Communication technologies have permeated almost every aspect of modern life, shaping a densely connected society where information flows follow complex patterns on a worldwide scale. The World Wide Web created a global space of information, with its network of documents linked through hyperlinks. And a new network is woven, the Web of Data, with linked machine-readable data resources that enable new forms of computation and more solidly grounded knowledge. Parliamentary debates, legislation,

more »

... formation on political parties or political programs are starting to be offered as linked data in rhizomatic structures, creating new opportunities for electronic government, electronic democracy or political deliberation. Nobody could foresee that individuals, corporations and government institutions alike would participate in a joint space of information establishing mutually beneficial relationships. Chapter 1 has presented in detail the technologies enabling the Web of Data and has sketched practices of much interest for experts in political studies. The concept of democracy, which has remained relatively unaffected by this wave of changes, needs a revision and the idea of a Linked Democracy is an exploratory contribution. Chapter 2 has reviewed deliberative and epistemic models of democracy and traced how some of their features are present in the current ecosystem of civic technologies. Building on both these models and empirical examples of participatory ecosystems we propose the concept of Linked Democracy as a basis to represent distributed, technology-supported, collective decision-making processes where data, information, and knowledge are connected and shared by citizens. Chapters 3 and 4 expand this concept by sketching a multilayered model and preliminary suggesting some core properties that we connect with Ostrom's design principles for the effective management of common-pool resources. Chapter 5, finally, outlines the regulatory frameworks for linked democracy ecosystems that we denominate 'socio-legal ecosystems' and, on top of them, the concept of 'meta-rule of law'. The chapter distinguishes between hard law, governance, soft law and ethics. They are connected and constitute what we have called the "legal quadrant" for the rule of law.