Self-Organizing Democracy
Dang it! I wish other people would stop writing the essays I wanted to write!
Joi Ito has an interesting essay on Emergent Democracy
Democracy:
ideally to be governed by the majority and protects the rights of the minority. For a democracy to perform this properly it must support a competition of ideas, which requires critical debate, freedom of speech and the ability to criticize power without fear of retribution. If it is a representative democracy, the power must be distributed into multiple points of authority to enable checks and balances.
Emergence:
the arising of patterns, structures, or properties that do not seem adequately explained by referring only to the system's pre-existing components and their interaction
Emergent democracy is (if I'm understanding correctly) a way for understanding, consensus, problem-solving, and radical new solutions to emerge from small and large interlinked discussions involving vast numbers of people who may or may not even be aware of how things all interconnect.
Dan Gillmor says his readers are smarter than he is. Together, we--all ofus--are smarter than any president, legislature, or government. The world is a complex place, but it's also a place where we can be smarter and wiser than we've ever been and this essay is a really interesting take on what's already happening and what's possible. As Joi Ito says, it's a possibility for which the technology is just starting to emerge and which we can see the beginnings of in weblog interlinkages and interactions.