Interview by Electronic Government master’s student

[MrPerfect72]

Interview by Ovid Pacific Boyd, E-Government master’s student.
("•" is a follow-up question)

Section 1: Aktiv Demokrati’s beginning

1. Why were you inspired to become involved with Aktiv Demokrati?
I was brought up in a political family believing in fairness and moral standards. I was told in school how things worked in politics. Nobody told me about the existing corruption and how it undermined the democracy. In my case a local leader in an established party made me start to question our entire democracy and the way it worked. - Could it really be called a “democracy”? I also saw how there was no party that could represent my ideas well enough in all fields and it felt that people were brainwashed into beliefs by mass psychology. I came up with the idea that it would be better to have an Internet based democracy and searched the Internet for it and found it. People were already doing exactly what I was looking for in a very positive manner.

• How is today’s political system corrupt?
In many different ways. There is friendship corruption. The word “sosseadel” (freely translated: social democratic nobles) in wikipedia explains one part of it, but in my opinion it can bee seen in all political parties. There is a thing called “valberedning” (freely translated: election preparation) which in my opinion is corrupt again and again in many political parties on all different levels. The people who want to have good positions try to corrupt the “valberedning” or influence it in an immoral way. There are corrupt decisions being made that benefits the politicians and not the people they represent. There is influence on politicians by big companies and politicians making careers in business in the same companies after they quit as politicians. There are politicians with capital interests abroad getting positions so that they can benefit themselves. The list goes on and on.

The root cause for corruption is first of all human greed and lack of peoples influence over democratic process which makes it possible for greedy persons to benefit. It will however change in the future and all this will go away. The People will make decisions to benefit people instead.

• What did this politician do that made you question the entire democracy?
It is not important who and were. I do not wish to hurt them. The person did learn a lesson when I exposed the person who was immoral in front of the party. For me it was a definite eye opener that greed is number one priority for many people, and I realized that these people probably can be found in the top of most organizations. This made me sick, because I really believed that the organization of my choice was different. It was not. It is built into the system, therefore the system must change. Our greed, because it is human, must be used to think long term, then it is logical. Then people who really deserve to rule will rule in the end.

2. How was Aktiv Demokrati founded?
The party was founded by a private person as an open wiki at first.

• How did this wiki transform into today’s political party?
Many reasons. The wiki was at first open for all and that made it possible for a totally anonymous rasist to put illegal material on our page. We had also a proposition from membro.se that we changed to. This was however a bad idea because they soon charged us to much for further use. That is why we now use GPL software.


3. What kinds of activities were undertaken first?
Forming the political program without putting values else than direct democracy in it and the idea of how the processes and software should be working.

• Why do you think it is important that the party’s only value be direct democracy?
Any other idea as a core value would be counterproductive and just lock people out from discussion if they can not accept the party standpoint. The closer we can bring people with different standpoints, the better. It increases understanding between cultures. Following the law is of course necessary.

4. How was the party’s manifesto written?
It was originally written by one person and has then been changed by active members continuously democratically.

• How do you go about changing the manifesto? Is it done via wiki?
A new manifesto or changes of the old manifesto over any wiki is of course possible, but if it is accepted or not is a vote through our phpBB-forum.

5. Were there any disagreements about strategy or direction among members?
Yes. People push different areas individually. Final decision is democratic if no other good compromise can be found.

• How do you go about democratically solving disagreements?
Discussion, to bring standpoints closer together by bringing up new creative solutions that more people can agree on, compromise and finally a vote.

• Is there any disagreement that stands out especially strongly in your mind?
Yes. The question about people who dislike the level of immigration and if they should be included in the discussions or not. People have problems sometimes to separate illegal standpoints from legal. My standpoint is that all legal standpoints should be allowed in the party.

6. Based on the 2006 election results in Sweden, a number of people voted for the Aktiv Demokrati party. What was this campaign like?
I did a lot of interviews with people on the streets and about 30% are positive. We had 1 minute of pre-recorded video on national TV (TV3) for free (can be seen on our homepage) and we also had a spokesperson in the studio. Government controlled channels did not mention us or what we stand for. They could possibly be afraid of their employers (the politicians from established parties). We had 25000 ballots printed and distributed with our own private money/time.

• What were these street interviews like?
Fun. I love people. I had a lot of good response.

• Did other members conduct street interviews as well?
Not that I know of but I am sure many did tell friends and relatives, because I was sent signatures by different people.

• How did you manage to get the video on TV for free?
We were invited.

• By ballots, do you mean advertising brochures about your party?
No. I mean the actual bill with personal names on it that you can choose from and use for voting.

• Where did you distribute these materials and why did you distribute them to these people?
I distributed them close to where I lived.

7. What was learned from this experience?
We have learned that:
* No money is available from the government for parties below 2%, while people involuntary pay much money through tax for all established parties and their propaganda. Therefore it will take a lot of engagement and idealism to get this going in the beginning. It will come.

• How do you hope to get funds? Or do you mean you will try to operate with just lots of engagement and idealism but little funding?
If the right person filled with belief in democracy decides to fund us we will have a lot of funding. However I do it for myself and my children. I have a long perspective and it is a kind of egoism to be an idealist. A good egoism. It feels nice to do good every day.

We have learned that: * People who do know about us and who vote for us loose their possibility to influence the established political blocks because of the 4%-barrier. It might be one explanation for low rate in the elections. However, people who understand the importance of increased democracy and the importance of looking further into the future voted for us anyway. The votes will come in the future.

• Is your call to other small parties to join together into a direct democratic party in response to this problem?
Yes.

We have learned that: * Because of the electing system with ballots having to be distributed privately in mailboxes and in voting places we can only succeed by having a lot of idealism and people who are willing to sacrifice time and money for a greater good. We have some, but we need more of these motivated people. They will come soon.

• How do you hope to recruit more motivated people?
I do it with love for them and myself and our children. Motivation comes from within. Idealism comes with the possibility to think far into the future and do the right thing today according to the big perspective. It is nice to do it. Try it!

Section 2: How Aktiv Demokrati works

• What kinds of offline activities and meetings have been part of Aktiv Demokrati?
So far only the first building of paragraphs to register us as an organization and of course locally and some people who are friends and meet. Some programmers have met and done programming together.

1. Your manifesto describes the Aktiv Demokrati system in detail. What kind of effort has been done in actually developing the system?
Programming has been done by voluntary programmers but it has not yet been dazzling. It will be soon I believe.

2. How do you plan to produce this information system?
We trust in the open source community and will probably use software such as Linux and phpBB which goes under GPL (General Public licence) for safety reasons and independence. Some programmers have made efforts and come close to specification but has not yet followed through. It is only a matter of time before programmers with ability will dazzle the world, as Linux once did, for the exact same reasons. The other stuff is not working properly and is not open for adjustment.

• So, your party is building an open source eDemocracy system itself? Or you hope to use tools developed by other open source projects?
Some try. We have expressed what we want in a design document but will probably use the first tool that will work better than phpBB. Initially we cannot be too picky.

• Does this software have a SourceForge webpage?
No not our exact specification but there is http://edemocrazy.sourceforge.net/

• You say, thus far, the programming isn’t dazzling. What kind of work has actually been done on it so far?
Some. We recommend all programmers to publish on sourceforge under GPL. We cannot afford loosing good code. It should be shared between us so all people including programmers will benefit.

3. How is the Aktiv Demokrati movement organized?
As a direct democracy by the members continuously over the internet.

• Are the decisions made on your web forums?
Yes.

• How does the process of coming to a decision work? Is it discussion on the forums until some sort of consensus is reached?
Yes usually, but there are issues that do not come to consensus and then there have to be a vote.

4. What roles do you play in the party?
I service the party selflessly to keep it going in the areas I find important and where I can be a resource. I am officially president of the party, but that is of no importance because of the direct democracy by the members within the party. I feel equally responsible for results as any other Swedish person with the knowledge of our party. I just do what I can and hope others will do the same.

• So, there are no specific responsibilities or expectations on being the president?
No, except for official responsibilities such as legal ones.

• What other official positions are there within the party?
Vice president, cashier, secretary, members of board. Not that we really like all the hustle, but it is required by all official organizations.
Section 3: How others see Aktiv Demokrati

5. How has the media responded to Aktiv Demokrati?
Very little. In local media it has been easier to be heard.

• What kind of work has your party done with local media?
We have gotten some publicity through members and journalists locally. Work has consisted of writing to newspapers. I have been on local radio when I had the chance.
Section 4: The future

1. What is Aktiv Demokrati’s strategy over the next few years?
This issue is member controlled.

• So, do the members focus the party more on short-term activities?
No, anything is possible. It is up to all of us.

2. What will Aktiv Demokrati’s legacy (bestående avtryck) be 50 years from now?
This issue is member controlled.

• What do you want Aktiv Demokrati’s legacy to be?
AD has slowly, step by step, taken over the parliament with more than 2/3 and people have changed the constitution to be a pure direct democratic constitution.
Other countries has done the same and a new internationally strong and true direct democratic UN has been formed without the undemocratic veto. Dictatorship after dictatorship has fallen. Imaginary corrupt democracies, s.c. “corpocrazies” are no more. Illiteracy has been eradicated. Computers and internet are everywhere at a reasonable price. Corruption has been eradicated. Poverty has been eradicated and birth control is functional all over the planet. The population is stable and on a healty decline towards reasonable levels. War is no more, because people simply do not buy it. They are to smart to follow any warlords thanks to mind opening discussions.

Thank you so much for your friendly answers! This last bit isn’t a question for the interview, but an answer to the question you wrote.

Martin returns: By the way, could an established politician misinterpret “electronic government” as if he/she is about to control politics with his/her home PC? This is absolutely not the idea of direct democracy.
Ovid: At least in our Electronic Government program, we usually define eGovernment as any use of ICT by government. This includes things unrelated to democracy, such as tax databases, etc.

Usually eDemocracy and e-participation are used to refer to government uses of ICT specifically for democratic purposes. But these do not necessarily refer to direct democratic uses, they could refer to the websites of traditional political parties for instance. Or projects like Interlegis, a system that connects legislatures at the local, state and national level in Brazil, is an eDemocracy project, even though it has nothing to do with direct democracy and is specially designed to improve communication within representative democracy.

I made this continuum for a paper once:
----
elite-run society advanced societal data-mining citizen profiling service fees service delivery internal democratization citizen decision making people-run society
----
citizen influencing and control citizen monitoring citizen registration office automation administrative transparency citizen consulting citizen run government
----

eAuthoritarianism eGovernment eDemocracy
---

Which I like cause it points out not only that some usage of ICT is more democratic than others, but that some government ICT use, like policing and monitoring applications, are in fact potentially anti-democratic. I made up that term eAuthoritarianism for them. The idea with this continuum is that you could define an eGovernment project by whether it is mostly just about neutral government efficiency gains, or could have also have positive or negative democratic effects.

I have read some studies about how supportive, or unsupportive, political elites tend to be towards direct democracy. I could send you some if you are interested in reading about this question.

Once again, thanks for your involvement!
Ovid Pacific Boyd
Electronic Government international master’s student
Örebro Universitet

o v i d *at* m e t a m o r p h i c a *dot* net
0 7 3 7 - 1 5 9 8 3 4

[Magnus Gustavsson]

Any errors or need for additional info shold be posted here or directly to Ovid within a week.
BR/
Magnus

Hello, Ovid!
Sorry for the delay but here comes the answers on your interview:

Section 1: Aktiv Demokrati's beginning
1. Why were you inspired to become involved with Aktiv Demokrati?

-I saw the lack of real sense and even contaproductive decisions made by the traditional politicians. Many have the best whiches but can't work effectively in a partisan system only made to perserve the power and structures in politics.



2. How was Aktiv Demokrati founded?

- A number of students in computer science at Linköpings University had a discussion over lunch after the elections of 2002.





3. What were the original goals of Aktiv Demokrati?

-Same as today, to transfer the power from the political elite to the people, or at least to those interested in politics.





4. What kinds of activities were undertaken first?

-More discussions over the forms for this unconventional party, followed by a wiki page where the first statutes, voting algorithm, rules etc. where developed.





5. How was the party's manifesto written?

-On the wiki by all founders more or less.





6. Were there any disagreements about strategy or direction among members?

-Strategy is always on the agenda and have been revised several times. Today, only two or three of the original founders are still active in the party.

But the corner stone of the strategy, to get elected into the Swedish parliament and once there start to work in a totally new way in order to gain more and more support when the citizens and media of Sweden sees the shortcomings of the traditional parties.

The disagreements have mostly been about the order and way the electronic voting system should be developed and which importance that will have for the success of the party.





7. Based on the 2006 election results in Sweden, a number of people voted for the Aktiv Demokrati party. What was this campaign like?

-Due to lack of both money and party workers, we tried to use internet as our main channel. We see our target groups existing there already to a large extent and it has been seen in other countries that Internet is beginning to take over as a communication platform, even for traditional politics.

We also delivered about 20000 voting slips, some together with a flyer on the streets and in mailboxes. We had one party worker out for almost 50 days on the streets of Växjö.

We wrote several debate articles to tha major newspapers but only small papers published them. We took part in as many debate forums as possible on the internet in order to promote our ideas or at least our partys existance.





8. What was learned from this experience?

-Mass-communication isn't easy. Even if we might have used internet in an effective way given our resources, much more could have been done with some money for small ads on homepages, textTV, etc.

And many more election workers could have made the difference, both on the internet and in RL.

The clooser election day we came, the more obvious it was how the traditional parties have put themselves in the safe chair by using the tax-payers money for mass advertisement only for themselves (only if you hade 1.5% of the votes in last elections you will get some support as a new party).

In order to get though that, a new party have to spnd even more to reach the election tires voters the days before election day.

One lesson learned is that the day we are known by our target groups, we will most likely be able to use only internet to build up the interest before the next elections.





9. How have the ambitions and tactics changed since the beginning?

-I think ambition is the same, it's only about how to get there as quick as possible that has been discussed. See more above.



Section 2: How Aktiv Demokrati works
1. Your manifesto describes the Aktiv Demokrati system in detail. What kind of effort has been done in actually developing the system?

-To few unfortunately. It is sad to see that the computer students that probably hade the skill to do the work, got tired even before they started.





2. How do you plan to produce this information system?

-This is constantly up to discussion, hopefully the task will attract many skilled programmers on SourceForge or similar open source communities. If it was possible to develop something like Linux just in freetime during a few years, we see this task to be finished in a few months once enough programmers are involved.





3. How is the Aktiv Demokrati movement organized?

-Basicly as any party with the important difference that we already is working direct democratically. The voting system have the status "temporary" -meaning that it is not functioning exactly as described in the statutes. But there is no chance to a power takeover or such by an individual or inner circle since all decisions made are taken by the transparent votingsystem (open voting on our forum).

This means that all members have exactly the same power.



4. What roles do you play in the party?

-Currently I'm elected to one of the few posts needed for practical running of the party; accounter and registrator of members.





5. What real political effects has Aktiv Demokrati had thus far?

-None, visible. But we are convinced that our actions are followed by the traditional parties which probably will try to pretend that they also have "real democracy", as soon as Aktiv demokrati is beginning to gain gravity.



Section 3: How others see Aktiv Demokrati
1. Who are Aktiv Demokrati's biggest supporters?

-Free thinkers who have given up the hope for the traditional parties and their abilities.





2. What kinds of responses have Swedish citizens had to Aktiv Demokrati?

-First suspicion (are we alien-hostile, communists, insane etc etc..) followed by questions that we think we have managed to answer to a big extent.





3. How has the media responded to Aktiv Demokrati?

-As described above, by trying to ignore us. Only some minor newspapers have written, but on the other hand quite big article over more than one page.

One small notice in a local edition of Göteborgs-Posten (but a big picture at least), one small news feature in local TV in Gävle.

The largest coverage was that we was invited to a 2 hour debate some two weeks before election day in TV3 together with all other small parties aiming for the elections 2006.: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3518216

Ofcourse a kind of freakshow, but what are a small partys' options?



4. Have any traditional political parties taken interest in Aktiv Demokrati's call to work together?

-No




5. What kinds of contact has Aktiv Demokrati had with other eDemocracy parties?

-We have contact with them all. We have also invited most of the small parties to a cooperation work in order to break the 4% backstop: http://wse75376.web16.talkactive.net/PH ... .php?t=405





Section 4: The future
1. What is Aktiv Demokrati's strategy over the next few years?

-To grow by members in order to build gravity and critical mass. This is also necessary to find enough interested programmers who can create our voting system, more attractive homepage, forum etc.





2. How will you make Aktiv Demokrati part of the government?

-Only way is to get elected into the parliament. Well there the traditional parties will try to ignore us as they do with all small parties in possible. But in the case of Aktivdemokrati, the ignorance will strike back differently since Aktivdemokrati gives membership to all citizens with voting rights for the parliament. Ignoring such a party will look like ignoring the people. In paralell we can dig out a lot of information that is difficult to retrive from outside and put it on the agenda as never seen before.

In total we will remap the political landscape by only a few mandates in the parliament.

And the coming election will be a final verdict of Aktivdemokrati vs the traditional parties.





3. What will Aktiv Demokrati's legacy (bestående avtryck) be 50 years from now?

-A real pioneer that totally changed politics from the ground!





4. How do you want society to be organized in the future?

-It is totally up to our members but we don't see very large changes from here.

It is the decisions made today that are wrong, not the structure so much, but it's up to the members ofcourse.



5. What do you think is the best strategy for achieving that society?

-To get Aktivdemokrati into the Swedish parliament!



Section 5: Your reflections and interpretations
1. Why does Sweden need Aktiv Demokrati?

-The traditional political system fails in increasing freqensy to take the correct and fair decisions. This is due to the built in shortcomings of representative democracy. As all democracies, the respect from the people is very important in order to preserve democracy itself. We can se many signs on that this respect is disintegrating more and more due to corruption and personal erratic moves by the politicians.

In order to avoid much more anti-democratic movements such as facism or worse, it is neccessary to improve the language of democracy to the final and purest form.





2. What is the biggest mistake Aktiv Demokrati has made?

-Not been enough engaged in the growth of the party/membership/supporters.





3. What has been the most frustrating thing about working for Aktiv Demokrati?

-That a party founded by computer programmers still don't have a voting system as described for years.





4. What are the biggest obstacles to Aktiv Demokrati's success?

-People might loose interest if they find the progress too slow. To loose an engaged member is even worse than not have found him yet.





5. What could be done to improve Aktiv Demokrati?

-More attractive homepage + forum >

-Success in attracting programmers that can create the voting system >

-More members and supporters >

-More attention from media >even more members and voters





6. What could make citizens more interested in eDemocracy?

-Even more shortcomings of the traditional democracy

-See 5.



7. What has been Aktiv Demokrati's brightest moment?

-Not maybe one moment but; Probably to see that people actually cares to vote on us and to take part in the debates on our forum. The more we think on how Aktivdemokrati could have solved the many problems in Swedish politics (or anywhere in the world really), the more we feel that we are on the right track.

The knowledge of the very invention of democracy is the light in our tunnel.


Finally I would like to thank you for this opportunity to inform and spread our words.
I see no problem in publishing both my name and Aktivdemokrati.
My only concern is that I have to publish these anwers in our forum also in order to get any feedback/corrections or additional information.
This means that I might have to come back to you within a week if any corrections (since I give a week for anyone to react in my answers here) and that you might get some additional answers (maybe you already have since we have put your interview on the forum as we received it).

Best Regards,
Magnus Gustavsson
Aktivdemokrati.se