Possibilities for Massive Participative Interaction: including voting, questions, metaphors, images, constructs, melodies, issues, symbols

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Background

The following sections explore a range of techniques to enable interactive participation by millions of people in support of collective decision-making and strategy articulation. It notably responds to the needs of a range of worldwide initiatives to enable massive participation in some form.

Such possibilities clearly merit consideration in a period when the European Union is striving to give itself greater legitimacy through a new version of a European Constitution -- if necessary by avoiding significant public consultation in the form of referenda.

The exploration is also of relevance given the wide variety of web-based technical innovations that ensure popular interaction by millions on a daily basis across the world. Conventional intergovernmental institutions have accorded little attention to these phenomena -- except as being disruptive of the dynamics of democratic processes that appar increasingly outdated. It could be considered extraordinary, for example, that no consideration is given to the possibility of more representative cyberparliaments and virtual popular assemblies -- especially given the massive budgets currently allocated to face-to-face intergovernmental meetings where "access" is implicitly controlled by questionable means. The possibilities now exceed by far those envisaged less than a decade ago (cf The Challenge of Cyber-Parliaments and Statutory Virtual Assemblies, 1998).