currently 780 words

Mass Collaboration in Politics

Whether we realize it or not the form and function of any political system is driven by its technologies. Politics is ripe for mass collaboration - perhaps in no other area of life is there such a broad gap between current practice (using tools circa 1800) and what is now technologically feasible. Our current systems of government were designed to require only the horse, the printing press, the abacus and the candle. The technical and practical constraints on democracy, at that time, meant that the best way to determine the will of the people was to print platforms, hold meetings, count votes and send one person on a horse to the capital. With mass collaboration - it now quite possible to distill the will of the people without the use of intermediaries, representatives or traditional mass media acting as a filter. Of course, we must ask ourselves seriously if we really would prefer to be ruled by our neighbors, and if not - by whom?

The Open Source Israel-Palestine Peace Plan
"Since the “professionals” in Israel/Palestine are having a continuing lack of success at creating a workable peace plan that both will follow," Curt Hopkins suggests "why not give it to the people themselves, on both sides of the divide, and create an “The Open Source Israel-Palestine Peace Plan.”

set up a wiki and invite people (emphasizing Israelis and Palestinians) to create their own collaborative peace plan.
Different people could work on various issues like borders, trade, right of return, etc.
invite some scholars and academics with specialties to augment the citizen involvement.

Advanced Democracy

What forms could future democratic institutions take? It is difficult to predict, because most people have never seriously considered alternatives existing political systems. Politics by nature is resistant to change - because the rules are set only by the winners, and those who win under the current system clearly have no motivation to change the rules. Current small scale experiments underway on the web, however, indicate the two most important functions that would have to exist in some future democracy:

deliberation - knowledge gathering and discussion that enable the "due diligence" required to make policy. The ability to define and frame issues that need to be decided
decisionmaking - given that priorities have been established and choices exist - how do we decide?
activism - rallying supporters around a candidate or an issue - is a very much live component of the current and any future systems, but even so collaborative tools for activism are still being used in only very limited ways.

Wikis are one example of a technology that essentially combines the deliberation and decision in one simple process (via collaborative editing) but to date no project has been successful at attracting large numbers of participants to what is so far just a theoretical exercise.

With advanced democracy being the headline of this chapter, the truly advanced vision of democracy or politics needs to question even the most basic aspects of current global political situations. Do we still have a need for "territorial nations/states" in an age of global connectedness or could we just have various political systems to choose from, no matter where we live? Why not decide where you want to be a citizen, regardless of where you current home is located? A startup attempt to define how an advanced global democracy could look like is just emerging at http://www.online-nations.net. This site is an early startup, but aspires to become a platform for online nations and provide a free market place for "politics providers" where citizens can choose an online nation/state or political system that is just right for them.

The key idea is the same as in most online communities: cut out the middle men (and women) in politics, form communities and do it ourselves. The classical political structures could be limited to managing local affairs with strengthened communities or counties dealing with community infrastructure issues. The rest of politics - taking decisions together which shape our lives - is transferred to a global internet platform, with models of political systems competing in a free market for citizens. Choose your matching political system, rather than choosing a political system for your region and get exactly what you want in politics instead of mostly getting a more or less acceptable compromise.

A more collaborative union
Instead of electing representatives from each region by a set of winner take all contests every four years or so, the legislative branches of government could be made up of representatives who have the support of some threshold number of voters from any region. There would be no single election day, a much wider range of candidates to choose from, and any citizens support for a representative could be withdrawn if they failed to represent their constituents. The drama of election night (and the pomp and vacuity of election campaigns) would disappear. Continuous voting legislature

Collaborative Decision-making

There are several projects started already to enable, at least in an experimental sense, citizens to become legislators by creating or redrafting laws using the internet and collaborative websites.

MorePerfect.org encourages people to rewrite the constitution of the United States, and propose legislation to any of the legislative bodies in the US.

The World Parliament Experiment encourages voting and consensus building on global issues, where anyone can propose a vote.

Collaborative Activism

Collaboration allows for new ways to interact with the current political process. Whether it is collaborating to frame a spin-free voters guide, or tracking the perfomance of elected politicians these collaborative sites indicate how the internet can and is changing the political process.

Wikia Politics Portal, contains a list of wiki-based political communities.

E-Democracy.Org's Wiki, this non-profit, non-partisan, non-advocacy site includes use of a wiki to collect contact and link information from candidates such as Minnesota Gubernatorial candidates and their President 2008 directory effort

Poliwiki A site where people can share information about the upcoming presidential election.

The Ideal Government Project: A U.K. based effort to enable citizens to "say what we want from e-enabled government."

For a British example see: www.mysociety.org.

Voter's Guide at Wikibooks

Collaborative deliberation

dKosopedia left oriented a political encyclopedia. The dKosopedia is written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point of view.

Issuepedia describes itself as "the encyclopedia of issues, analysis, thought, and opinion. As with Wikipedia, anyone can edit; unlike Wikipedia, we encourage opinions and rants as well as carefully considered analysis and purely factual writing." Their main page includes a list of related projects

Openpoltics.ca - a project of mlpilling and friends, which devised a new standard in 2004 for political deliberation via a wiki.

Electowiki - Talking about voting methods.

Government in the age of Web 2.0

Collaboration can impact the business of government no less than business itself. Governments struggle as much as anyone with deeply entrenched bureaucracy, complex institutional structures, unwieldy decision-making processes, rigid models of management, and information silos. While many citizens and private sector organizations confront these same challenges, the rewards for successful cross-departmental collaboration could be more responsive and less costly government.

Explore opportunities for mass collaboration and self-organization among internal Departmental and Ministry user communities. One example is efforts in the US Department of Defense with its evolving concepts of network centric operations.
Engaging more citizens in the policy process and improve transparency of decision making while reducing cynicism toward government.
Hold more local collaborative events such as neighborhood level charrettes rather than designing and managing from afar. solutions?
Make public data publicly available in real time in a raw form that organizations can mashup.

Clipped some stuff like from page 199-201 in wikinomics

Emergency Services and Incident Command

The Emergency Wiki
Incident Command is a specific protocol for handling emergency situations such as chemical spills, fires, and natural disasters. It was born out of the critique of the Oakland Hills fire where different fire and police agencies had difficulties working together because of differing terminology, dynamic chain-of-command subordination, and undocumented radio channel assignments. Wiki-based EMS systems present potential benefits including:

continued up-to-date information about chemical inventories, ongoing processing activities, as well as simple upkeep of the personnel roster, reference materials, and the written ICS instructions.
capture of the current state of refineries and other chemical processing facilites together with a daily log of any specific, potential hazards.
reduced exposure to potential server disruption of services caused by the incident given the web-based nature of the medium
reduced chance of "cross talk" (compared to radio) as multiple functions continually provide updates

http://www.news.com/How+law+enforcement+uses+Google+Earth/2100-1025_3-6208034.html

some wikis definitely attract more intervention than others

contributed by M O on Oct 31 7:19pm

Our new technologies may very well provide us with the ability to achieve an Advanced Democracy. However, I think we must study our history even more to learn the hard lessons of the past. This new technology just might permit "the people" to act before thinking. The rapid collection of votes on a social networking website, influenced by top news stories, could cause snap judgments resulting in the wrong action being taken. We may have to learn some hard lessons all over again, like why a representative form of government is preferred over a true democracy.

Some people may be surprised to learn that a true democracy can become problematic. But this, too, is one of the lessons of the past. Check out Tyranny of the majority at wikipedia.

contributed by Dave Holly on May 18 9:50am