Open Coalition
Welcome to the homepage of the Open Coalition project. This page will act as a portal for the project, offer useful updates and highlight ways that volunteers from “open” communities can participate in the project. More content will be added here, and to sub-pages, as the project progresses.
History
The idea for the project emerged towards the end of 2013. It became apparent that many of the organisations working in the field of open shared areas of overlap. Work was sometimes duplicated, lines of communication between organisations and communities were sometimes weak and there was lots of potential for closer ties between open groups. Following some tentative discussions, a session about this was delivered at MozFest in October 2013 based around the idea of developing an open coalition.
The objectives of the coalition are varied and include supporting various open organisations and communities in the development of collaboration, a shared web presence where useful information can be aggregated and the creation of other resources that support these aims.
The project has been initially funded by Wikimedia UK and Bekka Kahn has been appointed as the project co-ordinator for six months. During this time Bekka will be working to develop the concept as well as co-ordinating efforts to achieve the coalition's aims. While the post has been funded by Wikimedia UK, Bekka's role is to support all interested parties and support the coalition more broadly.
Resources
Bekka's role description can be seen here. This provides an overview of her role and what she will be working to achieve.
This page gives a little more context to the project's inception
Digital Democracy - add your voice to our submission to the Parliamentary Commission
In theory there are many lessons that any attempt to increase engagement with digital democracy can learn from open projects. These include the participatory nature of content development and the nature of content (and policy) being arrived at by consensus. Open organisations and the people involved in them are from a wide array of backgrounds and represent a broad spectrum of views. This could lend itself to effective drafting of the kind of evidence that the Speaker is looking for. The Open Coalition, Wikimedia UK and Demos would like to establish whether this is indeed the case. In particular, we are seeking answers to the following questions:
- How can technology help Parliament and other agencies to scrutinise the work of government?
- How can technology help citizens scrutinise the Government and the work of Parliament?
- What kinds of data should Parliament and Government release to the public to make itself more open to outside scrutiny?
Everyone is encouraged to try to answer these questions collaboratively, in much the same way Wikipedia articles are approached - using the space below for content and talk page for discussion. Staff from Wikimedia UK, The Coalition and Demos will happily answer any questions on the talk page but are equally happy to let the process take its course.
At this point there is no fixed deadline for evidence on the theme of digital scrutiny. However, the Speaker’s Commission will be publishing publishing a single call for evidence covering our last three themes (yet to be announced). The conversation and crowdsourced evidence will be reviewed at the end of June with a view to either continuing the process or submitting as is. If there is appetite among the community, and if the first attempt is successful, there may be further attempts to develop submissions to the later three themes.
At the end of the process Demos, Wikimedia UK and the Open Coalition will prepare a report on the process and the effectiveness of this kind of approach to crowdsourcing policy and evidence. This paper will be released under an open licence. It is a real opportunity for everyone working in the open space to influence the debate about digital democracy and both Wikimedia UK, Demos and the Open Coalition thank you for engaging with this idea.
Background to the Call
The Speaker of the House of Commons of the UK, John Bercow, has established a Commission on Digital Democracy. It will report to Parliament in early 2015 with recommendations on how Parliament can use technology to better represent and engage with the electorate, make laws and hold the powerful to account. As part of their work, the Commission have issued a series of calls for evidence. These are open invitations for members of the public, either as individuals or groups, to submit responses to a series of questions. They have attracted responses from unions, academics, non-governmental institutions and private individuals. The first theme was ‘making laws in a digital age’, and the second on ‘digital scrutiny’. The Commission plans to shortly publish the final three themes.
There is a growing sense that the growth of the Internet has not paid the democratic dividends that it could. Turnout in formal political elections is steadily decreasing, and trust and support in the institutions and offices of mainstream political life are low and falling. Despite many innovative attempts from both within and outside of Government, the daily reality of democratic engagement for most people in the UK would be familiar to generations of British citizens who predate Facebook or email. The rise of the Internet has, broadly, done little to challenge concentrations of power or structures of unequal representation
Demos is one of Britain’s leading cross-party think tank and it has an overarching mission to bring politics closer to people. They contacted Wikimedia UK to propose an experiment: can an online community be used to source a response to this call? Can the ethos, community and technology like that of Wikipedia be used to engage Wikipedians to come together and collaborate to create a reply? In particular, Carl Miller, Research Director of the Demos Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, wrote this piece in for Wired in which he describes Wikipedia as a masterclass in digital democracy.
Ways to get involved
Open Coalition Meet & Greet - 19 May 2014
When: Mon, May 19, 4pm
Where: Wikimedia UK Office and online
Why? To help us start building the Open Coalition (and see old friends, make new ones and have a drink)
Join us in London to meet Bekka Kahn, the new co-ordinator at the Open Coalition, and get involved in building the coalition. We'll talk about improving communication, sharing experiences and start mapping out plans for the 6 months. We'll also have a dial-in set up for those who are outside the UK, so everyone can take part.
Can't make it to the Meet & Greet? There are some simple things you can do to get involved and help us build the coalition:
- Follow @opencoalition on Twitter for all the latest news
- Tweet this: Help spread open collaboration across the web. Join the #opencoalition
- Join our mailing list: open-coalition(at)googlegroups(dot)com either by dropping a note on the talk page or by emailing above
- Join the coalition - get involved on this wiki (later to be followed by a shared presence) and help to shape the project as it grows
As the project progresses more opportunities to participate will be listed here.
Next steps
Bekka and other people involved in the development of the coalition will maintain this page with latest news. The talk page can be used for questions, comments and general discussion.