Free One Way Forward by Lawrence Lessig Page B

Promise
     
     
    In 2008, Iceland, like much of the rest of the world, suffered a major economic collapse after its recently privatized banks suffered a catastrophic default. The legalized gambling that the world’s banking system had become left Iceland’s three major banks holding nine times the country’s GDP in debt. When the collapse of Lehman Brothers ended their ability to refinance that debt, the banks entered bankruptcy—the largest collapse, relative to the size of a nation’s economy, in the history of the world.
    When a coalition government tried to bail out the banks—with a package that would have required each Icelandic citizen to pay about one hundred euros a month for fifteen years at 5.5 percent interest—the citizens revolted. A national referendum rejected the bailout in March 2010, with 98 percent voting to reject. 44
    As the frustration with Iceland’s failure grew, there was a growing recognition that this economic failure was a governance failure, too. Iceland had failed to insulate its government from cronyism and corruption. Both fueled irresponsible monetary and banking policy and, eventually, economic collapse.
    So the citizens of Iceland launched the most ambitious crowdsourced-sovereignty project in modern history. As a first step, a network of private grassroots organizations called the Anthill gathered a statistically significant portion of the nation to brainstorm a vision for the country. This “National Assembly” of more than fifteen hundred Icelandic citizens used open-source principles to “energize the wisdom of the population,” as it was promoted, and “to crowdsource a socio-economic political manifesto.” 45 The idea, according to the assembly’s architect, was to “focus on the process. With a process it is something that can scale. It’s like how Linux competed with Windows. … The process … can scale so clever people all over the world can participate.”
    The National Assembly set the stage for the next extraordinary step of popular sovereignty. In June 2010, the Icelandic parliament passed the Act on a Constitutional Assembly, delegating the “intensely legalistic task” of writing a constitution to a group of citizens acting in a constitutional council.
    That council then convened a National Forum in November 2010, which “crowdsourced the norms and values of the population of 21st century Iceland,” through a series of questions and interviews. Then, building on the results from that survey and the work of the 2009 assembly, the forum divided citizens into groups focused upon particular themes.
    At the same time, the council initiated elections to a twenty-five-seat drafting commission, which would have ultimate responsibility for drafting a constitution. After some struggles with the Supreme Court, the government appointed the elected representatives to the council in April 2011.
    The council was a completely self-governing body, charged with the task of drafting a new constitution based upon the framework established by the 2010 forum. Each week, the council assembled in a televised general meeting, accessible over the Internet. Every Icelander was invited to participate in those proceedings by submitting written comments or proposed new sections. Every week, beginning in April 2011, the council posted draft clauses on its website. The public commented on the clauses directly and through social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube. By the end of the process, the public had contributed more than 3,600 comments and had submitted more than 370 suggestions to the council’s website.
    In July 2011, the council submitted the draft of a new constitution to parliament. That draft will be voted upon in a public referendum sometime in 2012. The parliament will then determine whether to approve it and bring it into force. If it passes, it will be the first popularly ratified constitution in Iceland since it gained independence from Denmark in