Proposal for Knight News Challenge

[conseo]

Hey Mike,

Michael Allan wrote:
> 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
> -------------
> Public autonomy based on the discourse principle
> 
> DESCRIPTION
> -----------
> 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.

Maybe we should emphasize the grassroots/bootstrapping aspect of organizing 
low-level community duties as well. In other words frame the structuring of a 
rational discourse more universally. For me at least the "primaries" analogy 
sounds very specific to the electoral process. I would keep it in there though 
and I also wouldn't make it a lot longer. Maybe:

"... their un-elected peers. These practices are not bound to a particular 
organization, size or citizenship and can be started by anybody, anywhere, 
anytime, needing to form a rational social structure or process, no matter how 
small or special and are never finally concluded, but still actionable under 
agreed circumstances."

Probably not very precise or pretty, maybe you can melt that better and 
shorter?

> 
> 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]
> ---------------------
> 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?

The rest sounds good to me. Maybe you should underscore that the tools are 
open-source under MIT license.

conseo