Lift 2012 in Marseilles was a blast. The first afternoon was dedicated to conferences (more intimate than previous editions) about a lot of interesting topics, from Biology 2.0 by Thomas Landrain to Gudrun Pétursdóttir, chairman of the Icelandic Constitutional Council, talking about the democratic process in Iceland after 2008's crisis. But the most interesting part was the second day, a whole day of workshops entitled "DIGITAL DISRUPTIONS" COLLECTIVE FORESIGHT. You first have to choose one of the 20 "promises" explained as some kind of scenarios about a given topic. I picked the one dedicated to democracy: restored, enhanced, extended and I'll try to sum up some of the insight in this session (there were about 10 people).

First things first, when you talk about democracy you have to consider that not everybody wants to actively participate in it, it's very frustrating but it's interesting to analyze causes:

• lazyness: it's much more comfortable to let others do the hard work even if it's not possible on the long term if you consider democracy as a daily implication ;
• hopeless: one thinks that democracy is just a mirage that can't be reached, they consider that we are not in a democracy ;
• disagreement: I don't think that democracy can scale (even using MongoDB :p) to the size of a country or even a city — or Humanity is just not ready for that — at best it should be possible in a community or a tribe. The only alternative I see (and we get back to small groups) is Sociocracy but I need to experiment that system of governance for real.

The first part of the day was dedicated to past and present initiatives and we all felt a bit desperate after that observation. One of the conclusions is that the digital world, even if we can cite a few marginal examples, didn't enhance nor extend democracy. But, it provides a new hope: the one to be technically able to reinvent the democracy. The Web gives people a way to educate themselves about citizenship and to somehow magnify their messages, to express their diversity. On the other side, it can be instrumentalized and didn't invert any hierarchical relation.

The afternoon were hopefully more encouraging, we talked about the future of democracy and even if it was hard to keep focused a whole day with intense discussions we ended up proposing some key actions to change for the better. Unfortunately I didn't took the time to write notes down because of the rush but I'm impatiently waiting for Hubert Guillaud's article on that topic given that he kept the poster :-).

Note : I'm more and more frustrated about the lack of discussions about those unidirectional thoughts but I don't want a clasic centralized commenting system, maybe I'll finally code that DCVS fork/enrich/propose way of interacting…

Original post of David Larlet.Votez pour ce billet sur Planet Libre.