[MG] Global advisory parliament - was Hi & Re: Invitation to Metagovernment project

[Alexander Praetorius]

That's why I think it needs a scalable system, where a small community could
host its own service for themselves ..or one could host it as a service for
other people who are willing to create accounts.

I know at least 2 communities that could use such a software. One has around
20 members and another around 50 members.

If metagov tools are useful enough so small communitys could use it to
discuss their problems, it might be an easy step to connect communities with
similar topics to each other via the mechanism that will enable the
stand-alone-instances of communities to connect to all other communities in
a p2p fashion. ...and crossforum theater might be helpful here.

There are a lot of small communities which discuss political topics.
Some are NGO's, some are small political parties, they could really use it
as an internal instrument for consensus. Some are just normal people.
If differend NGO's and small political parties and other communities discuss
the topic of democracy, they might find the content produced by these other
communities via the p2p-mechanism or crossforum and so it might be possible
to expand metagov tools to what might be called "critical size"

...but I think we never get it if we don't create useful tools for tiny
communities.


--
Alex



-----Original Message-----
From: start-bounces at metagovernment.org
[mailto:start-bounces at metagovernment.org] On Behalf Of Wybo Wiersma
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2011 1:39 AM
To: Metagovernment Project
Subject: Re: [MG] Global advisory parliament - was Hi & Re: Invitation to
Metagovernment project

Thanks for the welcomes, Thomas, Michael, and Marcos,

Some quick replies:

@Marcos, Pangaia looks interesting, though to fully grasp it I'd
probably need to read more about it, which I will do later. In the
meantime you might want to get in touch with tav & others, in the #esp
IRC channel on freenode.net, as he was/is working on something
similar.

> > Why focus on critical mass:
> > - Because it is the biggest problem facing online communities, and one
> >   that is often ignored (no, if you build it, they will not come!).
> >   And without it, nothing but marginalization will ensue.
> 
> Mass cannot be the only possible answer.  Thomas (offlist) mentions
> drafting media in this context, to which I would add Wikipedia as an
> example.  Wikipedia had a low mass initially, but it was not thereby
> marginalized.  It grew continually and did not stall. *

@Michael, Wikipedia could start out small, because a small
Encyclopedia (especially when indexed by Google so people find the
article if it existed) is already an Encyclopedia, and useful in 
its own right.

While on the contrary, a small group of people interested in some X
and drafting/voting about it among themselves is, politically
speaking, nothing but a fringe interest-group that is managed 
somewhat democratically.

To people outside that specific organisation, and to politicians, it
will be nothing, and completely uninteresting (thus not grow further).

At best such an organisation would be looked at for it's management
techniques, but not for its political views. Politics is about 
participation in numbers (or other forms of leverage such as money if 
one is cynical), about people realizing others are critical of some 
situation as well, and politicians facing numbers, it is about 
critical mass.

> I suspect that cultural and other aggregative forms of expression can
> be immune to network effects, and I would place legislative expression
> - even if it were stamped ADVISORY ONLY - well within that category.

No politician is going to listen before you have a few million, or at
least a few hundred thousand (in smaller countries) people voting (and
nobody is going to vote unless people believe politicians will listen
(soon), or they derive other benefits (blog-app, game with friends,
etc...)).

Wybo

> -- 
> Michael Allan
> 
> Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
> http://zelea.com/

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