[MG] Proposal for Knight News Challenge

[Ed Pastore]

Hi, Michael.

I find it a bit confusing. Even if the readers are intelligent, many of the topics you are discussing are just not familiar to most people. While they can be understood with contemplation, on their face they may be too difficult to grasp.

I would propose going a different route... and of course, it's possible we could make two submissions, one for Votorola and one for Metagov, or whatever.

My suggestion would be to directly attack the premise: that improving government is a question of enabling citizens more access to the government. That still treats citizens and government as two distinct things, and I think that's where the fix needs to be applied.


PROJECT TITLE
-------------
Use internet tools to remove the distinction between government and citizens.

DESCRIPTION
-----------
Democracy is not about a good relationship between the government and the people: it is about government of, by, and for the people. As long as we view government and citizens as two distinct groups, we cannot have actual democracy. This means changing not the way government institutions function, but rather the way governance works. This proposal is to fundamentally change the means by which government decisions are made.

In the past, it has been impossible or undesirable for the people to continuously participate in their own governance: people had to be physically together in order to make decisions together. So we had to compromise and implement a representative form of democracy: basically keeping the governance structure of feudalism (lords and a king), but democratizing the process how those rulers came to office.

Now with internet technologies, we have the ability to democratize the entire decision-making process. The common reaction to this proposal is that it is an attempt to bring about mob rule: a horrible result of a primitive and ill-considered form of democracy. We do not propose that at all.

Instead, we propose to build systems where deliberation and discussion are the core of decision-making. Where democracy is not about 51% of the people picking one option and 49% picking the opposite, but rather about building consensus through organic means of dialog and deliberation.


...I would continue from here, but I have hit a time-deadline and must stop now. 

Opinions?



On Feb 20, 2013, at 5:56 PM, 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> -- 
> Michael Allan
> 
> Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
> http://zelea.com/
> 
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