The Green Party of Canada Living Platform is a wiki used to employ participatory democracy in the writing of this political party's electoral platform.

Significance

It was notable for being the very first attempt to create a binding political platform entirely on the Internet. The party's Shadow Cabinet expects to have the first such platform ready in case of a Canadian federal election, 2005 - despite a shift away from the official party venues. While Green Party leader Jim Harris has been a vocal supporter of the Living Platform Project, there is now a controversy over whether the project has been supressed by the GPC's current management team in favor of more traditional approaches to platfrom development.

Initiation

The Living Platform project was initiated in November of 2003. Party activist Michael Pilling, who had worked closely with Jim Harris in the Ontario Green Party and in subsequent non-party business activites, developed a proposal to create a participatory platform process using a wiki as the main collaborative tool. The plan to include diverse party members from across a very large country with a minimum of expense, and draft a platform on participatory principles was well received by the Federal Council. Starting in December 2003, Pilling was hired (initially on a part time basis) to coordinate the project. The result was the 2004 "Someday is Now" platform in which the planks were drafted by member/volunteers via a wiki and then edited for continuity and length by GPC staff. "Someday is Now" was well received by party members and voters - unscientific polls from the party's website recorded over half of the planks in that platform were approved of by over 80% of those who chose to vote. The project was profiled in a Globe and Mail article from which the name "Living Platform" originated. Following the election of a minority governemnt, Pilling, and the Living Platform's Process committee planned out and began to impliment a more sophisticated process that futher increased participation in the project and improved upon the transparency and democratic continuity.

Technology

The basic technology of the platfrom is tikiwiki but mailing list, teleconference and chat media are also used. There is even some discussion about whether a blog element is useful.

Use in outreach and lobbying

Though the Green Party of Canada received only 4.3% of the popular vote in the Canadian federal election, 2004 and is not in the Canadian House of Commons due to Canada's "first past the post" voting system, it is an active lobbyist and has achieved some victories by working through members of other parties - see Canada Well-Being Measurement Act. This is an admirable step into the federal stage for the Canadian Greens.

Untill current Green Party Media Chief Dermod Travis ordered otherwise in Fenbruary 2005, the Living Platform was open to non-members of the party as well as to non-citizens and even non-residents of Canada as anonymous individuals who could add comments. Currently, only those who are registered with the project can edit the actual wiki pages, or make comments. Some pages are restricted to allow only members, advisors or specific committees within the party to view them.

There were alse criticisms of its systemic bias, but also proposals to correct that bias via a "mark up and mail back" and "rank a plank live" system - and of course, live meetings have their own biases, too.

Neither the ERCT structure nor the Living Platform had been voted upon by the membership at a General Meeting.

There were some attempts to compromise by promoters of the open approach:

Feedback-oriented Terms of Use

The Terms of Use combine the Creative Commons CC-by and CC-by-nc-sa open content Creative Commons Licenses in a way that encourages maximum sharing of policy papers and feedback, potentially among many players in the noncommercial sector. Contributions by any individual may be copied anywhere as long as attribution is preserved, but commercial use of any combination of works by multiple parties is reserved to the Party. However, any noncommercial purpose - such as other parties' debates or NGO position discussions or academic research - may freely redistribute all the content.

Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and Common Content, and a notable critic of monopolies on information, has pronounced the terms of use as "cool". CC's own wiki debates on terms of use have similarly focused on this distinction between what a participant commits to the group and what the group commits to the public, the latter being Share Alike to ensure that the group creates a shared resource that is continously available to its non-members, even if some rights in that use are reserved to the group.

Opposition by Harris and the Head of Media

In February 2005, the party's Election Readiness and Campaign Team (ERCT) (then only a de facto executive committee) asserted control over all policy debate and temporarily shut down the Living Platform.

On January 20, 2005, there was an attempt by the ERCT to assert control over the Living Platform and delete all pages that suggested any policy or governing direction different than that advocated by ERCT itself.

By that time, the Living Platform was being used by some members to debate political party governance. This was part of the mandate of the democracy and governance committee and also relevant to the GPC's own policy of behaving according to the policies that it advocates for government. Some argued that this use went beyond the original purpose of the wiki, but many including party leaders and Issue Advocates argued that it was inevitable and necessary.

The governance uses included the use of the platform by deputy leader Tom Manley to debate party governance, its use by GPC Council member Sharolyn Vettese to debate a Code of Conduct for that Council, its use by the party's office manager to detail staff priorities to the members, by a women's caucus to build their agenda, and its use by members using it to discuss and develop alternative directions for the party (some of which were critical of the existing leadership).

A very few pages contained possibly-derogatory comments about party figures which were soon removed by the administrators (as per the sites "terms of use"). Some documents which the ERCT had wished to remain secret were posted. Furthermore many of the pages that were critical of the leader and ERCT were open to the public to view. They were however all wiki user pages and clearly not party publications.

Users of the Living Platform considered this normal and unavoidable - part of its evolution to deal with the internal operations of the party so that it would be prepared to take over internal operations of the government, practicing the transparency it advocated.

Opponents of consensus decision making Bill Hulet, spoke in favour of the closure of the Living Platform, arguing "it is clearly not in the interest of the Green Party of Canada to use its scarce resources to advertise inflammatory comments about its duly elected leadership."

Others questioned the need for restrictions on freedom of speech in the Green Party's forums.

In late January, party chair Bruce Abel blocked any executive interference in the Living Platfom, and ordered the webmaster to keep it running and intact with all comments remaining on the record. This was meant to prevent hearsay, rumour, and CC-by violations from occurring. The process (steering) committee of the Living Platform decided to make some sensitive pages inaccessible except by request, but most of the pages would remain available so as not to interrupt the mission-critical work of the Shadow Cabinet, and those working on the post-ERCT Governance Council and a new GPC Council Code of Conduct. All of this work was wholly dependent on the Living Platform.

A proposal by Party Fundraising Chair Kate Holloway to integrate all political party governance in a similar framework, a variation of Living Platform called the Living Agenda, was adopted by the Party's process committee as a response to first crisis. This would be the Party's mechanism for dealing with governance questions as raised by membership, and bringing maximum expertise to bear on decisions presently monopolized by the "ERCT".In January 2005, GPC staff met in Ottawa to, developed an implimentation plan for this idea. As of April 2005, no such wiki has been created.

One day before the shutdown on February 9th, an attempt by members of the Federal Council (the party's top decision making body) to assert is power to fire usurpers on the ERCT and protect "whistleblowers" - such as Head of Platform and Research Michael Pilling - was ruled "out of order" by the Chair, Bruce Abel, who had apparently reversed his position of just two weeks earlier. On the same day, Abel in an email titled "A line in the sand" and defacto ERCT chair Wayne Crookes sent emails to top level party officers that the party was sliding into anarchy and immediate deference to the ERCT's authority was required, even of sitting councillors who the ERCT in fact reported to.

Firing the Head of Platform, GPC management withdraws it's support.

The Living platform was shut down for approximately 48 hours. Volunteers who were working on the project expressed shock and frustration over this act, and many subsequently left the project. Since January 2005, there has been a sharp decline in activty on the site, a reversal from the prior months. (In January 2005 then Co-chair of the Project Tom Manley announced that "the assembly was booming.) When reposted, observers noted that the only content that immediately deleted were paged critical of the Media Team and Dermod Travis, with the most controversial pages about Harris, and party chair Bruce Abel still as thew were before the interruption. No definitive explanation was ever given to members or participants, apart from a vague statement about administrative deficiencies.

The claim was disputed by Pilling, the Head of Platform and originator of the project. He had been fired the same day the platform. Although an email from Party Chair Bruce Abel insinuated that he had been negligent, no explicit reason was ever given either to Pilling or party members for his dismissal. Pilling refuted the allegations as being without substance, and submitted a report to Council claiming he had been fired summarily with no process, that a plan agreeable to Travis and the platform group was already in place to deal with the controversial postings, and the plan was being carried out. Pilling claimed that in January, Travis had already hired his intended replacement for Pilling, and that the shutdown of the living platform was an artificially created crisis by Travis to allow the removal of a popular and well respected staff member. Travis's plan (to which Pilling and the platform team were vocally opposed) was to have media team staff person (the same person touted by Travis as a possible replacement for Pilling in November 2004) rewrite and update the 2004 "Someday is Now" platform for a possible 2005 election. Travis' plan became known as "Operation Fig Leaf".

Following the temporary shutdown of the Living platform Head of Media Dermod Travis withdrew staff support from the Living Platform, leaving volunteers struggling to pick up the burden of managing the living platform project. In a February 2005 meeting, the "emergence of a new and improved Shadow Cabinet" was defined as one of the LP's most important goals. Operation Fig Leaf went ahead with increased funding.

One day after the abrupt shutdown of the living platform, the Process Committee (the steering comitte of the living platform, and the committee of policy chairs (including most members of the shadow cabinet) who were opposed to the actions of the ERCT and increasingly to Harris, decidede to set up a "free" living platform using the current content (which was avalible by the terms of the Creative Commons licence. The revived Living Platform, hosted by non-GPC volunteers exists at [1], and is now slated to become a non-partisan forum for policy development by the public.

Living Platform revival

As open content with the right to fork, the "free Canadian Living Platform" has been revived out of Green Party of Canada web space.

However, it has expanded its mandate significantly beyond GPC or even the worldwide Green Parties or politics in Canada , and has moved significantly in the direction of global simultaneous policy, urban autonomy and bioregional democracy.