A few months ago, I participated in an event about "Politics 2.0" here in Switzerland. One of the input speakers was the head of the youth section of one the major Swiss parties. His section had used a lot of social media tools to push their political agenda. They used them smartly and created good stuff that often went viral and made it to mainstream media. However, at one point in the discussion I suggested that what we were talking about wasn't actually "Politics 2.0", it was merely "political marketing 2.0". It was the communications part that was being redone; but the old system of doing politics and creating policy remained unchanged. I went on to predict that the social web (or whatever you wanna call it) would change this too; and that the future would see a decline of classical political parties and the rise of "political flash mobs" - groups of people finding together online to push a specific issue.

Needless to say, the speaker didn't agree with my prediction. He didn't only state that this would never happen, he also said that it shouldn't - because only political parties could secure the working of a democratic system. And granted, I'm not sure myself whether "political flash mobs" ever will (or should) replace political parties. But nevertheless, I have kept thinking about this idea because, actually, I think that we're already seeing signs of this happening.

Of course, there's the often-cited statistical evidence that less and less young people are willing to join a political party. Most of them probably really don't care that much about politics, but there's also others (including myself) who actually do care, but don't find themselves represented by any of the available parties and their ideologies. Meanwhile, I think there's also a quite fundamental shift in how philantropy is done (I'll write about that in more detail some other time). After the devastating earthquake in Haiti last week, a lot of the donations were done through mobile phones; and organizations like Kiva, Betterplace or Kickstarter allow to "crowdfund" very specific projects (check out this post by my Sandbox team colleague Paul Gleger for more info on mobile banking and crowdfunding). The trend is two-fold: First, thanks to online technology, large groups of people with no apparent previous connection can be convinced to contribute or donate to the same cause; and thanks to online communication, accountability rises, and people are more and more inclined to contribute or donate not to organizations and what they stand for, but for specific projects or issues.

I'm convinced that we'll see more similar developments in national politics too. That doesn't mean that parties will cease to exist altogether, but maybe they have to become more open platforms that allow people to come together and work on specific issues. And they'll have to accept that most of these people will never pledge allegiance to a party, but rather turn to whatever issue they think deserves their attention - regardless of the corner of the political spectrum it originated from. In a way, the idea of "political flash mobs" is the political equivalent of the idea of "social business design", one of the six big topics we identified at Sandbox for the coming year (and beyond).