Smári McCarthy interviewed by Lily Lynch

I was interviewed by Lily Lynch for the BTURN magazine. The article is here. Since the interview was conducted via e-mail, I became a bit verbose… I have that tendency. Most of my answers didn’t make it into the article, which focuses heavily on the Cyber Yugoslavia project, and is really great. But still, I felt that the good bits didn’t get used, so I asked Lily permission to republish the interview in full. Here it is:

Lily Lynch: I know you’ve been critical of some of the representations of the Icelandic project in the mainstream media, and I was hoping to get a very short statement from you about the extent to which this new Icelandic constitution was “crowdsourced”.

Smári McCarthy: The new Icelandic constitution, which has yet to be ratified, was developed by committee, as with any constitution. In the future it may be possible to engage a large population to develop a complicated legal document, but right now such a task does require direct human intermediation.
What makes the Icelandic experiment interesting is the degree to which feedback was accepted from the general public, and the fact that the entire process was entirely transparent – all meetings were open to all, and the working documents were made available for public comment after being accepted in a plenary session of the constitutional council each week. The following week, any comments on the text so far were taken into discussion in committees, and a very large number of comments were adopted into the proposed text.
While this isn’t perfect, it’s by far the most open and inclusive constitutional reform process I have seen or heard of, and should be used as an example for future constitutional processes to build upon.
An interesting side-effect of a fully open process is the congregation of civil society special interest groups who specialise in certain areas of the subject matter and contribute actively to the conversation. I do not have statistics, but I would guess that at least a third of the suggestions to the council came from groups of individuals rather than individuals – groups who came together explicitly to contribute in some meaningful way to the process.

Complete interview can be read here.