Mexico City Is Crowdsourcing Its New Constitution Using Change.org in a Democracy Experiment Ana Campoy - Quartz
go to original April 21, 2016

Mexico City just launched a massive experiment in digital democracy. It is asking its nearly 9 million residents to help draft a new constitution through social media.

The crowdsourcing exercise is unprecedented in Mexico - and pretty much everywhere else. Chilangos, as locals are known, can petition for issues to be included in the constitution through Change.org (link in Spanish), and make their case in person if they gather more than 10,000 signatures. They can also annotate proposals by the constitution’s drafters via PubPub, an editing platform (Spanish) similar to Google Docs.

The idea, in the words of the mayor, Miguel Angel Mancera, is to “bestow the constitution project (Spanish) with a democratic, progressive, inclusive, civic and plural character.”

There’s a big catch, however. The constitutional assembly - the body that has the final word on the new city’s basic law - is under no obligation to consider any of the citizen input. And then there are the practical difficulties of collecting and summarizing the myriad of views dispersed throughout one of the world’s largest cities.

That makes Mexico City’s public-consultation experiment a big test for the people’s digital power, one being watched around the world.

Read the rest at Quartz

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