What is the best tool available, within current limitations of technology and communication, to allow a large number of people with disparate ideas and backgrounds to coherently interact with one another on a large scale when the need arises?

The purpose of Wirite is to search for an answer to that question. Its goal is to allow the editing by and contributions of people to a single document at a scale that is unsupportable by traditional document sharing platforms (such as Google Documents and wiki systems). The platform attempts to allow 2 people to 7 billion people edit, contribute, and feel a sense of ownership in a single document that could be as short as a paragraph or as long as a novel, thereby allowing more people to be invested in a collaborative treatise of shared interests and action.

We are most familiar with one person creating a document that expresses their ideas, thoughts, and proposed actions to the world:

The tools that allow a person to do this are numerous: a piece of paper, a typewriter, a word processing editor such as Microsoft Office, an Internet publishing tool such as a blog, an email account. Since a single person has complete control over the creation of the document, she can write the document in a way that she sees as valuable as possible for herself and the people that she wants to share it with. Many of the editing tools created have focused on one person creating content and sharing the content with the world.

The same goes for a small group of people of less than 4 or 5:

In this case, it is also relatively straightforward for a group of people to use the same types of systems that the individual person use (like a word processor such as Microsoft Word) to create a document that mutually maximizes their satisfaction. This is because it is possible for the entire group of 4 or 5 people to get together and talk to each other at length during the editing process, and settle to a consensus about what to write. It is still possible then for satisfaction to be high in a group that gets together and creates a document that expresses themselves as a collective. For a larger group of five to twenty people, things can get a little more difficult and complicated:

It is tricky to get everyone together at the same time, and when that is possible, it is difficult to come to a consensus with such a large group. One easy way is for a single person to hear the suggestions of the larger group, and incorporate those changes into the document. Conversations can happen about what to change, but even this can get tricky when the number of proposed edits become overwhelming to discuss. There are several collaborative document editing programs which attempt to ease the discussion of such sized groups: the programs store proposed changes from members of the group and facilitate discussion about the changes in an orderly way, so that the controller of the document can make a final decision about how to make the changes. Such collaborative software programs exist as separate entities, and are also provided as add-ons to the more traditional single person editing programs mentioned above.

The situation gets even more complicated when 100, 1000, 10000 or more people want to contribute to a single document:

Here are a few methods that are used to handle this endeavor:

Wiki Systems

Wiki systems, such as Wikipedia, allow the world’s Internet users to edit documents together. Anyone who wants to change a document is free to do so, anyone else can decide that it is not a good edit and remove it, and a conversation occurs between the two people in a discussion site along with the rest of the community interested in that topic, and this cycle continually repeats itself and the documents continually change. This system is currently used to create encyclopedias of knowledge: a set of articles, where each article treats a specific topic independently and distinctly.

Petitions

Petitions are documents that expresses a group’s principles and collective abilities. The documents are usually signed by the numerous individuals that back them. The life-cycle of a petition is usually as follows: an individual or small group of 10 or so people create a document that they feel will garner the support of a much larger group of people. They then offer the petition to the larger group to pledge support for the ideas expressed in the document. The goal of almost every petition is to maximize “people power” by having the strongest message possible and having the largest number of people signing it.

Representative Democracy

Systems of government collectively state the intentions of a large group of people by having representatives selected periodically by smaller subsets of people to represent them for a given period of time. The representative’s job is then to come to agreement with one another and create rules or a document that the entire community then abides by. Anyone who wants to change a law can petition representatives with their viewpoint, vote different representatives in, or become a representative themselves. We see this type of system in small organizations, to local governments, to national governments, to the United Nations - it is one of the most widespread democratic systems that we have in our world today.

When discussing wiki systems, petitions, and representative democracies, it should be stressed that the point is not to make arguments for replacing them. These systems are positive and integral parts of our culture.  Rather, critiques allow us to explore new options for collaboration in our communities, and the possibility of filling needs that older systems are not providing.

Pillars of a new system

When beginning to evaluate the pros and cons of systems that can help bring together large groups of people, it was helpful to codify qualities that would act as a guide.

Does the system have leaders that have more control over the document than the people that will support the document?

We are very used to people taking the lead and attempting to be the voice for large amounts of people. Lots of good can come of this, but it is worth asking How much potential do leaders have to overly express their own ideas in the final document? Furthermore, it is worth exploring the purpose and benefits of leadership, especially when it can distance the people of the community from understanding issues that directly affect them and decisions made on their behalf. One goal of any healthy society is to empower people to be knowledgeable and control their own lives and destinies. When evaluating a system that attempts to express the collective ideas of a group, leaders influence should therefore be evaluated.

Does the system let certain individuals influence the document more than others if they want to?

 When people get together to do things, it is common for those with more time or intention to put more effort in. Just like having leaders, this can be a good thing, since passionate people usually do a good job handling things they are passionate about. This type of action is so common in our societies that we assume it as given. However, when creating a document that expresses the collective ideas of a group, it is not as democratic to allow very uneven contributions. There are many reasons why people don’t contribute as much as others even if they are just as interested in sharing their voice: they could be too busy with other things in their life; they may not be informed as much as they would like, or they may be unsure of their abilities. When evaluating a system that attempts to express the collective ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to see how accommodating the system is to a wide variety of people’s abilities and time to contribute.

Does the system handle the many voices and contributions from it’s users, even as the group gets larger and larger?

Systems that work just as good when there are 100, 100000, a million, or a billion people using them are called scalable. Scalability is a good thing since it is unfortunate when a system that is working well at one size, say with 1000 people involved, stops working when 10000 people get involved, especially when the goal of the system is to include more and more people. When evaluating systems that attempt to express the collective ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to imagine how well it works as more and more people get involved.

Does the system allow for ideas that are in the majority to suppress ideas that only a few people have?

The so-called tyranny of the majority is a worry that in any system, decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority’s interests so far above a dissenting individual’s interest that the individual would be actively oppressed.  In addition to creating an oppressive environment for people with non-majority ideas, this also leads to a narrowing of viewpoint by the community since ideas from diverse minds are not being expressed. Most importantly, it disallows very differently minded people from coming together on a given cause only because one group has more people compared to the other. Allowing ideas that less than half of the people support to fairly influence the document creation process is a fundamental pillar of building consensus within diverse communities. When evaluating systems that attempt to express the collective ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to see if such inclusion is integral to the process.

Does the system allow people that speak different languages to edit the same document?

Systems that can create groups that are inviting to all languages are important, since the language difference should not get in the way of people standing collectively behind a cause. If the system is scalable and able to represent non-majority beliefs fairly as mentioned above, then the system could accommodate unprecedented numbers and diversity of people. With the ability to have people of different cultures and languages edit documents with one another, the groups that define the traditional

The three tools of wiki systems, petitions, and representative democracies highlighted above have some similarities concerning the challenges just mentioned: they all use a subset of the population to create the document of interest whether it be an encyclopedia article, a petition, or a document of governance:

For a wiki system, although anyone in the world can edit a given document, the number of people that contribute to a given Wikipedia article is around 300 or less, and there are not any articles that have thousands of active contributors at any given time. For a petition, it is the group of activists that create the document in the first place - less than around 20, and for the representative democracy, it is the representatives in the governing body, which is less than around 500. These numbers show that while the amount of people that can be represented by these methods can grow, the number of active creators of the documents are staying less than 1000 - the amount of contributors is not scaling.

Because of this, the more diverse and large a community gets, the more challenging it is for a Representative Democracy to keep the number of representatives at a relatively constant level and still enable the representatives to work with each other to come to consensus on important issues. This could be because of the complicated pressures representatives feel during the process of becoming elected. One of these pressures is that of smaller groups of people which use resources to influence the representatives in a disproportionate way. Also, it is very difficult from within a given governance system to reach solidarity with others from another governance system, even if such overlap would be helpful to both groups.

Petitions can be translated into multiple languages for people to read, and they can be read and signed by an unlimited number of people.  Also, there are two forces that minimize the chance for non-majority ideas to be suppressed. First, in their attempts to collect the most amount of signatures of support for the document, the drafters create the most accommodating document, and therefore attempt to incorporate non-majority ideas. Secondly, the very nature of a petition is such that whomever decides not to support and sign the petition can “walk away” and not support the cause. By doing this, they gain nothing, but are not forced to support actions they don’t agree with, either.

The maximum number of people that can get together in this traditional method and the maximum power for change that the document can create, however, is usually not attained for several reasons. First, any document has multiple points, some of which have the potential to make one supporter or another feel less interested in supporting the document - so-called “section cooling”. If the document is written less controversially in order to collect more support, then it lessens the document’s ability to invoke change, even if more people sign, which may not be the case since a “watered-down” document is less inspiring to support. Also, after the petition document is created by the leaders, there is a certain amount of time that is needed to garner support and have people sign the document. During this time, similar to a representative democracy, smaller groups of people that have disproportionate resources can unduly influence the discussion of whether the larger community should sign the petition or not. A last pitfall is that even when people sign the document, pledging their support, they are not invested 100% in the cause, because they had no say in the creation and development of the document, and could not express their detailed ideas towards the multiple concepts of the document. With these challenges in mind, the small group of writers must find a perfect balance by having an intimate knowledge of all of the supporters for the cause, or have the ability to perform large amounts of polling research, or, in a shotgun approach, submit numerous documents and hope that one that catches the minds of a group of supporters. These challenges reduce the power of the petition as a mechanism for meaningful change in our society.

Wiki systems allow for an unlimited number of people to contribute in a meaningful way to factual, historical, and scientific documents. Unfortunately, moving from the discussion of these topics to that of governance and opinion, where unlimited numbers of people are contributing ideas, is not possible on wiki systems. What does happen on wiki sites is very similar to representative democracies and petitions: experts on a given topic are the self-selected representatives for the rest of the community. Such a system is a natural method for scientific or historical topics where there are a handful of experts, but does not work well when dealing with such opinionated topics. The alternative to having representation, where hundreds of thousands of people voice their opinions by editing an article, is a very different scale from the 300 or so editors that the wiki system currently handles on average for each document. wiki systems cannot handle the volumes and frequencies of contributions that would come if as many people that read the documents also contribute to them.  It is interesting to note that Wikipedia expresses very clearly that it is not a democracy or a place for original thought or opinions.

Wirite is an attempt to democratically bring people together to write a document and follow the fundamental ideas of being controlled by the people that will support the document, having fairness of input, scaling to any number of people, and allowing diverse groups to contribute.

Wirite tries to adapt the traditional petition style of community expression so that the final document expresses a set of collective beliefs and actions of the people supporting the document in the most powerful and influential manner possible. Enabling the backing of the document to occur at the same time as the formation of the document is a fundamentally new concept in petition-like documents, and may have the potential to reduce the issue of resource-rich groups being able to manipulate the larger support group, since the documents inception, development of support, and pledge of support occur simultaneously. Also might be able to solve the problem of “section cooling”, signer’s investment, and maximizing overall document influence (number of people signing and “potency of document”) by allowing all final supporters of the document to play an integral role in the drafting and critiquing of the document. Lastly, it allows contributors to express dissatisfaction throughout the process, empowering each individual as much as possible in a democratic setting.

The ideas in the preceding paragraphs are only possible by creating a document sharing system that scales to an unlimited number of people. This is challenging because such a system must collect the changes that are made by the individuals contributing to the document, but if the number of active contributors is in the thousands, the amount to discuss and come to consensus and conclusion on also becomes so large that it is difficult for each member to evaluate each change that is made.  Check out the first version of Wirite and this first HowTo to see the first ideas that we are using to start exploring this communication / connection / solidarity “space”.