Experiments with a data public

Democracy, it is said, is in a state of crisis. What exactly defines the crisis depends greatly on who, when and where you ask the question, of course, but the credo is frequently heard. Denmark is no exception and the recent reform of
the Danish school system, traditionally a highly praised token of participatory democracy, has been a case in point. So what happens when elected politicians recognize that they can no longer act as trusted epresentatives and decide that a radically new dialogue with the public is called for? And what happens when they decide that this dialogue must be constituted where the public is already venting its frustrations, i.e. on social media? In this paper we consider our recent experience of being enrolled as data-Experts in a participatory democratic experiment that attempted to use Facebook to collectively envision the school of the future in the municipality of Aalborg.