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About the Citizen Democracy Project

The Citizen Democracy Project (CDP) is an experiment in Massively Parallel Activism-- the use of the internet as a communication medium to enable large numbers of people to self-organize into highly-effective, decentralized groups to achieve outstanding results.

Inspired by two landmark phenomenae that began in the 1990's, namely the Open Source software movement (as exemplified by Linux) and on-line activism (as exemplified by groups such as MoveOn.org), I became intrigued by the possibility of re-purposing the wisdom gained about large-scale human collaboration in the Open Source movement in a broader scope that would be applicable to other endeavors in social, environmental, business and political arenas. Eric Raymond's book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, with its nineteen principles of success in open source software projects was particularly enlightening.

The basic hypothesis is that the problems facing humanity in 2004 are bigger and more numerous than at any time in human history, however, we now have 6.2 billion people who all have a common interest in the survival of life on this planet and who are all, at least a little, inclined to help solve these problems.

The CDP focuses on the problem of state legislatures, for whatever reason, becoming out-of-step with their constituents' best interests. If it is true that, on some issues, a governing body does not accurately represent its citizenry, then some measures that are gridlocked or rejected by politicians should pass and be enacted if submitted to a popular vote.

In the 1980's during the cold war, many people decided that diplomacy was too important to be left to government-appointed diplomats. Instead, they appointed themselves ambassadors to travel to the Soviet Union and other countries to meet with their peers. American teachers might travel to visit Soviet teachers, American doctors to visit Soviet doctors and so on. Thus, the "citizen diplomacy" movement was born. Now it appears that legislation, at least for some issues like campaign finance reform, is too important to be left to career legislators and it is time for Citizens to step in. Where representative democracy appears to have failed us, let's try Citizen Democracy. Fortunately, most states in the U.S. have a mechanism for deciding issues by popular vote-- the initiative process. By collecting enough signatures on a petition, a proposed measure can be put to a popular vote on the ballot in the next general election.

In the past, the task of gathering tens, even hundreds of thousands of signatures has proven daunting for small, grass-roots organizations. In Oregon it now takes about 120,000 signatures to put an initiative on the ballot, but what if 10,000 Oregonians each pledged to collect about a dozen signatures each? Let's find out, shall we?

Marc Baber
Eugene, Oregon
December 23, 2003

January 13, 2004

CDP presented at the monthly PlanetWorks meeting in SF. Powerpoint presentation here.