Can our party pick your brain?

[Rohan Jayasekera]

Michael, if I understand correctly, you're saying that there is no
need to choose right now between "party" and "no party" approaches,
and that Votorola and Transparency Party people should just work
together on getting a vote going in some riding on one or more
issues.  Is that correct?

If so, that makes sense to me, as we don't yet know which approach
will be more powerful, and in any case the answer may vary by country
and by riding.  Plus since there aren't many people in either camp we
need to work together!

Once the vote is going, the Transparency Party will presumably run a
candidate in the next election who pledges to obey that and any other
votes.  It may however turn out that the vote is itself sufficient to
dictate what the incumbent representative does.  Either way we win.
(Hmm, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, then you win." -Gandhi)

Simplicity is key when introducing new things to people, so I suggest
that the initial issue(s) be ones that are already well understood.
Also, since only a small percentage of people will be (a) contactable
by us and (b) willing to be "early adopters", we will need a fairly
large population to draw from in order to get enough initial
participants to bootstrap from.  I suspect that a single riding will
be too small.  Perhaps all ridings in one city could be covered
(Toronto seems to me the obvious choice), so that in the early days
when we don't have meaningful numbers in any one riding we can still
have meaningful totals for the city, and publicizing those via city-
level media will attract additional participation in each riding.
(City-level media can include social media: tweeters often assume that
the reader is in the same city and when that's untrue it's accepted
and forgiven.)  BTW, please forgive me if I'm saying things that were
already well understood by those who (unlike me) were actively
participating in earlier discussions.

Rohan