Proposal for Knight News Challenge

[Michael Allan]

The Knight News Challenge this year is, "How might we improve the way
citizens and governments interact?"  https://www.newschallenge.org/
Here's a draft of something I'd like to propose:


PROJECT TITLE
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Public autonomy based on the discourse principle

DESCRIPTION
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We aren't quite free if we're obeying laws we haven't discussed and
agreed with. Our autonomy in a social world that regulates itself by
laws and other norms of action (public autonomy) depends on being able
to understand and agree with those norms that we're affected by. As
the social theorist and philosopher Habermas puts it, "Just those
action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could
agree as participants in rational discourses."

Taking this *discourse principle* as our guiding star, we aim to
develop and disseminate practices of public autonomy based on
transitive voting, recombinant text, and a relentless exposure of
evolving drafts to those who have reason for dissent. We'll
simultaneously run open electoral primaries based on transitive voting
to put our most qualified drafters on the ballot and into assemblies,
where they'll continue to work with us, their un-elected peers.

We'll use MediaWiki for the drafting medium; Semantic MediaWiki as an
open database and voter registry (streetwiki); existing public forums
as discussion media; Votorola's prototype toolset for transitive
voting and inter-draft patching; plus any other suitable tools and
projects we discover along the way. These should be sufficient to
support a crude practice. Our immediate task is to assemble a good
team to debug and refine that practice, especially its crucial public
interface. It looks like small, team-like groups will not only conduct
the day-to-day core of the practice, but also serve as teachers and
role models behind its dissemination. In any case, we don't want the
design of the tools to harden till we understand the hands-on
practice. Nobody's ever done this before.

http://www.mediawiki.org/
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/
http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.html

WHAT IS YOUR PROJECT? [1 sentence max]
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To develop and disseminate practices of public autonomy based on
transitive voting, recombinant text, and a relentless exposure of
evolving drafts to those who have reason for dissent.


Comments are welcome. It's not a thumbs-up/down thing, it'll be read
by intelligent people. But is it fairly clear? Or are parts confusing?

-- 
Michael Allan

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