Australian bill of rights initiative: Collaborating on public policy

Wiki politics are put into practice. This article focuses on the development and the rationale behind ARBI, an online project aimed at promoting awareness and discussion of human rights through the collaborative development of a bill of rights for Australia.

Written by Mark Elliott, Mimi Marcus, Marcus Barber, Marcus Leonard, Alex Gibson, Lucas Maddock, Matt Daniel

Public policy refers to the “the body of laws, regulations, decisions and actions of government” which effect and regulate the public. However representative democracy limits the civilian’s role in the participation of generating this policy through the reliance upon elected politicians who’s interests may or may not be aligned with the public’s. This brief case study looks at the inspirations and guiding principles of the Australian Bill of Rights Initiative, a wiki based project whose aims are to promote awareness and discussion surrounding human rights through the collaborative drafting of a bill of rights for Australia.

Australia is now the only common law country in the world without a bill of rights. The UK and New Zealand have statutory bills, whilst Canada, Fiji, India, South Africa and the United States, to name but a few, have constitutional bills of rights. The notion that Australia does not need such a bill is the general position of the incumbent (Howard) government, an argument based upon the belief that the Commonwealth Constitution adequately protects our rights and that because our lawmakers are democratically elected, they will provide a sufficient safeguard to the people against misuse of power. While this may appear true for a majority who, by choice or chance fall within the realms of the status quo, this belief is based upon a fundamental lack of understanding of the law by the Australian people – almost every freedom Australians assume they have (including freedom of expression) is not actually protected in the Constitution. Particularly at risk are the rights of minorities and those with the least power and advantage in Australian society – indigenous people, immigrants, refugees, suspected ‘terrorists’ and the poor to name but a few.

In the words of Justice Kirby of the High Court of Australia:

The protection of fundamental human rights, and especially the rights of minorities, is one of the great issues of the law and of the world today.

Founded on the emerging beliefs, values, norms and methods surrounding projects such as the Open Source software movement and Wikipedia.org, the Australian Bill of Rights Initiative (ABRI) is an online project aimed at promoting awareness and discussion of human rights through the collaborative development of a bill of rights for Australia. Currently comprising lawyers, barristers, academics, students, software engineers, artists and futurists, it is hoped that, as the project evolves, the contributing participants will grow and diversify across the social spectrum.

Growing communities of creative action

With the ongoing growth of participatory culture in a wide range of user-generated content domains – such as political engagement (blogging, Moveon.org, Getup.org), technological design (Open Source software (OSS)), knowledge building (Wikipedia.org), gaming (Second Life) and art (Drawball.com) – it is hard to imagine this new methodology not affecting the realm of governance – especially those aspects requiring creative production. The collaborative drafting of a bill of rights provides a tangible first step towards participatory engagement in the collective creation of public policy.

ABRI’s approach is inspired and guided by the beliefs, values, norms and methods emerging online as part of a growing group of participatory ventures such as those listed above. A quick survey of the products of these new ways-of-doing yields a number of core attributes which ABRI has incorporated with the aim of extending them into the unknown realms of participatory democracy.

Dynamic content is a universal and fundamental feature of all online participatory enterprises (and of ‘Web 2.0′ in general) as the evolution of content must be represented by the contributions as they are made (typified by the wiki). This serves as one of the defining differences in online approaches after the dot-com bubble (2001), where past ‘push media’ forms such as print were adopted as a model for web projects prior to the recognition of the Internet’s expanded capacity as a new medium.

Open access is a key and near universally accepted tenant of large-scale collaborative ventures such as those listed above. In this context, open access refers to the capacity for any individual to participate providing they have the tools and capacity to do so – access or membership is not restricted to a core or elite group. While some of the above projects do require that participants logon to a website (thereby potentially limiting access to those with the appropriate technological resources), there is no restriction to who may sign up and, in many cases (Wikipedia, Drawball, most OSS projects), explicit membership/logon is not required.

Voluntary participation and task self-selection is critical in user-generated content projects, as the motivation for participation lies in the value of what is produced by the individual and group, and not in external rewards such as monetary payment. Not only does this provide the means to ensure the relevance of content and activities to the contributor, but it also serves to optimise efficiency by maximising the energy associated with the contributor’s personal interests.

Self-organisation in such participatory projects tends to form a sliding scale with the lowest level being the generation of the content of the output – everything else being stipulated by the organisation (Getup.org) – to the form and content of the output (Drawball.com, Second Life), to the total output and the running and governance of the project on its meta-level (Wikipedia, OSS). This latter distinction is an important one, as such projects provide direct models for participatory democracy and governance.

Meritocracy tends to emerge in self-organising projects of this last class – those for whom governance and administration is also a participatory venture – with the community investing power and responsibility upon those who’s abilities seem to best match the needs of the organisation/project. This is not to suggest that meritocracies are not exempt from the same deceptions and abuses of power associated with any other form of governance, rather it provides methods for aligning skills and resources with needs which are more streamlined than those of complex bureaucracies while being innately linked to those needs and interests as they emerge.

These characteristics which have so far guided ABRI’s aims and development can be seen as the product of an emerging set of values, beliefs and norms associated with emerging online participatory culture. In addition, as these values, beliefs and norms give rise to new methods (such as those mentioned above) they develop synergies with the technology which supports and enables them, thereby providing positive feedback for the further development of participatory methods and systems. However this ongoing development in no way ensures the success of their interests and objectives.

Some of the key threats facing the use of the Internet as a medium for participatory democracy include exploitative manipulation of the medium through the harvesting and subsequent misuse of personal information, as well as the biasing of the Net’s infrastructure through legislation associated with net ‘non-neutrality’. Such moves undercut public trust and faith in the system to protect their rights while providing an accurate representation of the digital world.

Of the challenges, perhaps the largest is that of accessibility. Online accessibility generally refers to standards and methods for ensuring equal access to content across barriers of distance, cost and usability. However in a more generalised sense, accessibility also points to larger problems such as digital divides. While those without access to digital infrastructure comprise much (if not most) of the world’s population, digital divides are also rife in most developed nations. This provides a potent barrier to equal access in the case of participatory democracy, however it might also be seen as a signal for the need to provide digital network access as a basic, free service. Not only would this help provide access to emergent forms of online democracy, but it might also help spur many more forms of social, civic and economic participation.

In a world increasingly organised under the rubric of privatisation and commercialisation, stimulating and supporting participatory governance through subsidisation seems less likely than it might have twenty years ago. However costs are falling and mechanisms for cooperation are rising, and while it remains unclear as to how emergent technologies might best integrate with existing forms of democracy, of one thing we can be certain – wikis are only the beginning. As digital network proliferate, it becomes faster, easier and cheaper to take part in the construction of the world we inhabit. If we can participate in the design our own shoes, then why not our governance?

Further links

MetaCollab.net

Cooperationcommons

Special issue: recent articles, wiki politics
Tags: Australian bill of rights, open access, participatory democracy