Green Party of Canada Living Platform

From dKosopedia

Categories: Green Party | Canada

Green Party of Canada Living Platform was probably the most ambitious wiki platform project ever. Using Living Platform technology originally evolved by the Green Party of Ontario based on concepts by Michael Pilling and Craig Hubley, the Green Party of Canada adopted the method for the Canadian federal election, 2004. In 2000 the Party had received only 0.8% of the vote across Canada. In 2004 it received 4.2%, more than five times more votes. This was widely credited to the innovative and comprehensive platform, which could not have been created without the wiki methods.

During that election, the Party answered public questions about the platform and standing policy also using its wiki. These answers are still visible to the public. Policy development was being rapidly spread through the entire party using deliberative democracy, and there were proposals to also write press releases using the Living Platform, which would have put spin doctors out of a job.

The Wikipedia article on the project explains what happened to it after the election: apparently it was attacked and shut down by conventional spin doctor Dermod Travis acting on orders from party financiers or creditors. This was quite similar to the reaction to Howard Dean by the Democratic National Committee in 2003-4, which was also threatening to conventional hierarchy and also involved innovative technology.

Also very similar to the Dean campaign's people forming openspacelabs.org, dissidents who wanted to keep the deliberative methods going founded openpolitics.ca, which has become a main source on how to support issue/position/argument debate and citizen initiatives. The list of policy terms was influential on the list of policy terms used at dkosopedia:itself.

In the Canadian federal election, 2006, the GPC ignored Living Platform and did nothing with it at all. Their performance was characterized by a series of public governance issues largely overhanging from the attempts to shut down the deliberative and participatory democracy. As in the Green Party of the United States, the GPC supports these explicitly as principles, so there was considerable resistance to going "back" to conventional leader-run policy (which the GPC had never actually practiced, and which many of its members despised). After that election, Travis and party leader Jim Harris were gone.

The new leadership candidates, Elizabeth May and David Chernushenko, both promised to revive the participatory methods and devote more funding to internal policy work and less to spin doctoring.