Wiki Government

What NEED does this meet?

Aim: To create a loom for weavers of social fabric.
ie: an open source social programming environment.
ie: to provide a structure for the people who wish to effect social change to do so.
Imagine an open source legal system.

interactive: WikiGov is to government as tv is to internet.

What is the APPROACH?

Fully interactive virtual-government website.
Login.
See the general consensus on an issue. Influence it with your vote. Create a new issue.
Join in with a discussion. Create a discussion. Ask why something is the way it is. Share some knowledge. Such discussions will assist responsible decision making.

See at a glance – what are the hot topics?

What are the BENEFITS to people?

It should dissolve the us/them powerlessness mindset that it’s easy to fall into, when we percieve the way politics happens — eg westminster live.

it will bring intelligent discussion into politics, and fish out lies and contradictions.

if it grows big politicians won’t be able to ignore the ebbs and flows of opinion polls. thus it becomes a huge magnifying glass for channeling a hive-mind.

What is the COMPETITION?

ok. step back. how do we get info? usually papers. that’s basically: everything that happened yesterday that is atypical — ie interesting / fascinating etc. what are the biggest outrages / most horrid murders / greatest unfairnesses/injustices.

its entertainment, or at best a set of emotional triggers with which we reaffirm a social identity — “this is who i am defined by what i stand for and what i am against”. that’s comfy but non-constructive.

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

maybe 5 programmers for 3 months (tho i havent a clue :)). only problem i can see is ensuring people are who they really are (ie no spam). maybe use a national insurance # or passpt # or address as unique id.

2 Comments

  1. Damn, you got there first! Same name, general idea and so on as I had in mind.

    > The proposal suggests extending existing [UK?] political government into an interactive web-based forum. I agree with this, but think it would be good to consider this as being a possible subset of something larger – what is the potential for a site which acts more broadly, a wikipedia of governmentality, a huge, community-edited, global site, potentially containing thousands of context-specific ‘sub-sites’? Be it NGOs, corporate accountability to ‘stakeholders’, local, national, regional, global, non-geographic political government. Scalable and transferable discussion and law-writing across contexts, and in different languages.

    > “Aim: To create a loom for weavers of social fabric.
    ie: an open source social programming environment.
    ie: to provide a structure for the people who wish to effect social change to do so.
    Imagine an open source legal system.”
    YES! But global, local, corporate, NGO and so on.

    > I would add: a governance “bug-checker”. If something within some mode of governance doesn’t work, this is the forum in which to discuss this and put presure for it not to happen elsewhere. A place in which the efficacy of various existing and ongoing social programming is discussed collectively. There could be a whole section of the site devoted to flagging up what doesn’t work, such that contributors/readers of other communities could be aware across contexts. This is a public forum, and the professional ‘officials’ of all forms of governmentality would have no excuse for not being aware of this public discussion.

    > “WikiGov is to government as tv is to internet” . Surely Wikigov is to government as Wikipedia is to meaning. However, regional, national etc access to Wikigov via TV ‘interactivity’ would be good.

    > So, Wikigov in my fantasy would work in several ways:

    1. As a variegated place for discussing and writing different forms of government, be they political, corporate, NGO, local, national, global, and any other conception of organisation that can be thought of. Infinitely extendable within a single scheme of things, as is wikipedia.

    2. As Sam says, “See the general consensus on an issue. Influence it with your vote. Create a new issue. Join in with a discussion. Create a discussion. Ask why something is the way it is. Share some knowledge. Such discussions will assist responsible decision making.”
    – ie. doing as mass endeavour what various representatives / employees are paid to do already. This process could occur (or not) with close reference to the professional processes (or not!) of democracy in various contexts, effectively constructing a threaded system of peer criticism.
    – Unlike wikipedia, different ideas / proposals are continually threaded and moderated, and different proposals elaborated.

    2. Tied-in would be the very writing of law – ‘as code’ – done by lawyers for free, much as opensource software coding works within such a ‘gift economy’. Scaleable, contextually transferable or not.

    3. Lobbying functions tied into portions of the site, like WriteToThem.com

    4. All the above are searchable. You don’t need to wade through pages, just enter keywords on a googleish front page. eg. “recycling tower hamlets london”, “kmart wages shareholders chicago”. Otherwise “advanced search” to wade through tiered subfolders of government. Here forums are aggregated into a ‘navigation page’: imagine seeing folder headings such as ‘Political governance > States > UK’ , ‘Corporate Government > Enron > Global’ , ‘Political Government > Cities > USA > New York’ , ‘NGO governance > Oxfam > UK’ etc.

    5. What happens on the site is not tied officially to professional government, and this is good. As with the bug-checking idea, those ‘within power’ have no excuses now – all is where you can find it!

    > “only problem i can see is ensuring people are who they really are (ie no spam).” I don’t think this is a problem. Firstly, I think a straightforwarder discussion forum -format is a better model, with a cookie-enabled sign-in, peer-moderation, and allotted moderators, managers etc. Something like the UK ‘Government Gateway’ you pass through to access things like the Inland Revenue online is just too cumbersome, with ID-verification and so on. Not having such also allows expansibility, and participation by ‘non-nationals’, both good.

    > Yes, this could wind up being a forum for advocacy, agendas etc. However, this is not a problem if access is easy. Discussion etc are cross-comparable and imminantly critiqueable, dismissable, and fundamentally on the same level, not happening ‘in the [hierarchical, non-transparent] media’. If some company can pay dozens to advocate its possition ‘virally’ on wikigov, who cares? There’ll soon be legions to counter!