The United Minds Story
Hi, I'm Ross O'Mullane, and I'd like to tell you the story of the United Minds campaign.
In 2008, I setup the unitedminds.ie website, but I was toying around with the idea for a few years before that…
One night a couple of years after the start of the new millennium, I was sick on the couch and stayed up all night reading a book from cover to cover - the only time up to and since this moment I ever did this.
The Vision
The book was called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, in it Thom Hartman (right) explains how all energy on our planet comes from the sun. He paints a lovely picture of a tree being solidified air and sunlight. He tells us how millions of years of decayed trees and other vegetation compacted to create fossil fuels which became a great big store of energy which modern humans recently gained access to.
And what a rollercoaster this burst of energy has been! Oil has transformed our species from the industrial revolution up to the information age. There have been many positives like electricity and the internet, but also significant negatives like climate change and starvation.
Since the dawn of fossil fuels our population grew from about 1 billion to 6 billion in just 200 short years. What a growth rate! A rate that's surely unsustainable I was thinking.
Similarly, the dominant system we use to organise ourselves - capitalism requires continual growth - but we live in a finite world. So that similarly seems unsustainable.
NOW, one day I plan on having children, hey we're chemically disposed to want this. And if I do have kids I'd like to give them the best chance in life. However looking at our world - our unsustainable capitalist system powered by an energy source that's rapidly running out... I got to thinking, this ain’t looking too good.
I mean, if we had a really efficient and fair system of government I'd sit back and relax - procreate and crack open a beer. But we don’t. And our government is making bad decisions faster and faster, and seemingly not learning any lessons.
But I am an optimist, so I started to think about solutions. My advice: for any problem you've got, try and think about how they'll do “it” in the future.
I figured they will use technology to organise our society in the future. I mean it's unlikely we wont use technology like the internet to run our country and our planet, right?
The web has irreversibly transformed our business and personal lives. How is it absent from politics I got to thinking?
SO I spent a couple of years boring my friends to death with my great vision of the future, when we would run ourselves with a "techo-democracy" – I’d poison good pub conversation with my never ending speeches on how we could make a fairer society.
A society where everyone could have a voice.
Where we could end suffering.
Where we could take control of everything.
Where we could manage things like population and climate-change on a global level.
Where we could stop wars.
Where we could make mistakes quicker and learn lessons en masse.
Where we could make the smartest decisions possible.
A place where I could be comfortable that my kids would have a good shot at life - and you whoever and where ever you are could feel the same.
The Motivation
SO, ideas I have learned, are easy. Doing stuff is bloody tough.
How do I go about it? How do I share my idea with the world?
While I was pondering these questions of life, the world's economies collapsed around us. We've stuck a few bandages on our economies, but we haven't fixed anything, we need actual change to our political structure before we can properly mend our societies.
The Plan
In July 2008, I turned 30. The next day Seamus Brennan died. Seamus was a Fianna Fail TD in my home constituency of Dublin South.
I decided I'd run in the by-election for his seat and get some media attention for my idea. Open a debate on it, get the political do-ers to take the idea on board - turn my vision in to a reality.
Now I'm smart enough to know you can’t own an idea, I'd be just happy for it to happen without my input, but I'm also smart enough to know that I'm too lazy to run an effective political campaign. So my plan was to share my idea with the world.
However the world needs more than just ideas. My mentors and web-friends needed something to latch on - the people of Dublin South needed a plan - simply saying "technology could make things more efficient" is too vague a concept.
SO I devised a plan - I setup a website www.unitedminds.ie which had a forum on it. If I were elected to Dail Eireann I would follow the views of the users of the forum. It would be like an evolution of our representative democracy - where an elected representative would be in constant communication with his constituents. So it would be a practical application of how technology could improve out society.
I spent the second half of 2008 setting up the website. First drafts were ready by December, final version went live in January 2009.
All this time I was waiting for Fianna Fail to announce when the by-eleciton would take place - they have full discretion when it happens – another example of weird inefficiencies in our so called democracy. Poor Fianna Fail, they were at their lowest popularity of all time and knew they would not be retaining the seat, so they waited almost a full year to hold the by-election, and held it on the same day as the local and European elections to minimise the media coverage of them losing a seat.
Knowing this would piss on my plan of world domination- I mean mass media coverage, I semi-thought of not running, but by this stage I'd told everyone I knew. I was 30. It was time to move. SO I ran for the election.
Running for election is tough! It's designed for political parties, who have to pen one letter. I had to find 30 people from my constituency (and many many thanks to these people) to go to a Garda station to fill in a form within a three day window. Jaysus the stress (okay that sounds easy, but I’d a full time job also!) I got the signed forms sorted, and brought them to the Dublin County Sheriff. So I was on the ballot paper.
Meanwhile the forum was gaining some traction, couple of hundred members, discussing interesting things, getting some good ideas in there. Working out how to interpret consensus was half of the trick, making people collaborate and not bicker being the other half.
When you run for election, you are entitled to send one piece of literature to each constituent (something like 92,000 registered voters in Dublin South.) I held a table quiz (thanks to all who attended) which raised a grand, which I then spent on printing up 92,000 leaflets.
So it was a pretty minimalist campaign. The website got something like 10,000 views, I got 650 first votes (but genuinely a load of 3rd and 4th preferences!) I abhor political posters and all that false electioneering crap - if I was going to succeed it was going to be on my terms - a low budget campaign based around a good idea rather than a big budget campaign based around populist policies that meant nothing, I thought to myself with my arms firmly folded and nose in the air.
Fine Gael drafted in RTE economic pundit George Lee while he still worked for RTE. GLEE became one of the most popular men in Irish politics. I met George only once, he was not a politician, lacking charisma and fuelled by an ego I think he felt he could enter politics and revolutionise Ireland. He assumed all these hacks who care about nothing more than getting re-elected would lie down and let him run the country. George lasted seven months claiming his policies were not being implemented, we've still yet to hear what policies he is referring to.
And that was my story of the 2009 Dublin South By-Election.
A bit of media coverage (the highlight being voted one of the Irish Time’s best looking candidates – score!)
A lot of lessons learnt about the world and myself.
A lot of hassle.
So after that I took a break.
The Resurrection
But the idea wouldn't go away. The original site was lost to the Internet.
So I've started from scratch and setup this petition site - a simplified version of what I was trying to achieve, and a simple first step the people of Ireland could make to take back control of our country!
The game plan is that one day we can remove politicians from government and let all citizens run their countries and their planet. Lets take it one step at a time eh?
If you have already signed the petition, thanks! I’d be most grateful if you could share this site with your friends.
Ross O’Mullane,
Founder of United Minds,
April 2010.