from our everyday lives.

So first of all, you can get informed so every new

project that gets introduced in Congress

gets immediately translated and explained

in plain language on this platform.

But we all know that social change

is not going to come from just knowing

more information,

but from doing something with it.

So better access to information

should lead to a conversation

about what we're going to do next,

and DemocracyOS allows for that.

Because we believe that democracy is

not just a matter of stacking up

preferences, one on top of each other,

but that our healthy and robust public debate

should be, once again, one of its fundamental values.

So DemocracyOS is about persuading
and being persuaded.

It's about reaching a consensus

as much as finding a proper way

of channeling our disagreement.

And finally, you can vote

how you would like your elected
representative to vote.

And if you do not feel comfortable

voting on a certain issue,

you can always delegate your vote

to someone else, allowing

for a dynamic and emerging social leadership.

It suddenly became very easy for us

to simply compare these results

with how our representatives were

voting in Congress.

But, it also became very evident that

technology was not going to do the trick.

What we needed to do to was to find

actors that were able to

grab this distributed knowledge

in society and use it to make better
and more fair decisions.

So we reached out to traditional political parties

and we offered them DemocracyOS.

We said, "Look, here you have a platform
that you can use to build

a two-way conversation with your constituencies."

And yes, we failed.

We failed big time.

We were sent to play
outside like little kids.

Amongst other things, we were called naive.

And I must be honest: I think, in hindsight, we were.

Because the challenges that we face, they're not

technological, they're cultural.

Political parties were never willing

to change the way they make their decisions.

So it suddenly became a bit obvious

that if we wanted to move forward
with this idea,

we needed to do it ourselves.

And so we took quite a leap of faith,

and in August last year, we founded

our own political party,

El Partido de la Red,

or the Net Party, in the city of
Buenos Aires.

And taking an even bigger leap of faith,

we ran for elections in October last year

with this idea:

if we want a seat in Congress,

our candidate, our representatives

were always going to vote according to

what citizens decided on DemocracyOS.

Every single project that got introduced

in Congress, we were going vote

according to what citizens decided
on an online platform.

It was our way of hacking the political system.

We understood that if we wanted

to become part of the conversation,

to have a seat at the table,

we needed to become valid stakeholders,

and the only way of doing it is to play by the
system rules.

But we were hacking it in the sense that

we were radically changing the way a political party

makes its decisions.

For the first time, we were making our decisions

together with those who we were

affecting directly by those decisions.

It was a very, very bold move for a two-month-old party

in the city of Buenos Aires.

But it got attention.

We got 22,000 votes, that's 1.2 percent of the votes,

and we came in second for the local options.

So, even if that wasn't enough to win a

seat in Congress, it was enough

for us to become part of the conversation,

to the extent that next month,

Congress, as an institution, is launching

for the first time in Argentina's history,

a DemocracyOS to discuss,

with the citizens, three pieces of legislation:

two on urban transportation and

one on the use of public space.

Of course, our elected representatives are not

saying, "Yes, we're going to vote

according to what citizens decide,"

but they're willing to try.

They're willing to open up a new space

for citizen engagement and hopefully

they'll be willing to listen as well.

Our political system can be transformed,

and not by subverting it, by destroying it,

but by rewiring it with the tools that

Internet affords us now.

But a real challenge is to find, to design

to create, to empower those connectors

that are able to innovate, to transform

noise and silence into signal

and finally bring our democracies

to the 21st century.

I'm not saying it's easy.

But in our experience, we actually stand a chance

of making it work.

And in my heart, it's most definitely

worth trying.

Thank you.

(Applause)