Democracy Online
February 7, 2007
Students associated with Germany's "Straight to the Chancellor" Web portal, direktzurkanzlerin.de, launched similar sites for Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Norway and Switzerland on Wednesday. The projects allow users to pose audio, video or text questions to their top elected leaders.
Three students at Berlin's Free University, Caveh Valipour Zonooz, Alexander Puschkin und Jörg Schiller, started the German portal in September. They said 1.5 million people have already visited their site, which they call "a different kind of Web 2.0 success story."
"We are a great example of a couple people getting together and trying to make a difference through tech-driven grassroots democracy," the students wrote on their umbrella site, communination.eu.
They said their aim is not only to encourage exchange between citizens and their governments but also to inspire public debate through what the students call "communination." "Communination" is the combination of community, nation, unity, communication and university, they write on their site.
Waiting for a response
Visitors to the portals can vote on the contribution they would most like to see answered. The site's administrators submit the top three questions each week to their heads of state or government.
Whether the leaders of Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Norway and Switzerland will actually respond to their citizens' queries remains unclear. The answers that Merkel's aides have passed on to the German Web site's makers haven't shed any more light on her policies than her government's regular press briefings.
Norwegians appeared to be the most avid contributors to the seven sites launched Wednesday. By the early afternoon, a number of letters had been addressed to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, possibly because the country's press had already reported thoroughly on the project.