[Foundation-l] Wiki-revolution

[Ray Saintonge]

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