In the previous three blogs I written on the topic of using social media to organise grass roots movements to cause an impact on public policy, particularly in the setting of European Union. Well, the wave that we been riding has been a positive one and European Union is launching a Citizens Initiative from the 1st of April, this year.

Citizens Initiative will allow a million European citizens to initiate a legislation through European Commission. There are a few clauses such as signatures have to come from at least seven different member states, and then the important question is if one million facebook likes will constitute a proposal to the European Commission. The bureaucrats at Brussels can be very pedantic with the legitimacy of signatures and especially the privacy of the individuals who signed the petition.

This is a very important first step towards highly connected democratic society. The Arab spring, public anxiety to legislation and toppling of EU government, has policy makers thinking social media in the usual mix of their governance tools for the United Nations colony of 7 billion humans.

Romania once home to the notorious dictator Ceausescu, has seen people take up in struggle against EU standard of democracy, albeit a bottom of the table EU quality of democracy. Romanian youth and in general young adults around the world must be thinking what a poor time to begin their working life, with such a large unemployment figures and lack of prosperity the youth are rebelling against the current status-quo.

Some individual seem to point to the suns energy and the rise in sunspots numbers as explenation for this increase in human energy level, as Nikola Tesla mentioned. However Jeremy Rifkin says that we are actually living in rather exciting times of the Third Industrial Revolution.

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW3pQ0IXAPo[/embedyt]

The time then modern communication technologies will unite with renewable technologies to bring the 21st century changes in human culture and way of life. His ideas have strong flavours of the Innovation Convention that I had a privilege to visit last December, in Brussels organised by the EU. The convention showed-off EU’s state of mind and direction it’s aiming at with the union’s policy through the speakers it invited, the funded projects showcased, and the topic’s of the conventions conversation. With Germany giving up its nuclear energy and shifting to the renewable sources, Europe is showing leaders in a historic struggle for humanity to change its unsustainable way of life, the mass consumption has gone out-control with the population which will soon reach 9 billion, by mid 21st century.

This change is indispensable from the Internet and social media, which is already having enormous influence upon the democracy and transparency of regimes. Which is why I have set-up an NGO called GPI Institut, to monitor, report and consult on public data driven policy making, as well as to study Internets influence upon democracy and human rights, which is directly linked to the growth and prosperity of the humanity.

Public data driven policy making is about utilising the enormous data sets to make better informed decisions about the actual needs of citizens. This data is being produced with ever greater scale and speed due to Moore’s law. More on that next time, for now I have to end it here.