Deutsche Welle: “A public interest organization called Crowdsource Europe wants citizens to formulate their own constitution. If successful, the document could even replace the Lisbon treaty, the campaign’s organizers say.
“Crowdsource Europe is building a platform to work together with all Europeans to create a People’s Constitution, by the people, for the people,” the organizers said on their website. The goal is to create a document that captures the shared values and collective ideas for the future of Europe.
“We launched the project in May 2016. The motivation was to let the people of Europe decide what the EU should be about. Cooperation within Europe is important, but too often people don’t feel connected with the EU where technocrats decide from their ivory tower,” the project’s organizers Thomas de Groot, Mathijs Pontier and Melissa Koutouzis told DW.
“In the current representative democracy, people have the ability to vote once every several years (five years in the case of the European Parliament). After that, the possibilities for participation are very limited. As a result, many people don’t feel represented, and many people don’t even make the effort to vote for the European Parliament,” they told DW.
Crowdsource Europe’s idea of “interactive democracy” helps bridge that gap. In this concept, everyone has the ability to propose ideas and discuss them….Writing a constitution, especially the way de Groot and his partners Pontier and Koutouzis envisage it, is very easy. Interested people can log on to the People’s Constitution website (https://peoplesconstitution.eu/). A “How-to” tab explains users the ways in which they can enter their details and descriptions of laws they want added into the “constitution.”…The idea of writing a people’s constitution for all of Europe was inspired by
The idea of writing a people’s constitution for all of Europe was inspired by Iceland’s experiment in redrafting the document….(More)”