Online Party of Canada

Monday, November 26th 2012 – Online Party of Canada (OPC) founder and leader, Michael Nicula, ran in the Federal By-Election of Durham, Ontario. This action has completed the registration process and as a result, OPC is now listed as the 19th registered party in Canada!

Here are some lessons learned from this campaign, as Michael Nicula shares, that could help OPC (and other Electronic Direct Democracy (E2D) parties) run better campaigns in the future:

• Start Candidate selection as early as possible; we should start now for 2015 general elections
• Each Candidate should build a strong team of volunteers locally, start collecting donations and actively promoting themselves as well as OPC through the internet and social media
• Expand and maintain fresh website content, use more videos and blogs
• Prepare for the old-fashion ground battle even if this is not our style; signs, door to door, flyers, phone calls. Be ready.
• Build a war chest of around $100,000 per district, from donations. As much as I hate begging for money, we can’t win votes without spending as much as the law permits
• Create strategies to compensate the media isolation by using effectively the social media, advocacy group alliances, public endorsements from reputable persons.

Again, this is a historic achievement not only for OPC, Durham and Canada but also for the entire E2D community internationally. Over one hundred citizens in Canada have officially said they believe in electronic direct democracy! We’ve come a long way and this is just the beginning!

Partido de Internet

Sunday, November 20th 2011, was election day in Spain. The People’s Party (PP), led by Mariano Rajoy won an absolute majority in the elections, ousting the party in power since 2004 (PSOE). However, these elections were also an important step for the electronic direct democracy (E2D) party movement, since these were the first general elections in Spain with Partido de Internet (PDI) candidates!

PDI (“Internet Party“, in English) is a new political party born in 2009 in Spain that tries to develop an electronic direct democracy system within the current legal system. The Internet Party has no ideology. They support an open list system where the elected members act representing the decisions taken by citizens in the Internet platform. [1]

They are officially registered and were able to participate in the Spanish General Elections 2011; however, due to recent changes of the Electoral Law, by current parliamentary parties, which forced political parties to obtain supporting signatures from 0.1% of the census population just to be allowed to run in the elections, PDI was only able to present 8 candidates in the electoral district of Cádiz and received 603 votes (0.09%). ^[2] [3]

This is a historic achievement not only for PDI, Cádiz and Spain but also for the entire E2D community internationally. Several hundred citizens in Spain have officially said they believe in real democracy, liquid democracy and electronic direct democracy! There will be many more to come and we congratulate Partido de Internet and all of its members and candidates for bringing us all one step closer to real democracy!