A Soundtrack for the Collective Sound of Democracy: Crunching

Mostly during vacation, I shut down thinking about digital democracy. But not all the time. What I heard during vacation was the soundtrack of digital democracy: full citizen participation and steady progress.

And this soundtrack, like those recordings you hear of whales or dolphins in the water, comes from nature.

This is where we find out who has been snorkeling and who hasn't. I snorkeled for the first time only about a year ago. I was mystified not by something I saw, but something I heard.

In some areas, you dip your head into the water, and you hear ... crunching.

The water conveys sound broadly and disperses soundly widely. So when you hear something under water, it can be difficult to pinpoint a location. What I heard during that first time snorkeling was crunching, coming from everywhere.

Turns out it was. This is the sound of creatures like the parrotfish (and assorted critters like them, but let's pick on the parrotfish for simplicity). What the parrotfish does is pretty amazing. He or she wanders the bottom, and bites coral and rock. He or she extracts the living matter, and then gets rid of the crunched material.

That makes what we call sand. One parrotfish, with his or her tiny mouthfuls, makes hundreds of pounds of sand a year.

Now that's an accomplishment.

So what's this got to do with democracy? Suppose for a moment that the conduct of public policy is as important as eating. Maybe it's not that important, but just suppose. People have to get along somehow. So do fish. Notice how the fish approach the Herculean task of eating and generating sand.

You will notice that the fish in a cove do not sit back and elect seven other fish to do the chewing for them.

They don't elect a city council of fish to go out and do the chewing and be responsible for handing out the food.

The fish in the cove also don't sit back and let a few other fish activists do all the work.

Nope. The cove reverberates with the sound of hundreds or thousands of fish, all chewing.

That's what digital democracy on the Internet should be. It shouldn't be blips of posts and dialogue from council members, from staff, from just a few individual citizens who happen to know how to Tweet or post. There should be a way, someday, for a digital dashboard to light up, or sound off, to measure massive citizen participation: Not just the participation of a few.

And that's the trick for Gov 2.0 and digital democracy. What forms of hardware, software and public practices will take us to a digital democracy as participatory as that of the conduct of the parrot fish? Can't we rise to their standard?

Photo credit: Count on National Geographic to tell us about nature ... and the parrotfish.