[liberationtech] Twitter and the resignation of Germany's minister of defense

[Anne Roth]

Hi,

not that that would be a truly liberating step, but it's interesting
nonetheless:

Germanys extremely popular minister of defense Karl Theodor zu
Guttenberg resigned from office yesterday. There are two or three
interesting aspects which make this resignation different from others.

The starting point was an article about his doctoral thesis (law)
containing a number of plagiarisms, published maybe three weeks ago.
This led to a vast wiki-based online collaboration of many people
looking for pieces in the thesis that were in fact copied from
elsewhere. Within days it turned out that approx. 70% of the 400+ pages
didn't have the necessary footnotes. The collaboration on this was
started on Google docs but was moved to a proper wiki shortly after:
http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com/wiki/GuttenPlag_Wiki

Guttenberg and his political allies - including the chancellor - tried
to belittle the whole affair as irrelevant to his being minister of
defense. Alongside wild public debates an open letter was set up by
doctoral students protesting against the belittlement of their academic
work. Within days 30.000 signatures were collected online and handed
over to the chancellor. Almost - the students were refused at the
entrance of the Office of the Federal Chancellor and told that because
of terrorism dangers the signatures couldn't be accepted.. (not sure if
this is really true but it could be). They were all over the news anyways.

Lastly Berlin's first demonstration took place last saturday that was
organised solely through Twitter and social networks. Some 500 people
gathered in Berlin's commercial center and marched to the ministry of
defence holding up shoes - a reminiscence to the Arab shoes. This got
attention in virtually all of Germany's news, major tv news included.
I've never participated in a demonstration that small - there wasn't
even music - that got this much national attention. (Some pictures here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/guttbye/interesting/)

Another Twitter revolt, style: western industrialised country? I don't
think so. Both tv and big printed papers played the decisive role. But
what's interesting is how public attention is moving 'our' way. Why
would less than 500 people protesting against a corrupt defense minister
play any role at all? Because 'the net people started it', via Twitter.

The fact that the amount of plagiarism in the dissertation was detected
so fast by using a wiki played a role. It was noted widely that online
collaboration can be very different and very effective in campaigning
against politicians who didn't have to fear this kind of attack so far.

Both the plagiarism detectives and the doctoral students wouldn't have
been able to get together, do something and go public this waybefore.

We've had Twitter, wikis, open letters online for a while. What's new is
the way this is being discussed. And the resignation of the most popular
politician Germany's had for years.


Best,
Anne

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