Changing how we decide

The Pirate Party, an anti-copyright party is showing that intellectual property rights are ever more irrelevant in the internet age. This party recently received 7.8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, making it the fourth state government in Germany in which it has had enough support to get into the state parliament. It also won enough votes to get seats in the European Parliament. The Pirate Party is widely expected to cross the five per cent threshold in the German national elections next year, allowing it to get into the national parliament. While it is unlikely that it will ever become a dominant party in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, it is helping to reshape the political agenda.

The Pirate Party has only a partially formed platform, and means many different things to different supporters. However a general theme is a support for the freedom of the internet and against attempts to limit the flow of material over the web. Near the top of the list of the Pirate Party's demons is copyright protection. Copyright protection is an antiquated relic that has no place in the digital era. Now that the internet allows material to be instantly transferred at zero cost anywhere in the world, copyrights are clearly a counter-productive restraint on technology.

Take the medical world and genetics, for example.

Patents, copyright, trademarks and competition for resources (people, money and accolades) seal off information. But there are reasons to believe that a cultural shift is afoot: researchers from geographically distant labs are forming non-traditional "federations" to combine their data sets, work on them collaboratively and post the results for other scientists to analyse. Crowd-sourced competitions such as DREAM Challenges and FoldIt show that important scientific findings can emerge from outside of universities and pharmaceutical companies. And public-private partnerships between drug developers, basic researchers and patient groups that share information pre-competitively (that is, with no patent filings) are an increasingly popular way to translate scientific findings into potentially meaningful clinical benefits.

 Patient groups are already organised; their members can report their symptoms online and self-enroll in clinical trials. We can already obtain portions of our own genetic information and use it to make informed medical decisions, join existing patient groups or create new ones. We can provide our genetic samples to data-driven trials to learn about our likelihood to respond to particular therapies. We can even organise to self-fund future studies or join only those studies that give us the legal right to say how and where our data are used. In other words, patients can and should stop being the passive "sick" and actively engage to pressure clinicians, researchers and drug developers to adapt or perish. Democratised medicine represents the fullest flowering of the biomedical information revolution. There are few worthier goals than a future in which citizen-patients are active participants in managing their own health.

"Collaborative filtering" is a technology where people can navigate huge numbers of options. It starts off by collecting data on an individual's preferences, extrapolates patterns from this and then produces recommendations based on that person's likes and dislikes. With suitable modification, this technology could be of use to socialism - not to help people decide what to consume, but which matters of policy to get involved in. A person's tastes, interests, skills, and academic achievements, rather than their shopping traits, could be put through the CF process and matched to appropriate areas of policy in the resulting list of recommendations. A farmer, for example, may be recommended to vote upon matters which affect him/her, and members of the local community, directly, or of which s/he is likely to have some knowledge, such as increasing yields of a particular crop or the use of GM technology. The technology would also put them in touch with other people of similar interests so that issues can be thrashed out more fully, and may even inform them that 'People who voted on this issue also voted on…'

Modern communications technology has opened up the possibility for mass participation in decision-making. The revolutionary changes in communications technology has made it possible, for the first time in history, to sum up millions of decisions taken far apart into a single total in seconds and to relay this continuously to millions of others. Political decision-making by millions of people is now possible.

E-democracy allow participation in decision making at so many different levels and particular areas.

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