Stupid Networks, Smart People
The indefatigable David
Isenberg, the stupid
network guy, forwarded an email he had received from Robin
Chase, the founder of ZipCar,
source of the little
rental cars that can. He hooked us up because he wondered
if our ORGware platform might
serve Robin's vision for a new progressive conversation. (ORGware is
the name we use for the web
framework to be released, oh so very soooon, by my little company, Open
Resource
Group, LLC):
On Dec
17, 2005, at 8:50 AM, Robin Chase wrote:
David,
Recently,
I've been caught up in new collaborative thinking and websites,
especially inspired by Karim
Lakhani from MIT who just finished his dissertation on the
topic and told me his research findings.
I
think the DNC should launch a WELL DONE site to create the party's
platform in true democratic style. I'm thinking of a sophisticated
wiki/ranking of sorts. What Karim's research shows us is that the end
result will be:
50%
of the outcome, especially what we might consider the core planks would
be crafted primarily by a very small core of highly engaged and
involved people (think 10-20 people). This should give comfort to those
who are afraid of actually letting the masses in.
50%
of the new ideas and details will be generated by the thousands of
others that participate lightly and infrequently, but introduce very
powerful ideas.
All
of those who participate, even once, will feel like they participated,
care about the platform's ultimate success, and work to help make it
succeed.
the
existence of such a project (and the associated press), and the working
on such a project would give some hope back to many people and
reintroduce the idea that democracy can be salvaged.
The
platform will have effectively been pre-tested and honed to get the
right words that resonate with a huge diversity of people.
Right
now there isn't anything out that is quite right or good enough for the
task. MoveOn, SinceSlicedBread,
Wikipedia, min.uti.ae (brand new
and sent to me by Karim), threadless.com,
43things.com
all have some elements of what is needed but not exactly right.
What do
you think?
Naturally,
I agree with Robin that existing
solutions don't offer the full combination
of capabilities we need to transform governance. Later, Robin added,
On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:17 AM,
Robin Chase wrote:
David,
I was just reading through some
of Britt Blaser's blog. He was feeling bad about the lack of
on-going interest in his Katrina Recovery efforts. It occurs
to me that most collaborative efforts provoke only flash-in-the-pan
interest because people do have lots to do and there are always other
pressing issues.
This feels like the nub
for success. If the casual interloper is to be retained (and hopefully
recruit others like him/herself) then there has to be something in this
person's daily environment that keeps the pressing-ness of
participation alive.
I think the viralness of
Zipcar is because everyone several times a week is irritated by their
mobility choices and zipcar provided them the way out.
I am irritated at least
several times a week by the Bush administration policies and effects,
but I see little that I can do to change that situation.
Going back to my initial
observation (and continuing to think about Britt's comments):
In regular jobs and
enterprises (i.e. not collaborative OS groups), we are FORCED to stay
focused and to care on a daily basis about whatever we are working on.
In the OS/collaborative world, we are not forced. We are free to
wander, which is why we really need to think about and work in some
environmental trigger to remind us/participators to hold fast to
pursuing whatever it is that we care about.
Wow, that was enough
philosophizing for one morning.*
*BB comment: Is
there such thing as too much philosophizing?
I call it cultural design, and we
need more of it.
Ya gotta love it! The woman reads about an under-populated
wiki and says"This feels like the nub of
success"! Have you ever heard a
more concise way of saying the glass is half full? This is how I felt
about the "disappointing" response to the Recovery 2.0 Wiki - I didn't
actually regret my discoveries. In fact, I had a kind of schadenfreude moment,
contemplating how much better we might serve democracy with ORGware
than a wiki.
I discussed my Recovery
2.0 Wiki forensics project with Socialtext's Ross Mayfield at
the Syndic?te
Conference last week, where I participated on Brian
Oberkirch's panel considering the lessons
of Katrina. Ross pointed out that the trick of launching a
wiki is to appoint content mavens who act as the gardeners of their
areas of specialized interest: sowing, weeding, feeding and
cheerleading. Despite Ross's compelling and expert insight, I'm sure
that a simpler, more engaging way of presenting and editing and
reviewing contributions will generate more and better participation.
Why? Because wikis are still way to hard to understand and use as a way
to operate a democracy.
If we want to engage as many as possible, we have to provide a
suite of services that the brightest
and busiest and
the stupidest and most ingenuous of us can use. Because:
smart
= busy = distracted = stupid = LCD
The
Lowest Common Denominator is the Largest Common Denominator
The
best initiatives are rarely offered by the most dedicated promoters. I
suggest that our shared obligation is to empower the least informed and
busiest among us to help develop the new thinking and new political
power we so obviously need. This can't happen if grassroots organizing
is as demanding as our "regular jobs and enterprises".
We at ORG are gearing up to do precisely what Robin Chase
seeks: an environmental
trigger to remind us participators to hold fast to pursuing whatever it
is that we care about.
My bullish mantra is that We The People outnumber the
politicians and the lobbyists and the big donors. So we're designing
and preparing to maintain well designed communities that are accessible
enough to be viral and robust enough to overwhelm all those jerks who
have convinced us that they're in charge, even
though we outnumber them.
The Seven Steps of Recovery
An ORGware community is designed to be "Dean Done Right". It
includes the specific policy formulation tools that Robin seeks, plus a
way to bring others into the active community of thought and power:
- Anyone who registers at an ORGware site can form their own
sub-site (team) spontaneously, which inherits all the capabilities
of the main site: they get their own Dean-Campaign-in-a-Box."
- Members invite friends to join their team, which has a main
page, a shared blog, an "About Us" area and a "What's New" area. There
are invitation links everywhere, so members of the team can invite
friends to comment on a blog post, come to a meetup, collaborate on a
project, come vote on Tuesday, etc. There they discuss what's important
to them, the best ideas etc. We think we can do this more elegantly
than others, but those two steps get us no farther than the current
tools do: All hat and no cattle:
"A vision without a task is but a dream,
A task without a vision is drudgery,
A vision and a task is the hope of the world."
- Here's where (we think) the going gets interesting: an
ORGware shared blog is also displayed as a threaded discussion forum,
to facilitate the transition from group blather to focused
work.
- All posts and comments can be rated by any member of the
site. After a while, the community identifies which of its members are
contributing the best thinking.
- The team can morph at will into a focused policy
development project, with postings limited to the most highly-rated
members. In policy development mode, these newly-designated "elites"
are charged with transforming the values of the group into specific
policy, platforms, ballot initiatives, etc. Their work is still public
and the public continues to grade their work and comment on their posts.
- After specific policies and plans are agreed on by the
community's anointed experts, the community puts its political muscle
behind their shared vision.
- They declare, publicly or privately, that they have an
appointment to vote for the measure on election day, at a known place
at a specific time.
- They agree to respond to an audit of who is committed to
this measure or candidate.
- A public accounting firm queries the committed supporters
by email and publishes the tangible evidence of the community's
commitment.
- I call it the Vote
Delivery System. It's a set of straightforward tools by which
people who are seriously pissed off or slightly uneasy add their little
bit of thought or hope or evangelism or money and then watch every
little expression spin the flywheel of extreme
democracy (PDF) just a little faster:
|
The
people are kvetching...
|
|
11:27:03 PM 
|
|
