Leadership on the Lake – Macedonians Win with Tech Cooperation
When introducing IT initiatives into legislatures or about any other organization, the importance of good leadership and "buy-in" from the top is widely recognized as a key to successful adoption. It certainly was a recurring theme by several of the presenters at last week's eDemocracy Conference in Ohrid, Macedonia - myself included.
The refreshing thing about this conference was that the leadership wasn't just rhetorical bullet points on a PowerPoint slide (but believe me there were plenty of those). There was fantastic leadership demonstrated in the conference itself from the two leading political parties in Macedonia – the VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM, and by Jani Makraduli – a member of the SDSM and Vice President of Parliament.
The Macedonia Parliament has made great strides in automating parliamentary business and connecting citizens and MPs to parliament from their comprehensive website despite a very contentious political environment. In fact, the conference was being held under the auspices of the Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia largely because the successful eDemocracy initiative there has started to become a model in the South East Europe region that the several other parliamentary officials could learn from.
The keynote speeches from the President of Parliament, the Minister of Information Society (no, not this Information Society) and Vice President of Parliament to kick off the meeting demonstrated important leadership - but we all know it's not hard to get politicians to make good speeches.
The exceptional leadership was demonstrated if you know the back story between the Parliament President and Vice President and their respective - and opposing - political parties. The President's ruling party (VMRO-DPMNE) was in the minority between 2002-2006 in a broad coalition led by the SDSM – a time when Makraduli and his SDSM party spearheaded the eDemocracy initiative in Parliament. Then in the 2008 parliamentary elections the VMRO-DPMNE took the parliamentary majority away from the SDSM.
In many cases a high profile initiative so closely associated with the former majority political party might get sidelined for political reasons. It was even suggested that the new Minister of Information, apparently an open-source supporter, wasn't excited about the Microsoft-based eDemocracy solution that was put in place by Makraduli's team and tech partner Nextsense. So now you've got politics and religion involved!
However, credit goes to both the VMRO-DPMNE party for its continued support for the eGovernment project, and VP Makraduli who still plays the key leadership role in driving its adoption while in opposition even though political points for a successful initiative could possibly end up on ruling party's side of the scoreboard. In fact, Makraduli is so committed to this process that he demonstrated his personal leadership in another way - the VP participated in the conference through the very last session on the second day.
You don't often see senior political leaders dive into the weeds with the Parliament staff from several regional governments and parliaments, NGOs, tech companies and international donors for two entire days - that demonstrates true commitment and leadership (he also happens to be an IT professional from a former life - also a noteworthy contributing factor to the success of the project).
The Macedonian people are the winners when this kind of cross-party leadership allows tech-enabled democratic development to trump politics.