A celebration was held on November 2 in Yeoeuido, Seoul, to mark the official launch of the Headquarters of the Pan-national Political Innovation Movement with Jung Yeon-tae, Chairman of the Innovation Forum for Nation, and Jeong Hyun-ho, Head of the Headquarters of the Pan-national Political Innovation Movement in attendance. The Pan-national Political Innovation Movement kicked off with nearly 1,000 people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s and 100 former student body presidents (at the university level) as its members.
The celebration was jointly organized by the Innovation Forum for Nation, the Future Generation Forum, the Korea Youth Policy Academy and the Association of University Student Newspapers and was sponsored by the Forum on the Future of Big Data. The celebration featured a live mobile platform demonstration which was watched by 200,000 members of the Innovation Forum for Nation and one million members of a user-generated political Facebook group.
Jung Yeon-tae, Chairman of the Innovation Forum for Nation, delivered the opening address, saying “Taking advantage of the world’s fastest and best ICTs and the Internet infrastructure, we look to take a plunge into new politics in order to create a fair and happy world of common sense that the public aspire to. This gathering is so meaningful in that these young leaders who worry about the future of this country came here to watch demonstrations of a new political decision-making tool, which is designed to encourage communication and transform national systems, policies and customs in a swift manner.”
“Today’s political arena is rife with corruption and illegalities committed by selfish people who seek to maximize personal gain and consequently the public became enraged. Exclusive "behind closed doors" party politics, characterized by power tussle, political strife and influence-peddling business, should give way to new politics for the people and by the people. The era of digital politics has arrived where whether you are a leftist or rightist are not important and what matters is whether it is open or closed,” Jung mentioned.
“We are witnessing the 4th Industrial Revolution sweeping across the world, shaking up almost everything. This era of fast changes demands that we build a mobile platform for the public to voice their opinion fast and transparently and a SNS-based national network. By building such a mobile platform-based public communication system, we seek to contribute to the advancement of direct democracy,” Jung stressed.
Jeong Hyun-ho, Head of the Headquarters of the Pan-national Political Innovation Movement, offered his perspective on the subject ‘Is mobile-driven political innovation possible, “We have to address heaps of government challenges and problems related to corruption, illegalities and political conflict. However, there is a limit to bringing about political innovations in a way that the public want under the current indirect, representative decision-making system. In order to reflect what the public want in national agendas, we need to retool the current high-cost, low-efficiency, unproductive political systems.”
“Building advanced information systems such as big data by utilizing the mobile Web, one of our country’s strongest strengths, will help us to precisely detect our society’s problems and urgent tasks and present reasonable solutions. In the process, transparent, grassroots democracy will gain ground in this country.”
Jang Sung-min, President of the World and Northeast Asia Peace Forum, delivered a special lecture titled ‘Zeitgeist and National Innovation Tasks.” Jang said, “Countries around world are testing digital democracy. California has launched Digital Democracy, a non-profit project to build a new online and interactive platform aimed at improving transparency in state government, enhancing citizens’ political participation and providing a view into the state legislature. Newly-created political parties in European countries, including Italy and Spain, are exploiting the Internet and social networking sites, therefore breathing new life into today’s ailing representative democracy.
“South Korea is already the world’s best when it comes to ICTs such as LTE and mobile technology. To do a better job of managing the country that has been entrusted to politicians, let’s tap into mobile platforms as a tool for transforming political systems into ones that encourage transparent, speedy and honest communication,” Jang said.
“Some foreign journalist has labeled South Korea as the ROTC (Republic Of Total Corruption). It didn’t surprise me. We are going through the worst crisis in South Korea's constitutional history, beset by an influence-peddling scandal, corruption, chaos in state affairs, social disruption, economic woes, etc. Let’s clean up the existing political arena and begin ‘cyberdemocracy’ to drive innovation in politics, the media, national security and education.”
