MassChallenge accepted! We’ll find out in early May whether we are a highly potential team. Go to http://masschallenge.org/profile/wirite to vote!
About Wirite
When people form groups in order to live with and care for one another, stand collectively behind a cause, and work towards a common goal that they believe in, the results can be powerful and revolutionary. This has been a theme throughout history. Some of the groups that we see in the world are: friends, families, organizations, teams, communities, religions, unions, governments, and countries. Within such diverse and differently sized groups there are similarly different time scales with which they exist - from hours to generations - different connections - ranging from loose affiliation to strong interconnectedness, and different enrollments, as people’s needs and desires change, and as they grow. In essence, the groups that people form are as richly varied and dynamic as life itself.
There is little more impressive than diverse groups of people overcoming their differences to express solidarity for needed change in their world. One could argue however that the current tools that we have do not enable the fluid creation and adaptation of groups in ways that our world needs.
Wirite fills that need by helping an unlimited number of people with different backgrounds, cultures, and languages move beyond the forces that keep them apart to create new groups when the need arises. It does this by helping people - without leaders or representatives - create a petition, a course of action, or any other type of document, that allows support by large, diverse populations, yet maximizes the influence of each individual that contributes.
Wirite gives all people, including those with ideas in the minority, a powerful tool to influence the document creation: the ability to show that they will not support the document in its current form, and to clearly expresses and pinpoint their problem with the document. These pinpointed dissatisfactions of non-majority groups are continually shown, allowing changes to be offered and voted on that appease dissatisfactions from version to version of the document. This way, Wirite allows all people, even those not able to support the document at a particular version, to continually contribute to it in a positive, open, and real way.
The premise of this system is simple: if dissatisfactions from non-majority groups are seen clearly by the larger group, and the loss of support is realized, then there will be an effort to come to consensus to keep the size and diversity of the supporters of the document as high as possible.
This is an optimistic idea about the innate desires to understand and come to consensus with one another, but also, in many situations, decisions made or causes expressed that do not have a large, diverse group of people backing them will not be as influential in a pluralistic society. On the other hand, a decision that does have diverse support is a very powerful force for change. The goal is a maximization of people that support the document with the most diversity possible, and to avoid gridlock when the system veers into a standoff position. This is what Wirite tries to do.
We are currently getting the first site working. If you would like to check it out now, go to the Wirite alpha site.
Some more information and writings:
Video of Wirite: Justin Almeida and Mark Pare made a great Intro video.
So Say Hi to Wirite: a step by step description of some of the features of the first version of Wirite.
Wiriting the Pillars: a discussion of the optimal properties that a new system of democratic document generation should have.
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.
Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he reinvented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of the skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.
Maybe if we reinvent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.
This is what keeps me going sometimes. One hit from one country that might find Wirite useful to create a better world.
Wirite Mockups
Here are a few mockups that I just turned to animated gifs to show the Wirite team. The question we are curious about is: can EtherPad, Sharejs, and Substance help us make a better edit interface for Wirite? Check out the Wirite alpha site to play with the current functionality.
Notes: Document Project = Wirite. Voice = Block.
Editing mockup:
There is a text box that has the document in it:
When the user moves the mouse over text inside of the text box and clicks on the left mouse button, a cursor appears in the text the closest place that the click occurred. The user can hit the arrow keys and move through the text. So far, this is all similar to any text editor. Here is something new. When a user types a new alphanumeric character, changes are tracked in a very similar way as in Microsoft Word or EtherPad. The deleted symbols are turned into light gray, and the added symbols are added as bold green. The instant a change is made in the sentence, the “Edit” expansion box expands and a number/color is placed at the beginning of the sentence that the edit was made in, and a new comment box is created on the side under the “Edit” heading.
For every sentence that is created, changed, or moved, a new comment box is linked to that sentence.
For example, if a period is placed in the middle of a sentence, then two comment boxes would pop up, and the part of the sentence that is longer would have the other side of the sentence deleted, a comment box would be created for that changed sentence. Also, a “new” sentence would be created from the smaller part of the sentence, and a comment box would be created.
Voting mockup:
Blocking/Voicing mockup:
How do people make decisions in a participatory democracy? There may be formal rules. Major decisions are made by the group as a whole; when an issue is brought to the table, concerns are voiced until someone, formally designated or self-selected, asks whether people are in agreement on a line of action. In some systems, people can “stand aside” if they cannot commit fully to the group’s decision but do not want to block it. But formal rules by themselves provide insufficient guidance actually to deliberate. In any system, whether participatory, adversarial, or some nondemocratic form, countless issues are not covered by the formal rules: what kinds of concerns can be brought up, how they should be framed, what kinds and degree of emotions should be displayed in debates, how breaches in the formal rules should be dealt with, and so on. Every system thus depends on a sophisticated set of normative understandings that accompany the formal rules, a kind of etiquette of deliberation. Such an etiquette does more than keep things civil. By routinizing interaction and domesticating attendant emotions, it generates trust in the process, its outcomes, and its participants. Trust, in turn, is vital to the institution’s survival. Without it, say organizational theorists, decisionmaking is likely to become rigid, and the decisions that result are unlikely to be good ones.
The trouble with majority voting, say its critics, is that every decision made leaves losers in its wake. The next time a decision must be made, those who lost this time may forge the alliances and strike the bargains necessary to win, thus subordinating the aim of making a good decision to their own desire to gain position. Or they may withdraw altogether from an organization part of whose appeal has been the opportunity to act with common purpose. Groups that put a premium on the possibility of consensus help that not to happen, thus generating important solidarity benefits.
Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
Today’s Teaching Rant
take one of each…
Some definitions:
phenomenon: A fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, esp. one whose cause is in question.
physical phenomenon: A “natural” phenomenon involving the physical properties of matter and energy.
<teaching rant>
Today we are beginning our exploration of electro-magnetism. In this overarching theme there are topics such as magnetic fields, charges in magnetic fields, magnetic flux, Faraday’s law, Lenz’s Law, electromotive force (EMF), generators and transformers. Don’t worry if you don’t know what these words mean. They are just words with vague connotations at this point. Our job is to understand the physical phenomena that relate to these words, and apply our understanding to answer quantitative problems (problems that have numbers in them) that are based on these physical phenomena.
To start this topic off, we are performing an exploratory activity where you will manipulate objects at your desk, such as metal, plastic, and magnets, and will answer a series of questions that will guide you through your observations. This will help you realize the myriad of physical processes that are happening right in front of you so that your understanding of magnetism is as strong as possible as we move through the next 3 weeks. The goal is to get a good set of observational and mental pictures of the basic nature of magnetism under your belt that you will use as the underpinning of all the subtopics mentioned above.
Most physics classes that you would take assume that you already have a strong set of “observational and mental pictures of basic nature”. The class usually jumps right into formalizing these observations into definitions, terminology, and relevant equations. If it does talk about the physical observances that underpin the phenomena, it is usually just a reminder of things you have already seen in your life. Or, there may be demonstrations shown in the front of class, which nicely shows the phenomenon. Or, there are statements of a set of progressing steps which connect the new topic (magnetism) to things previously learned in the class (static electricity, forces, etc.).
The problem with this instruction is that this is too mentally taxing within the speed that it is being given. There is usually too much need for a rapid assimilation of mental recall of prior life experiences, recall of things you learned recently learned in class, and new terminology and equations. Mind you, being able to perform this assimilation quickly is very valuable and is a skill to hone (especially when going into the field of medicine). But if you don’t have incredibly good recall of incredibly good observations of physical phenomena, you start to sink quite quickly.
I should say, about 10% of you can do this. You may have spent hours playing with magnets - just playing with them - while you were growing up. As easily as you spend hours playing with interacting with friends or playing a sport, you were just playing with something that shows the interesting physical phenomena that is magnetism. Maybe even by accident… in front of a refrigerator. And, you may have good recall of these memories, almost a picture perfect representation of what you observed when you were younger. For those 10% of people in the class, you have a much stronger underpinning to see the invisible, to visualize the problem better, to know which direction to “go” for each problem, to set up force diagrams with more ease, and to get the right answers on tests. You aren’t “smarter”, in the sense that you are quicker and have a higher capacity for learning. Rather you spent time playing with certain things when you were growing up and you have a huge head start.
So here we are in physics class, introducing a new concept, and one of my goals is to not just have 10% of you be comfortable and confident about this topic. You also need to know that you can be as quick and visualize things as good as the 10%, but it takes lots and lots and lots of training, observation, and thinking, in your spare time. There should not be a moment when you are not doing this in college.
Research has shown that a good amount of comfort and confidence of these topics can start by you just playing with magnets for hours and hours, feeling them in your hand, feeling their repulsion and attraction, seeing how they interact with each other and other things, see how their shape affects their interaction. etc. etc. But we do not have time. We are running out of time. So what is the next best thing? One answer is to intensify these experiences into a few hours - to see the phenomena happening in front of your eyes with a well informed teaching staff able to guide your observations to really make you think about what you are seeing.
exploring magnets with Tutorials in Introductory Physics
The Tutorials in Introductory Physics from the University of Washington Physics Department are the least flawed way for us to do this in the limited amount of time that we have. They are a way for you to attempt to hone all of the observational experiences that you have had about magnetism (and if you haven’t had any experiences, give you a crash course in the phenomena right in front of you), and to tease out the complexities of observation about magnetism that are necessary for you to be be successful and confident for the next 3 weeks. This is one of our major attempts to enable you to do more than just blindly apply equations to try to solve problems. This is not the end all of the instruction. Also, it is not perfect. But it is the best we can do with an hour or so of having experiences in the classroom. I should point out that a lot of good research has gone into making these tutorials as learning-rich as possible.
I also will give you magnets to just play with at home (similar to the wires and bulb and battery that I gave you when we were learning electricity). This is another way for us to catch up: just by you playing with something physically interesting while you are watching TV, or at the dining hall, or reading. WARNING: you shouldn’t put magnets near any electronic devices. For small magnets, keep them about 6” away from electronics. Here is another one of our challenges to really understanding things: in our current advanced world, things (like magnets, electricity, lasers, radioactivity, the list goes on and on) that could help us understand this wonderful world we live in better, can also break certain things or hurt us if we aren’t careful. They are therefore deemed dangerous, and we don’t usually have them to explore in our lives. This is a concept that chronically stifles many aspects of our development, and you should be mindful when it is happening to you.
With all of this said, here is the main point: These exploratory activities are not a touchy-feely, feel-good way to understand the material. Rather, these activities are possibly the ONLY way for a large majority of you to connect - in a very robust, enlightening, and empowering manner - the actual things that are happening in the REAL world to the equations and numbers and problems that are happening on the REAL test. Another major point: these activities are not a license to goof off and not have your brain work as hard, just because there are no equations. Don’t just use the fact that there aren’t numbers somewhere in a problem or activity to activate your logical awareness. That is a huge mistake. These activities are actually quite challenging and require all of your mental capacity, and even then we are going to fall short. So don’t skimp on anything related to them. In fact, you should be putting more effort and investment into answering these problems compared to any random question that has a numerical answer, because once you get these underpinnings down, your job of solving problems with numbers becomes much less overwhelming.
see you in class.
</teaching rant>
In recent years, analysts have been much more willing to credit participatory democrats with explicitly political purposes. Experiments with egalitarian and cooperative decision making are a kind of politics-just not the politics of parliamentary maneuver and bureaucratic manipulation. Rather, as sociologist Wini Breines put it in Community and Organization, her seminal study of the 1960s new left, by “prefiguring” within the current practices of the movement the values of freedom, equality, and community that they wanted on a grand scale, activists were helping bring them about. Their dilemma-and it was a dilemma, not a mistake-was that they wanted to effect political change without reproducing the structures that they opposed. To be “strategic” was to privilege organization over personhood and political reform over radical change, and this they would not do.
