Forum Post: Pirate politician: We want open, online government

An uberconnected world need a new politics, says Ben de Biel, spokesman for the Pirates party, who are making waves in Berlin, Germany

Who are the Pirates? The "Pirate party" name was thought up in Sweden in 2006 as part of an initiative for more file-sharing freedom. People were fed up with being criminalised as "pirates" by the media and other organisations lobbying against free internet content. Our political goals are greater public participation and transparency - the internet simply offers the best means to achieve these.

How do you explain your success in Germany? Berlin is the biggest city in Germany and a very young city. Most of our votes came from 18 to 35-year-olds. The established parties browse the internet but we work with it. The internet is not an end in itself, but a tool. Established parties haven't realised this but younger people who started life with the internet do. They want politics to change - to Politics 3.0 if you like - so politicians talk with them, not about them.

Why is free access to online content, as well as getting online for free, such a big deal for you? Using the net to change politics depends on free access to the technology. Only then can we tap into the potential and resourcefulness of all the people we want to involve in finding solutions for political problems. The establishment confines work on big questions to an inner circle. Attempts to censor information and restrict it to those who can pay have upset many people. Our alternative - give people a choice to be part of politics and decisions - seems to have struck a chord.

What changes does your party want to see? Long term, we want to run Berlin on an open-government model. We want all bureaucratic paperwork, publicly financed creative works and the products of publicly funded research not hidden away but freely accessible online. And we want a free wireless network infrastructure.

What about the short term? We are trying new ways of opposition. We'll put out to the people every enquiry and proposition we have for the coalition, as well as the replies they give us. With tools like Twitter we'll tap into and involve thousands of people.

Do the elected Pirates have an IT background - and if so, does it affect their politics? About half do. The rest know how to use net technologies. Many have a science background. They can do the mathematics and work out that there is a discrepancy between our finite resources and what is said and promised by the establishment. I'd say the Pirates' unifying feature is the desire for a more transparent and honest model of politics and to make a new deal within society.

Is the Pirate movement set to take off? Definitely. There are Pirate parties in many other countries. Estonia is already practising many aspects of the new politics - for example, it has a digital bureaucracy. We have had many inquiries from Greece and Spain, where people feel a need for greater transparency during the current economic crisis. If we can show success in Berlin, this will be a key to going forward elsewhere.

From NewScientist http://tiny.cc/tdeqv