[MG] Come together or reach out - was cascading etc.

[Thomas von der Elbe]

Hey Mike,

we agree on more here, than you seem to think. Let me try to clarify.

you wrote:

> Our difference centers on the practice (3) more than the tools. You see no future for extension as a practice, but I see it (more and
> more) as being essential and permanent.

I do see a potential future for the practice of extension. (Plz forget 
what I wrote about the possibility of a huge central forum ... I was 
probably wrong.) People are spread out and they need to get together, so 
some practice is needed. But I strongly believe that this practice is 
gonna be completely different after the explosion of the first poll. It 
being different is imo it being ridiculously easy. So easy that no extra 
tool-support is needed.

I think we can compare it to a normal election. What is needed for a 
whole population (which is spread out all over the place) to all come 
together in their polling stations? Just the simple info: "Next sunday 
is election day!" This is how easy the practice of extension gets imo: 
people telling each other: "The same thing which happend with this first 
poll is happening again now over here ...!" They can do this by email, 
phone, ...

What they do after they know about it:

i. pass the info on
ii. start to discuss and draft their own positions within their own 
community (or just draft by themselves)
iii. look for the best candidate to vote for
iv. look for voters for their position
v. discuss, negotiate, ... with each other, with candidate and with voters

i., iii., and iv. require reaching out to other communities/individuals. 
For neither one extra tool-support is needed imo beyond the tools we 
already have (including a pirate-pad where everyone can complete the 
list of potentially interesting other communities).

Again, I'm not denying the use for the short term. Maybe thats enough 
reason to invest in it.

--

Reading the above again, I realize, that it is only adressing that part 
of the extention-practice, which is about the health of 
community-activities and the health of a poll as a whole etc.

But now other aspects come to my memory which are about tagging: 
Individuals expressing on their pages, what topics they are interested 
in, what communities they are in, what polls they are active in. And the 
same for each of the four aspects. Now this seems very helpfull for iii. 
and iv. (and much more) because its kind of hard to get this info out of 
plain textual positions. A fifth category comes to my mind: Personal 
values ... very expressive and a bit different than topics, are they 
not? I remember DemocracyLab had this integrated.

Do you still have in mind to invest in those too?


Thomas





Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org