On 04/02/11 8:58 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
I found this
link *http://destour.org *on the Wikipedia-ar mailing list,
and thought it might interest people who don't speak Arabic as well.
This is a Wiki inviting Tunisian citizens to write the country's new
constitution the Wiki way. The site is entirely in Arabic and it
includes a constitution draft, which the Tunisian public is supposed to
change and amend collaboratively. According to their "about", this is an
initiative of the Tunisian Internet Association (/Jam'iyat Tunis
lil-Internet/), which is a non-official non-profit Tunisian
organization. According to them, the project is run by volunteers.
To be honest, I don't give much chance to this initiative, but it is an
interesting development nonetheless. As far as I remember, Florence told
me about similar initiative in France by the French government, but it
seems to be the first of its kind in the Arab world. Perhaps the close
cultural ties between Tunisia and France played a role here, but this is
nothing more than a speculation.
If everyone in Tunisia had good internet access,
knew how to edit a wiki,
and had experience doing so that would be a no-brainer. As it is, a
mechanism like that disenfranchises 99.999% of the population. Good goal
to work for though.
I don't expect that this sort of initiative will be a complete success
even with full internet access for everyone. We know from experience
that getting everybody to agree to anything, even to no-brainers, on
line is not an easy task. If the Internet is to be a force in
democratising political institutions for the future it needs to start
somewhere. It's an improvement over the Internet as a massive bitching
forum. At this time recognizing where strong agreement exists, and
isolating the issues that need work will be enough to label this effort
a success. There are too many preconceptions about the meaning of
democracy for us to expect more.
Ray