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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Goings On |
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On the Record |
Iceland crowdsources its new constitution
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Published :1 August 2011 |
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COURTESY ICELAND CONSTITUTIONAL COUNCIL |
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| On July 23, Iceland put the draft bill of its new constitution to a referendum with zero changes imposed on the document by its parliament—a confidence in citizenry unheard of in any democracy in the world since Athens circa 508 BC. Iceland needed to get away from its horrific financial crash in 2008, and from the farce of its independence from Denmark in 1944 (its constitution is a carbon copy of Denmark’s, with “king” replaced by “president”). So, the Icelandic government decided to use the vast tentacles of social media—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and a Constitutional Council website open to public consensus that carries the latest working draft—to determine exactly what the 320,000 Icelanders want as their nation’s governing principles. The public debates on the website make for lively reading: disallowed the indulgence of anonymity, debaters keep their arguments sane. But Icelanders have a long history of making themselves heard: their parliament, the Alþingi, started in 930 CE, is the oldest in the world.
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