Mission ePossible: Community Cooperation in Government
Although the annoucement has still not been translated to English, Serbian ministry of telecommunication and informational society has nevertheless published the news about Mission ePossible, a project to collect and publish opinions of progressive community members. As far as I am aware, this is the first step towards integrating the community into government (it’s still nowhere near as serious as it sounds, but I’m trying to be positive about it).
As part of this effort, the ministry has revamped the whole web site, and I must admit it does look a bit better than most government web sites. From other community members, I’ve learned that documents that have been traditionally buried under layers and layers of site navigation are being excavated and reposted in a more accessible package. Personally, I wish it weren’t a flash widget that eats 99% CPU time on my Linux box in Firefox, but at least you can see the documents online, which is a big step forward.
The ministry has also decided to hang out where the community actually is, on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other places. As far as I’m aware, this is the first government institution that actually understands what multi-channel means, and it’s great to see things are finally moving forward in this country.
The ministry still has to solve many of the problems that has plagued the Serbian Internet. Our Internet community is still quite isolated, and there aren’t even basic legislations in place that would allow serious development. For the ministry, increased visibility might sound like godsend as means of political marketing, but it also means that the community is now able to easily observe what it is doing, and any hint of slacking can become equally damaging. I happen to know that our minister embraced this type of transparency, and I’m quite enthusiastic about it. So, despite this being a small first step, it is also a bold step in the current Serbian political scene, where censorship and secrecy has become all too common.
Publishing blog posts, and liking stuff on Facebook is, nevertheless, just a small step. For any serious cooperation between community members and the government, the ministry needs to be in the know, to be where people are at, and share the experiences of the community’s daily struggle first-hand. Unlike other ministries, telecommunication and informational society gives this ministry a particularly good vantage point, where the whole community is just clicks away, and it should be able to take full advantage of that position.
Full integration of the community into the government would lead to an advanced democratic system, which no longer works like a mere representative democracy, but actually gives the country’s subjects a voice, and means to influence the country’s political process. Perhaps the ministry of telecommunication and informational society might just be the perfect ground of this type of experimentation, since the technical nature of issues the ministry deals with might give community members room to get involved without becoming entangled in dirty politics.
