We The People is Live!

Welcome to We the People on WhiteHouse.gov. This tool provides you with a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.

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OUR PETITION RESPONSE

Taking Action to Reduce the Burden of Student Loan DebtRead The Response

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How We the People works in 3 easy steps

Step #1

Create or Sign a Petition

Anyone 13 or older can create or sign a petition on WhiteHouse.gov asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. To get started you’ll need to create an account and verify your email address. Start thinking about the issues that matter to you, what you would like the Obama Administration to do to address the important challenges facing our country, and who you’ll ask to join you.

Create a Petition

Step #2

Build Support and Gather Signatures

Creating or signing a petition is just the first step. It’s up to you to build support for a petition and gather even more signatures. Use email, Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth to tell your friends, family and coworkers about the petitions you care about.

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On our way to Gov2.0, White House seems ahead of France...

Le dualisme Marché-Etat ne suffit plus. Il y a une impérieuse nécessité à tenir compte des apports de la société civile, de l'engagement des citoyens, des capacités propres de développement de chaque territoire. Il y a urgence à mettre en œuvre une véritable démocratie économique. Les acteurs de l'économie sociale et solidaire en ont la capacité. Les responsables politiques en auront-ils la clairvoyance ?

Mission:

The Meta-Activism Project (MAP) is a non-traditional think tank that leverages the affordances of the digital network to better understand its effects on social power.

We pursue our mission by building human and informational infrastructure for the study of digital activism, which means weaving human networks of activists and scholars and creating informational resources. Our motivating question is: “How are we creating knowledge about digital activism and how can we do so more effectively?”

The ultimate goal of these activities is to make digital activism a more effective means of achieving a transparent, democratic, and participatory global society.

The Soulaliyate Women's Movement was Rkia Bellot's idea. Now retired, she used to work at the finance ministry and is married to an outsider, a soldier. She too belongs to the Haddada tribe and has no chance of an inheritance. "I have eight brothers. I'm the only one not to have received anything when our father died and the discrimination got even worse when they started selling land as compensation or handing out plots for building," she explains, in tears.

She was particularly upset by the humiliation she suffered when she tried to stand up for her rights. "The male members of the tribe said: 'You're just a woman', and when I appealed to the officials, they told me I didn't have 'the requisite status', which is exactly the same thing, in more diplomatic terms," Bellot adds.

The first demonstration in 2007 was a surprise for many Moroccans, who knew nothing about the Soulaliyates and less still about their rules on inheritance. But the Soulaliyates have a growing audience. On 20 March demonstrations were held all over Morocco with thousands of people in the streets, despite a speech by the king announcing constitutional reform. But Bellot was not marching. She was typing out manifestos on her computer.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

Micro-participation is a term that’s been discussed within open government circles as a way to make citizen engagement more convenient, effective, and scalable. The idea is to fit civic activity and involvement into the everyday lives of the public, resulting in more small ways to collaborate and communicate.

Ce que Walesa m’a dit…

Publié par Hatem Bourial le 03 mai 2011 à 12:18

Permettez-moi de partager avec vous ce bref témoignage. J’ai en effet pu avoir un aparté suffisamment long avec Lech Walesa, lors de sa récente visite en Tunisie et pu recueillir quelques propos de ce symbole de la révolution polonaise.

Après son combat à la tête du syndicat libre « Solidarnosc », Walesa, devenu prix Nobel de la Paix, a aussi été le premier président librement élu de la Pologne.

Voici en quelques points, les idées dont il m’a fait part en réponse à mes questions relatives à son expérience et ses recommandations pour la Tunisie d’aujourd’hui. Verbatim :

• L’impatience est compréhensible mais attention : aussi peu de démagogie et d’anarchie que possible.
• Ce n’est pas encore la liberté ; ce n’est qu’un pas dans cette direction. Il reste beaucoup d’obstacles à franchir : rénover l’économie, réussir les réformes malgré l’inexpérience politique des nouveaux cadres.
• Il faut du temps et de la solidarité pour mettre fin aux vieilles structures et construire une nouvelle nation.
• Les fautes que vous ferez aujourd’hui compteront beaucoup. Il faut de la sagesse et de la concertation pour éviter les écueils et bâtir l’avenir.
• La démocratie, c’est d’abord le respect des lois. C’est la guerre de chacun contre chacun mais dans le cadre strict de la loi. Les politiciens sont là pour échanger des coups mais ils doivent respecter les règles de droit.
• Si vous réussissez votre révolution, ce sera aussi une réussite pour le monde.

What does Direct Democracy look like? Iceland is getting a new Constitution, written by ordinary people

"Iceland's getting a new constitution and it's really going to be the voice of the people."

From the Beaver County Times
Link to full article

"The sparsely-populated volcanic island is holding an unusual election Saturday to select ordinary citizens to cobble together a new charter, an exercise in direct democracy born out of the outrage and soul-searching that followed the nation's economic meltdown.

Hundreds of people are vying for the chance to be among up to 31 people who will form the Constitutional Assembly slated to convene early next year -- a source of huge pride for Icelanders who have seen their egos take a beating in recent years.

"This is the first time in the history of the world that a nation's constitution is reviewed in such a way, by direct democratic process," says Berghildur Erla Bergthorsdottir, spokeswoman for the committee entrusted with organizing the Constitutional Assembly."

*Photo courtesy of Icelandic Parliament

Link to post describing Constitutional Assembly

Iceland had never had any real constitution, but a "copy-and-paste" text derived from the Danish one, established in 1944, and where the word 'King' had been replaced by 'President of the Republic'.

WikiLeaks may be no more or less perfect than other media entities. Freedom of the press and of speech are often messy. But these rights are crucial, enshrined and protected as our most fundamental principles and practices.  The First Amendment is there to establish that it is not the job of the media in a democratic society to protect those in power from embarrassment or exposure. Thus, even when we are faced with what may we think of as “bad” press or speech, we must avoid responding with censorship -- the cure must not be worse than the disease.

If crimes have been committed in connection with the WikiLeaks experience, let the government make that case in court and let due process follow its course. But in the meantime, calls by some government leaders for the persecution of Julian Assange, or the extreme calls for his assassination, the intimidation of private internet service providers; the extra-legal freezing of WikiLeaks assets; and the blocking of the display of WikiLeaks-related information on government computers—even at the hallowed Library of Congress, where you can read all manner of subversive books—are affronts to an open society, a perversion of Internet activity, and a dagger aimed at the heart of the modern transparency movement.

The current reaction to WikiLeaks in the United States has exposed the vulnerability of any online publisher here to government pressure. This chilling effect on our democracy must be opposed.

... у меня исчезли последние детские иллюзии, связанные с тем, что кто-то там, наверху, о нас заботится и нас защищает (нет, я не о Боге, я говорю о руководстве страны и о Вас в том числе). Теперь я стала взрослым человеком и рассчитываю только на себя.

FR : ... j'ai perdu mes dernières illusions d'enfant quant à la présence quelque part, là-haut, de quelqu'un qui se soucie de nous et qui nous protège (je ne parle pas de Dieu mais des dirigeants du pays, dont vous). Maintenant, je suis devenue adulte, et je ne compte plus que sur moi-même. (Une blogueuse apostrophe Sergueï Choïgou, l’indéboulonnable ministre des Situations d’urgence, et rend hommage aux innombrables volontaires qui ont affronté le feu quasiment à mains nues - traduction Courrier International)

EN : I lost my last child's illusions regarding the caring and protective presence of someone somewhere up there (no I'm not talking about God, but the leaders of the Country, including you). Now I am grown up, and understand that I can only rely on myself. (approximately translated by me)

Toward new russian civil society awakening ?

Ultimately, what this implies is that the future of the global political economy is one of increasing moves toward a global system of governance, or a world government, with a world central bank and global currency; and that, concurrently, these developments are likely to materialize in the face of and as a result of a decline in democracy around the world, and thus, a rise in authoritarianism. What we are witnessing is the creation of a New World Order, composed of a totalitarian global government structure.

It is imperative that the world’s people throw their weight against these “solutions” and usher in a new era of world order, one of the People’s World Order; with the solution lying in local governance and local economies, so that the people have greater roles in determining the future and structure of their own political-economy, and thus, their own society. With this alternative of localized political economies, in conjunction with an unprecedented global population and international democratization of communication through the internet, we have the means and possibility before us to forge the most diverse manifestation of cultures and societies that humanity has ever known.