REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson is not your typical entrepreneur. Although he has founded numerous high tech companies — his first at the age of 17 — and is clearly the sort of businessman that companies like Google and Microsoft recruit, Mr. Gudjonsson has instead chosen to devote much of his time and technological know-how to a think tank called the Ministry of Ideas. The group’s mission is no less attention-getting than its name: it is pursing how Icelanders can breakdown hierarchies that elevate people like himself far above the rest of society in the first place. 

“I am a big fan of an active democracy and a participatory economy, and have been looking into open source governance for some time,” Mr. Gudjonsson explained, as we sat down to chat in his office. It is known as the House of Ideas, a former furniture store near Reykjavik's harbor that once also served the country’s fishing industry. The House of Ideas — no relation to the House of Blues — now provides free office space to successful applicants who have business ventures that are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

What sparked Mr. Gudjonsson's desire to be a social reformer was actually the same thing that drove the furniture store out of business. It is a nationwide calamity that will affect Iceland for generations. It’s what spurred the University of Reykjavik and the Icelandic Academy for the Arts to establish a place like the House of Ideas. And “it” is this: Iceland’s bankers, with the tacit support of its politicians, bankrupted the country.  

In Icelandic, it is simply known as the kreppa.

Society Down The Kreppa 

When Iceland plunged into financial crisis in late 2008, Mr. Gudjonsson decided that the raw emotion of demonstrations was not for him.

“People wanting change were basically split in two groups,” he said.  “There were people who went to protest, and people who joined groups like the Ministry of Ideas, planning for the future.” The problem, as he saw it, did not arise because of one specific government, but was a result of the way that representative democracy functioned, or didn't.  It was too passive, and a whole new social construct was needed.

The protest movement was spawned by the traumatic nature of the financial crisis.  The value of Iceland’s currency, the krona, collapsed on foreign exchange markets, which led to vanished savings, high inflation and even higher foreign debt payments. Iceland's main banks – Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki – which had only been privatized at the start of the decade, had managed to acquire up to nine times the size of the country's GDP in debt. When, in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers' collapse in the U.S., the big Icelandic banks were unable to obtain the refinancing they needed for their gargantuan interest payments, they went into government receivership. Icelandic taxpayers found themselves stuck with the bill after the banks were re-nationalized, leaving them a touch upset at the ruling class to say the least. Weekly protests gained momentum and eventually forced a change in government in January 2009. The whole affair came to be known as the Kitchenware Revolution, named after the pots and pans Icelanders used as noisemakers.

At the Ministry of Ideas

In the wake of the Kitchenware revolt, Gudjohnsson felt that a grassroots think tank like the Ministry of Ideas, which is unaffiliated with any political party, could achieve something that the system itself could not.  “[Parliamentarians] have worked for many years to get voted,” he said. “Certainly, to open everything up – it doesn't really fly for them.”

On Nov. 14, Gudjonsson’s Ministry of Ideas and several affiliated groups — known collectively as the Anthill — are hoping to take a significant step towards opening everything up. They are hosting a National Assembly where Icelanders will be invited to give their input about what sort of society the country should build in the aftermath of the kreppa.

Gov 3.0?

For the Anthill’s efforts to be taken seriously, they need mandate-like participation. That means inviting a large number of people to Laugardolshöll, the sporting arena in Reykjavik where the Assembly will be hosted. So Mr. Gudjonsson’s group has invited 1,500 people — roughly 0.5% of Iceland's population — to attend.

About 1,200 of these invitations will go to people picked at random from the national registry. If some fail to RSVP, more will be invited until the 1,200 “randoms” confirm that they will be attending, Mr. Gudjonsson said.

At the assembly itself, the masses will be broken down into groups of nine. With the help of discussion facilitators who have been trained to ensure the roundtable discussions are healthy, participants will  discuss what values defines them as a nation. To ascertain exactly how these groups of nine will arrive at a larger consensus, when each participant comes up with a proposed value – Mr. Gudjonsson expects 20,000 ideas to be proposed – it will be “tagged” by that group electronically, like on a blog.

Tags will be monitored by a backroom staff who will ascertain which values were deemed important most frequently. The top nine will be considered Iceland's moral pillars for the purposes of the National Assembly. From there, slightly larger groups will discuss how to build social frameworks — economic, educational, justice, and health care systems — based on these core values. For each value, the assembled groups will come up with nine ideas on how to improve society (nine, according to Mr. Gudjonsson, is an ideal number for group work.) 

Mining the data for a consensus in this section will be relatively more qualitative, but at the end of the day participants will have drafted a manifesto that will give the country a better idea of what sort of future society it would like to build. Not bad for a Saturday’s work.

“Before entering the meeting, no one knows what the values will be. We have a feel for it, but it’s up to the people of the meeting to find a government for themselves,” Mr. Gudjonsson said. Giving effective control of the nation’s monetary supply to a few avaricious profit seeking individuals will probably not make the cut.

The resulting manifesto won't have any sort of legal significance, but Mr. Gudjonsson said that holding such an event will be useful in holding the government more accountable. “We can always refer to the 2009 November national assembly,” he exclaimed. “If there are going to be discussions [about reform] in parliament,” which there have been and will be, “then the national assembly will be kind of a guiding light.” In fact, holding a Constitutional Assembly is something that some of the major parties in Parliament have discussed, and the National Assembly is something from which that they may draw wisdom.  Even if it is just the case of politicians blowing hot air, then at least the National Assembly will be an exercise in participatory democracy.

First we take Reykjavik...

Of course, it is information technology that makes this all possible. The whole ordeal is essentially the first attempt to crowdsource a socio-economic-political manifesto in history. More importantly, as the whole event will be on an open source software platform, Mr. Gudjonsson claims that the entire world can look to the National Assembly as a model for reform. In addition to  allowing the participants and the Icelandic public to scrutinize the information collected, people around the globe will be able to analyze the data and how it was obtained, thus ensuring the process' transparency and maximizing its utility to people everywhere.

People who are interested, for example, will be able to find out what age group in Iceland esteems which values more highly than others. Curious programmers, if they are interested in agitating for their own assemblies, can find out how the code was written so that the Anthill's administrators could quickly deduce the shared values of dozens of groups. If someone wants to produce a copy of the final manifesto, they will be able to do that as well, free of charge. This open aspect to the meeting, Mr. Gudjonsson hopes, will not only garner the attention of like-minded people abroad, but will encourage people in Iceland to act upon the ideas discussed by the National Assembly. 

“Instead of focusing on a particular solution, I want to focus on the process. With a process, its something that can scale,” said Mr. Gudjonsson, detailing his inspiration for open source social reform. “It's like how Linux competed with Windows because of its open source software. The beauty was in the process, which can scale so clever people all over the world can participate.” And what better place to experiment with a scalable project in social engineering than one of the smallest, most educated countries in the world? When the house of cards that is global finance came crashing down, Iceland, one of the first to take a massive blow, was called the canary in the coalmine. Mr. Gudjonsson is now hopeful that the world will once more look to Iceland as an indication of what the future holds, but this time for all the right reasons.

“In terms of use of technologies, more people per capita use Facebook in Iceland than anywhere else in the world,” he said, pointing out the role that the social networking website played in Iceland's Kitchenware Revolution. Facebook isn't just a place where you can update your status with the angst ridden Alanis Morisette lyric du jour, you know. Such a tech-savvy, educated democracy as Iceland that took Facebook and used it to organize an effective social movement, with apologies to Iranians, could very well be a leader in government innovation.

“The feedback system so fast. You can implement change so quickly and you have access to politicians and leaders within the country,” he noted. Being a country with a population of just over 300,000, Iceland is a place where, despite a lack of trust between the population and politicians, a tightly woven social fabric makes wide reaching consensual reform possible. The government has even given support to the National Assembly, although it gets financial backing from a wide range of donors. Having such an in tune civil society as exists in Iceland, in Mr. Gudjonsson's opinion, makes the country “the testing ground for a more sustainable democracy.”

Rockefeller Foundation, This Isn't

A breach of trust by the country's elected representatives wasn't the only thing that irked Icelanders about the kreppa. It made many question how it was that a small group of bankers and investors essentially squandered all of the country's money and then some without any real democratic process.  Voters may have given a mandate to the Independence Party to privatize the banking system, but that wasn't a carte blanche to bankers to pillage the country's savings accounts. The government wasn't the only one to blame.

This injustice has not gone unnoticed by the Ministry of Ideas who, Mr. Gudjonsson said, are also researching the idea of democratizing economics in addition to its work with the Anthill's National Assembly.  “We've seen that [a grassroots economy] is based on trust, but we are still trying to see how it can work.”  However it can work, it would need a reformed financial system, that Mr. Gudjonsson said should be “based on common values.” Again, in this respect, he believes that his diminutive country can set an example by combining lessons learned about resourcefulness in the private sector with the sympathetic worldview of non-profit organizations.

“[Iceland] could become a key partner in the G-20 for prototyping these new values, tools and processes for a more sustainable capitalism,” he said.

And what a better place to start than one's own institution?  Promoting both a more active citizenry and innovating are both clearly important to Mr. Gudjonsson. As with the work it is doing for the National Assembly, the Ministry of Ideas does not claim copyright to any of its published material or ideas.  “We are not about egos,” he ironically boasted. “We are about making society better.” When the Ministry of Ideas holds its weekly meetings, for example, individual enterprises are born, from which the Ministry itself – financed by donors and staffed by volunteers – sees no monetary reward.  Mr. Gudjonsson himself expressed an interest in an economic system without copyright, even though he  has filed a number of patents in his time. “We somehow need to pay for clothes and food and stuff,” he lamented. 

What else is on?

The National Assembly and the idea of increasing participation in the economy and government don’t have the support of everyone in Iceland. Just who are they to decide Iceland's future, anyway? some have asked. Mr. Gudjonsson responds that the group’s experimental work is not legally binding and is fairly inclusive.

It is perfectly reasonable to question the results that can come from a grassroots effort, especially when a nation’s very political and financial structure are involved.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gudjonsson hopes the Assembly’s mission will catch on because “the right people will pick it up and do something about it.” By helping to found the Ministry of Ideas and getting involved with the Anthill, he hopes to increase the odds of that happening. 

“If you have a grassroots meeting at 8 o'clock” Gudjohnsson said, describing the challenge, “then it has to be clear that it’s more important to join that meeting than it is to watch Jay Leno. To make that desire is to basically make people feel that they can have a role – that their voices can be heard, and that they have a sense for their role within the big picture.”

Perhaps more people, at least in Iceland anyway, will be convinced  they can play an active role in the big picture after the National Assembly on Saturday. That is, unless there's something good on television.