Guest post - Cristian Contreras reflects on GovJam 2013

I have attended several hackathons in the past but none have been as focused on the big picture as GovJam. For two and half days, a group of public servants, social entrepreneurs, and government aficionados took to designing better public service systems in the hope of creating a better place to live. Thanks to my previous exposure to design thinking, I was familiar with the constructive chaos that characterizes the creative process between teams of relative strangers working on ideas at an embryonic stage. The creative tug-of-war from this multidisciplinary collaboration was as it always is - an incredibly rewarding experience.

The idea of improving the quality of public services by redesigning them to include citizen input was a recurring theme during GovJam. Our team was no exception. We decided to work on designing a revolutionary approach to citizen engagement that gives people an opportunity to shape their community by letting them vote on projects with real tax dollars.

In addition to creating more opportunities to participate, a relationship between education and engagement was also present in many of the projects. I, for one, echo both of these ideas. In my work with Next Parliament, I have learned that there is a very real need for a more participatory democracy, but I have noted that solutions to this need are being held back by lack of widespread political engagement. Often, lack of confidence in the system is cited as the reason for this growing political apathy, but in my opinion this is simply the go-to excuse. The real problem lies in the fact that the wider public needs to be much better informed about various issues affecting their lives.

Next Parliament is my attempt at fixing this problem. I have created a site dedicated to educating Canadians on every issue related to politics. Next Parliament works as a Wikipedia-style website where every entry can be edited by the community. Every issue and community recommendation has an argument in favour, an argument against, a community discussion thread, and links to more information. Visit NextParliament.ca to learn more.

We are privileged to be witness to a Cambrian explosion of innovative Gov2.0 initiatives taking place all around the globe. It can sometimes be easy to lose sight of these new government breakthroughs in the sea of cloud, crowdsourced, mobile, and other social innovations, but we must never lose sight of the fact that this space represents one of the most fundamental transformations of the digital era to date.