Some of the smart people in the provisional wing of Cisco have been developing the idea of the "connected republic" for a couple of years – applying the power of networks not just to how public services get delivered, but also to how government works.
Now they have launched the Connected Republic 2.0 – both as a white paper and as an online community. Both are well worth looking at, and although the blog and the forum are in their very early days, the quality of the people involved pretty much guarantees that they will be worth following.
There is just one small oddity. The two leading lights, Paul Johnston and Martin Stewart-Weeks are, respectively, British and Australian (though Martin may still be claiming to be from Yorkshire). That makes both of them subjects of the Crown – though perhaps they felt that Connected Monarchy didn’t have quite the same ring to it – even with 2.0 (or should it be II) tagged on the end.
Wihtout wishing to get myself too tangled in political theory, there are those who might argue strenously argue that the presence of a monarch is no barrier to the full richnes sof life as a republic (connected or otherwise). Indeed, the cunning strategists who engineered a failed referendum in Australia a few years ago to put the kybosh on the idea of transforming Australia into a republic argued exactly that. The connected republic, as those who read the new paper will see, is as much a state of mind as it is any sort of constitutional commentary.
What I have found in the past couple of years is that those who show the most compelling evidence of embracing the connected republic mindset are very often from countries still labouring (or rejoining, if you prefer) under the yoke of monarchy – Australia, UK, Holland, Denmark, Sweden to mention a few.