November 11, 2006

• 0 c | 0 t

  by Samuel Rose

[Via Social Synergy Wiki]

Wikipedia:Zephyr_Teachout, Director of Internet Organizing for HowardDean’s presidential campaign, posted an election day blog posting to New Assignment with some suggestions about how politicians can engage networks of citizens (quoted from Blog posting:

1. Hold weekly online chats for any interested constituents
2. Hold online consultations where your staff identifies 50-400 people (NOT the online opinion makers, but people who don’t generally have a voice) to engage in consultations on particular topics, using existing list-serv technology (yahoo or google groups work fine).
3. Put your daily schedule on the Internet, including all meetings. Just as you put your public campaigning schedule online, you should now allow people to know how you are spending the time they earned for you.
4. List your overall priorities and general schedule for the upcoming four-to-five months, to engage people in the prioritization process.
5. Before you propose or sign any bill, put it online for at least three days for responses, and create “chat times” for discussions of the bills with staffers and constituents. There is a legislative proposal for this, but in the meantime members of Congress can act on their own.
6. Follow the lead of Estonia, and create a forum where people can track, suggest and review legislation – and commit to having your staff review any that gets at least (x number) of people supporting it. American politicians should be chastened — Estonia started that website five years ago.

I would also add that local groups can be given access to easy ways of accumulating their own data, and accessing data accumulated by government about their local area, and inserting it into these engagement platforms.

Also, alternatively, recurring telephone conferences are very inexpensive, and can give an access outlet for people who are not computer literate, or who do not have access to computers. These calls can be recorded and uploaded to websites as well.

For number 5., Post the bill onto a Wiki, and allow people to directly edit a copy of the bill, or place comments on or near it.

A message board or forum, or comment section in ThreadMode, with the document at the top, and a discussion at the bottom allows you to discuss what is wrong with the document at the top. a threaded conversation can become very difficult to read, and possesses a low SignalToNoiseRatio. A wiki page allows you to actually make the change (referred to as DocumentMode). Of course, a wiki also allows the freedom of a MixedMode (threaded discussion, and editable documents). The point is, don’t limit people to just talking about what is wrong. Give them a way to change it, and a way to PeerReview those changes.

Wiki-enabled feedback can help familiarize people with the language and processes of legislation. It would attract people who have expertise in the area of legislation and legal matters, as well as people who have no such expertise. MixedMode talking about, and directly changing proposed legislation in wikis can both generate debate and give people ways to demonstrate exactly how they would like to be governed.

Original Location: http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/11/11/citizenengagedg....html

The Second Life internal economy was predicated on the notion that designers could produce in-game objects that they could then sell; these objects would ostensibly be scarce (in the economic sense) because the designer could put limits on how many copies s/he would sell, and because -- in principle -- other residents couldn't make copies except by tedious efforts to reproduce a design by hand. Although the only "raw material" involved in the creation of Second Life goods is the memory & storage space needed on the SL server, the capability to design desirable objects serves as a market-generating form of scarcity. No matter that everyone can have the capability to make limitless numbers of in-game objects -- unless you can design something that other people want, you're just making digital junk.

But with CopyBot, these limitations are less meaningful, because it eliminates the barriers to making your own duplicates of other people's designs. It's not tedious or challenging, it's a click of a button. As a result, apparently over a hundred in-game designers have shut down in protest, and threats of lawsuits and copyright-infringement actions are flying.

If the ability to make copies continues to exist, these vendors argue, the basis of the SL economy will be destroyed. And since there's a direct conversion between in-game money and real-world money, anything that weakens the SL economy threatens the real-world economic livelihoods of many SL residents. They're right -- but is the Second Life economy worth saving?

What Linden Lab has tried to do is replicate the atom-world scarcity rules in a bit-world environment. Nobody should be surprised in any way that this doesn't work for long. It is the nature of bits to be easily copied. Even if Linden manages to shut down CopyBot, it will arise again in another form, and probably as something much harder to squelch. The death of Napster becomes the explosion of Gnutella and Bit Torrent; the death of CopyBot will mean the emergence of something more powerful and less easily eliminated. It's delightfully Darwinian.

Original Location: http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/11/second_life_economic_evolution.html

• Reworking is rewriting the text for future readers. summarizing, drawing lessons, clarifying.

• Page states "rewards for the person reworkign are minimal". Although, I would make a small argument that rewards are the same as the rewards for the person that jots down notes and summarizes key points from conversations. So, the rewards are enhancing your understanding.

• it would be easier to add comments
• more magic would be possible like
  • aging of entries
  • tagging of entries
  • transparent way of hiding / digging into past

what kind of technical support would i like to have for reworking

• an easy way to tag discussions on a sub-atom level
• an easy way of marking discussions as “reworked” → point taken and noted somewhere
• something like refactoring

• It’s not a social problem.
• It’s technology.
• Everyone knows how to rework.
• Reworking is expensive.
• Reworking is not high enough priority.
• We need computers, computers, people, and computers.

• Why can’t you make Linux, just shipping CDs?
• Too few interactions per unit time.
• Which means too little reward.
• Which means deflection off the priority stack.
• SmallChangesYieldGreatChanges.

• We should analyze reworking technology.
• How does reworking work?
• How can we make it cheaper?
• What can we implement?

• How does reworking happen?
  • Read comments.
  • Note major ideas.
  • Write a summary.
• Reading comments & noting the major ideas is very costly.
• Which suggests: WikiGranger?.
• We can’t implement everything. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves about our limitations.
• SVG wiki, MachineCodeBlocks: in reach, likely major effects. (But not reworking.)
• Lion thinks: If interested, we should: study reworking & brainstorm “easy” features.

• Comments should be modeled differently than documents.
• We can find ways to make threads reworkable, despite comment protections and special treatments of comments.
• We should totally be tagging our pages, (making them easier to find, making them easier, in turn, to link to and reuse,) and we should totally be able to tag individual comments, even.

We need to, as a community, I think: Smash the ideal of simplicity.

When the ideal of simplicity serves us, as it did with the birth of wiki, it is a great thing. But that ideal is not serving us any more. Instead, it is controlling us.

• conversation - content that has a meaning mostly in the context when it was created, it has only marginal value after a longer time, it is also cheap to start from the beginning
• refference - pages that we can link to from outside of CommunityWiki, should be in DocumentMode?, not excessively long, a definition or a clear thesis.

In this perspective I do agree with Thomas that we need a forum for the conversation part and only use wiki for the refference with easy interlinking and attaching of conversations to documents.

Keith: As a fan of design’s role in problem-solving, I believe there is an affordance for everything (WhatIsAffordance)! I have considered this problem of LackOfReworking, and tried to design a widget that encourages reworking.

There are several barriers to reworking:

• the awkward position of deleting everyone else’s comments
• the perceived confusion that may occur when thread participants return to the discussion only to find it has disappeared.

Original Location: http://www.communitywiki.org/en/LackOfReworking