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

[Ed Pastore]

Welcome, Wybo. I appreciate your good cheer in debating all of us. :)

On May 26, 2011, at 7:38 PM, Wybo Wiersma wrote:

> 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...)).

Here you are assuming that issues have to be in the millions-scale to  
be relevant. In other words, you're only focusing on nation-scale  
politics. And you are assuming that politicians need to remain  
relevant, when it is my belief that they are as outmoded as the fax  
machine (and I chose that analogy because sadly the fax remains in  
heavy use long after it has become unnecessary... we still have to  
even get to that stage with politicians).

If there is an active community debating whether or not a local park  
should be built in a township, then the critical mass is more like in  
the hundreds, perhaps even fewer.

This sort of governance does not have to be left to politicians, and  
it opens the door for community-based open governance. If open  
governance can take hold on that scale (or really, I propose even  
smaller communities), then it can gradually scale as people realize  
that it is more effective, more democratic, and more free than  
anything that is left up to politicians.



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