J’habite en France depuis 2005 mais mon film When Citizens Assemble n’a toujours pas de sous titres français. La honte! Alors j’ai trouvé une astuce aujourd’hui pour remédier cela, même que ce ne soit qu’une solution intermédiaire et incomplète. Le logiciel YouTube manque encore la capacité de faire des traductions des peu de plans du […]
I just finished reading this book – Creating Freedom. What a revelation! It brings together ideas from many non-fiction books I’ve read over the last 20 years. Then it adds an excellent wrapper. And that’s no mean wrapper. It’s the deceptively simple notion that each of us has no influence over the person that we […]
Ireland’s efforts to break a political deadlock over its de facto ban on abortion inspired a bold response – the creation of a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle on the issue. During five weekends spread over five months, a random selection of Irish people deliberated on the highly divisive and controversial issue. Their conclusion, in April […]
Great job by the Guardian reporter Gary Younge in nailing the US white supremacist Richard B Spencer in an interview. Exposing spectacular ignorance is the best defence against champions of racism. Spencer would be comical if he weren’t so dangerous. “If Africans had never existed, world history would have been almost exactly the same as […]
I was delighted to present this GlobalNet21 webinar on October 31, 2017 about my ongoing project for a nine-film series on democracy in crisis and real-world efforts to transform the way we do it. It includes a sneak preview of today’s working edit of the series launch film. The film features Ireland’s use of a […]
I’m a migrant. I left my native Scotland at 18 and haven’t lived there since. Having moved between a few different countries for study and work I now live in rural southwest France. I’ve been here for 12 years and counting. The experiences of all that moving has both exposed me to many foreigners and […]
I am excited about a nascent democracy innovation project – called Way Deeper Democracy – for which I am seeking partners, supporters, funders and everyday political visionaries. I imagine partners coming maybe from among media organisations, academic researchers, grassroots democracy activists, progressive foundations and, maybe, even existing politicians or political organisations. That could mean you.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people – seems like a good basic principle for “democracy”. Yet many groups of citizens, in different representative democracies around the world, don’t seem too happy with their current versions of “kratos” in the hands of the “demos“. Be they UK “Brexit” or Remain supporters, or […]
Smith’s book – Democratic Innovations – does an excellent job in helping move debate about the poor state of our representative democracies from the abstract to the practical and real.
His approach is to focus on which of a series of democratic innovations, present or recently past, could best take us towards more democratic modes of government. He takes a refreshingly pragmatic approach, pointing towards how democracy could occur with barely an elected politician in sight, if at all.
The last few months – be it via the UK’s Brexit vote, in US presidential campaigning or the Hungarian government’s demonising of refugees – have all made clear how badly our societies communicate their politics. We don’t hear, let alone understand what other people are trying to say and they, in turn, are deaf to us […]
