Julia, some terms to try searching: "participatory democracy" and "digital democracy" I think anything 2.0 runs a the risk of sounding cliched and being instantly out of date. It might be useful for identifying a moment in history or a past trend. I think the practices you are discussing need to be clearly identified/defined and then a term that refers to those should be easier to decide. You are not looking at laws being recreated through a wiki; what are you looking at? best, Kim On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Julia Pellicciaro <jpellicciaro@gmail.com>wrote:
Happy Friday AIR-Lers!
I have a two-pronged question to pose to you all. But first, a bit of context:
I am on a advisory committee for Philly NetSquared, which organizes monthly meetings (Net Tuesdays) on using technology to advance social change (another topic for another day). The idea being thrown around for the February Net Tuesday is "Democracy 2.0," which when assimilated with "Web 2.0," is a very timely topic.
However, upon a quick Google search of the term, I emailed the rest of the committee with the following information, which *I will now use to frame my questions to all of you: * *1.* The first two Google search results (http://moourl.com/r3jcz) are from Mobilize.org, which conducted a survey of Millennials way back in 2002, and their thrust at the time focused strictly on Millennials identifying specific needs for change (http://moourl.com/l5vqp). The third result is Digg citing a broken link from wiki-law.org (http://moourl.com/z9kow):
Democracy 2.0 is an experiment that hypothesizes that a wide range of
individuals can contribute to the creation of our nation's laws through a wiki on the web. Democracy 2.0 hopes to answer the following question: if the country started from scratch today, without any laws, what laws would you make for society?
This is not what has been intended by the term in the NetSquared discussion. And perhaps there is a reason why this entry has been removed from Wiki-Law...
*2.* There is no entry in Wikipedia for "Democracy 2.0" ( http://moourl.com/0y09k). While Wikipedia is, of course, by no means* *the final authority on either historical or cutting edge concepts (or anything in between), it is generally a good gauge of which concepts the Internet public (namely Wikipedia contributors) has formed even a somewhat stabilized and homogenized perspective on.
While I completely understand the intended conceptual thread drawn from Web 2.0 to "Democracy 2.0," I'm a beat leary of NetSquared coining a term that doesn't quite seem to have a single-minded use as of yet. Not to mention that "Web 2.0" has lost some impetus as it's increasingly become cliché.
I've also searched "Democracry 2.0" on BoingBoing, ReadWriteWeb, and Technorati. While the term is actively used as a tag on Technorati (as well as a related tags,"Government 2.0" and "Open Source Democracy"), the other two sites yielded null search results. There are also no entries yet on UrbanDictionary.com.
*So my two-prong question for you is as follows:*
1. What are your thoughts (as tech savvy researchers) on the term "Democracy 2.0" and similar terms "Government 2.0" and "Open Source Democracy" (and are there any other synonyms in use)?
2. How do we as internet researchers determine the validity of such terms in our temperamental social-networked information age? In what cases should we define terms and in what cases do we allow the Internet public to define terms?
I'm really eager to hear your input.
All the best, Julia
Julia Pellicciaro // Passion:Purpose:Integrity // tweet :: twitter.com/juropel blog :: telluricaesthetic.net ... Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow, whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die. —Tao Te Ching _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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