An intro of sorts

[David Bovill]

I'm posting a cobbled together intro - and i'm sure I will be saying things
that have been discussed here and are quite familiar. Then again there may
be differences of approach and experience that are worth hilighting.
Apologies if I'm simply preaching to the converted - I guess it is just the
danger of introductions :)

I spent about 3 years in Germany and Austria from about 2002 onwards
preaching and working on Liquid Democracy projects, in art and open source
communities. It's really good to see so much activity in this area in
Germany and Pirate circles.

Since then my main focus has been on facilitated physical meeting structures
to provide a human interface to the theory and to include the digitally
excluded, using a range of techniques taken from World Development /
architecture and urban regeneration circles, open source and
anti-globalisation circles, and participatory theatre (particularly the work
of Augusto Boal).

My focus on this is in order to aggressively counter the critique of
internet based solutions to our democratic deficit, by ensuring that the
primary point of interface is person to person, in community meetings and
cafes, with the online being "merely" a cost effective way of implementing
the theory using facilitators acting as proxies for those unable or
unwilling to take part online. It also get me out more often. This human
interface is based in a theoretical critique of the superficiality of
parliamentary politics and advocating a "deep democracy" based on rich data,
face to face contact and debate - and not simply SMS or internet voting
(which of course was never the aim but is a perceived issue).

I also believe that the nature of medium of the online debate should not be
restricted to text, and people confident with using text as there mode of
expression - I believe the visual nature of the debate is crucial to the
success of the project. In particular I'm interested in the use of
documentary and collaborative video practices, and have been working with
community TV stations and documentary crossover projects here in the UK and
in Europe for the last 3 years. A part of this visual approach is the create
intuitive argument maps that allow not only navigation, but an overview of
the whole, while being able to take apart a building block and research the
evidence for or against each element in a collaborative way.

Another part of this focus has been on legal structures that are suitable to
embed these decision making structures in law, so that they can be used by
NGO's or indeed any project with partners form anywhere in the world. This
requirement is that it should be no more expensive of burdensome to create a
legal entity for a project than it is to get up a web site, and that such
legal entities should be able to not only use the tools as their
constitution, but also have a firm technical and legal ground with which to
associate with each other.

>>From a technical perspective I'm looking for a new and robust backend - I'm
more interested in a message based protocol that can be implemented in any
language, than a web app based around a (distributed) database - and have
long advocated the use of Jabber / XMPP servers for this. The fact that
Google Wave has taken the same approach I think adds to the value of this
approach.I am a coder with a focus on desktop and mobile phone applications,
but also do some web apps.

>>From a practical point of view I'd like to use the
www.liquiddemocracy.net/org/com domains I have to take forwards both the
technical and partnership based legal aspects of the theory, so well
expressed by this group. I'd also like to help with fund raising for this,
and would be interested in discussing how best to do this with interested
parties / potential partners. I have recently started to work with LocalEyes
(see post from Peter earlier), and together we are applying for funding for
a number of on the ground practical projects that would help to develop the
software in an agile fashion with real world test scenarios.



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