Online constitution

At the end of last month, a council of 25 publicly-elected Icelandic citizens presented a draft constitution to Iceland's parliament. But what made this process unique is that the constitution was formed by online discussions. Icelanders were able to contribute and follow progress on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. That marks the end of a process of constitutional reform that began in April of this year. The new constitution will be formally examined by a parliamentary committee in October 2011.

To learn more about Iceland's new constitutional process, Deutsche Welle turned to Smari McCarthy, a digital activist from Rejkjavik.

It seems that this is the first time when a major political document in any country has been decided through any country, on the Internet, no?

I think it's probably the first time it's been done anywhere this way. Every couple of years, there's always a new constitution being done somewhere. Just last year, there was one in Kenya, and the year before, in Bolivia. But all of these have traditionally been decided by committee or some political group. The innovation here is really that the general public is being pulled into the process, and being very, very deeply involved in everything from the broad vision to the exact wording of individual articles.

How does that work, then? Usually in these types of voting situations, there's a Digg-like ladder where people can vote items up or down. Is that how the Icelandic system worked?

In this case, it wasn't. There was some talk of doing that kind of thing originally, but what it came down to was that anybody could put forward a proposal or some comment on what's been done, and then this committee which was working for the last four and a half months, they would split the comments and recommendations into categories and would do meetings within their own committee to decide them on their relative merits. In that way, it was fairly traditional as a representative, democratic process. At the same time, I've never seen this level of direct feedback with an elected body before.

I think one of the dangers of using the Internet as a platform to discuss something as serious as a new constitution, as you know, is that often people on the Internet are silly, goofy, or nonsensical. I wonder if there was a worry that people being silly would hijack the process, and if that was a concern, did it pan out that way?

To my knowledge, it wasn't a major concern. By and large, all of the discussion was very much to the point. It was incredibly civilized throughout the entire thing. The only time when it got a bit heated was during on the subject of separation of church and state. Iceland is one of the few European countries that still hasn't separated church and state. And Gallup polling says that about 70 percent of the population is in favor of church and state. But for some reason the constitutional council didn't feel right about going for full separation. They did move towards that in the end, but didn't go as far as some people had hoped. But apart from that, the entire discussion was very civilized and was surprisingly good in all regards.

Are there any examples that have come out of this process that might not have otherwise happened had the constitution not been formulated and discussed online?

There's a few different things. One, as someone who works a lot on Internet rights, I'm very happy that net neutrality has been included on the constitutional level. A paragraph within the article concerning free speech says that the government should protect the Internet as a communications mechanism, so that's pretty impressive. Another thing is that both source and whistleblower protection and journalist protection are in the constitution. There are items like that. There's also a strong freedom of information component, where all government documents must be publicly listed, so people will at least know which documents exist, even if they're not secret.

There are also different mechanisms for public participation in the political process. One-third of parliament can push any issue into a public referendum, and there are ways for the public to put forward law proposals. The general public can propose a law, which then the parliament can look at.

Interview: Cyrus Farivar
Editor: Nathan Witkop