flighthings

"How do people make decisions in a participatory democracy? There may be formal rules. Major..."

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:35:00 -0500

“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.”

- Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements, By Francesca Polletta

"The trouble with majority voting, say its critics, is that every decision made leaves losers in its..."

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:00:51 -0500

“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.”

- Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements, By Francesca Polletta

"Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately..."

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:37:00 -0500

“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.”

- The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman

Today's Teaching Rant

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:59:00 -0500

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.

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.

"In recent years, analysts have been much more willing to credit participatory democrats with..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:01:21 -0500

“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.”

- Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements, By Francesca Polletta

"…the simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument,..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:21:29 -0500

“…the simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses by summoning up contrary instances, organizing one’s time and one’s thought for study - all these arts - which cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject, which cannot be taught in one course or one year… must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections…”

- Jacques Barzun, from The house of intellect

Here is a first shot at a Intro/How-To Video for Wirite. We are...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:06:00 -0500

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Here is a first shot at a Intro/How-To Video for Wirite. We are currently changing the functionality of the site, so the functionality expressed in this video will certainly be different in the upcoming months. The old site is still up at the Wirite beta page to test out. Check it out and send any feedback you might have. There is also a written How-To here. Thanks so much to Mark Pare and Justin Almeida for making the video!

Settlers vs. Citizens

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:34:00 -0400

Recently, everything reminds me of Wirite: community organizations struggling to gather support for their causes; people in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen being left with the enormous task of replacing old ways with new better ways of living; anything on the news about a liberally minded person getting riled up by a conservatively minded person, or vice versa; news stories that show someone frustrated about something – not able to breathe about something in their life… some injustice; every time I hear someone saying that they are frustrated with the roles that our leaders are playing in our country, and throughout the world; every power struggle that just moves and moves around and around, and every time the people that should make the real decisions about things, since they are the ones most influenced, not feeling empowered to express themselves.

If I studied politics, government, or business, I would have a set of tools that would allow me to wrap my head around these things – to be more comfortable and level headed when talking about “the way the world is” and “the way we can help or do good”. It’s tough not having this set of tools. But therein lies what is so valuable: if you can be strong enough to be frustrated and struggle to understand something that makes absolutely no sense to you, you can come up with special ways to help.

In his book “Democracy in America”, Tocqueville seemed to capture a sense of what the United States was and is. What I gather from his writings is that townships in the United States were founded on a set of strong, clear, meaningful ideas (equality among all citizens, decentralized decision making, citizen ownership of the rule of law, and trust within communities and governments). I notice that the arguments being put forth by the current leaders in the United States are all loosely based on small remnants of these ideas, but the bigger picture of how all of them fit with each other is being lost.

My favorite concept in the book is that of people feeling like “settlers” rather than “citizens” in their own country. Tocqueville contrasts European countries to the United States in this way: The U.S. way of life made people feel like citizens that were responsible for the well being of all the affairs of townships, counties, states, and the country. In other countries, where there were stronger hierarchies of people, from rulers to “the ruled”, people shifted their motivations to only care about their families and immediate friend groups; everything outside of this small group was a system that they must survive within and cannot be changed:

“There are countries in Europe where the native considers himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits. The greatest changes are effected there without his concurrence, and (unless chance may have apprised him of the event ) without his knowledge; nay, more, the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or the parsonage, do not concern him; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. He has only a life interest in these possessions, without the spirit of ownership or any ideas of improvement. This want of interest in his own affairs goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is at last endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms and wait till the whole nation comes to his aid. This man who has so completely sacrificed his own free will does not, more than any other person, love obedience; he cowers, it is true, before the pettiest officer, but he braves the law with the spirit of a conquered foe as soon as its superior force is withdrawn; he perpetually oscillates between servitude and license.

Tocqueville had his eye on his home country in France when he made these observations of the U.S., and gave this analysis of what happens when the empowerment of a citizenry is lost:

“When a nation has arrived at this state, it must either change its customs and its laws, or perish; for the source of public virtues is dried up; and though it may contain subjects, it has no citizens. Such communities are a natural prey to foreign conquests; and if they do not wholly disappear from the scene, it is only because they are surrounded by other nations similar or inferior to themselves; it is because they still have an indefinable instinct of patriotism; and an involuntary pride in the name of their country, or a vague reminiscence of its bygone fame, suffices to give them an impulse of self-preservation.”

I feel that we are falling into this trap of all feeling like “settlers” rather than “citizens” in the United States. Our general trust in people and institutions is getting weaker, and the group of people we call our family and close friends, our so-called “trust group”, is getting smaller.

Web communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn, although they make us feel more connected, currently only allow our shrinking trust groups to overlap one another more easily. Although there is an incentive for Facebook and LinkedIn to push the size of trust groups, it has to be assumed that the main motivation for the “ideal” size of each person’s network is the maximization of the number of products that can be sold by advertisers: make trust groups too small and product recommendations are at a minimum; make trust groups too large and the idea of trust, friends, and connections becomes meaningless.

One of the questions I am trying to ask with Wirite is How can we take the feeling of connection of Facebook or LinkedIn and expand it outside of the standard “trust group” comfort zone, to 1000, 100000, a million people, and create meaningful pieces of content that can contend with the other huge and powerful forces in the real world, like governments, laws, wars, and all of the other things that we do communally in our very large groups. We already have many entrenched ways to do this at a large scale: politicians, propaganda, special interests, voting for representatives, accountable government. These systems don’t need to be replaced, but can we make each of them better by empowering individuals to feel integral to the creation process, and to feel responsibility to be part of the larger dialogue? If we can make the jump from individual to society be less fuzzy, and help make our social institutions more flexible to changing circumstances, does it help us take the best next steps?

Other quotes from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

“AMONG the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.”

“IN America not only do municipal bodies exist, but they are kept alive and supported by town spirit. The township of New England possesses two advantages which strongly excite the interest of mankind: namely, independence and authority. Its sphere is limited, indeed; but within that sphere its action is unrestrained. This independence alone gives it a real importance, which its extent and population would not ensure.

“It is to be remembered, too, that the affections of men generally turn towards power. Patriotism is not durable in a conquered nation. The New Englander is attached to his township not so much because he was born in it, but because it is a free and strong community, of which he is a member, and which deserves the care spent in managing it. In Europe the absence of local public spirit is a frequent subject of regret to those who are in power; everyone agrees that there is no surer guarantee of order and tranquillity, and yet nothing is more difficult to create. If the municipal bodies were made powerful and independent, it is feared that they would become too strong and expose the state to anarchy. Yet without power and independence a town may contain good subjects, but it can have no active citizens. Another important fact is that the township of New England is so constituted as to excite the warmest of human affections without arousing the ambitious passions of the heart of man.

“The native of New England is attached to his township because it is independent and free: his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interests, the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions. He takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms without which liberty can only advance by revolutions; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

“In the nations by which the sovereignty of the people is recognized, every individual has an equal share of power and participates equally in the government of the state. Why, then, does he obey society, and what are the natural limits of this obedience? Every individual is always supposed to be as well informed, as virtuous, and as strong as any of his fellow citizens. He obeys society, not because he is inferior to those who conduct it or because he is less capable than any other of governing himself, but because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow men and he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force. He is a subject in all that concerns the duties of citizens to each other; he is free and responsible to God alone, for all that concerns himself. Hence arises the maxim, that everyone is the best and sole judge of his own private interest, and that society has no right to control a man’s actions unless they are prejudicial to the common weal or unless the common weal demands his help. This doctrine is universally admitted in the United States.”

“NOTHING is more striking to a European traveler in the United States than the absence of what we term the government, or the administration. Written laws exist in America, and one sees the daily execution of them; but although everything moves regularly, the mover can nowhere be discovered. The hand that directs the social machine is invisible. Nevertheless, as all persons must have recourse to certain grammatical forms, which are the foundation of human language, in order to express their thoughts; so all communities are obliged to secure their existence by submitting to a certain amount of authority, without which they fall into anarchy. This authority may be distributed in several ways, but it must always exist somewhere.

“There are two methods of diminishing the force of authority in a nation. The first is to weaken the supreme power in its very principle, by forbidding or preventing society from acting in its own defense under certain circumstances. To weaken authority in this manner is the European way of establishing freedom.

“The second manner of diminishing the influence of authority does not consist in stripping society of some of its rights, nor in paralyzing its efforts, but in distributing the exercise of its powers among various hands and in multiplying functionaries, to each of whom is given the degree of power necessary for him to perform his duty. There may be nations whom this distribution of social powers might lead to anarchy, but in itself it is not anarchical. The authority thus divided is, indeed, rendered less irresistible and less perilous, but it is not destroyed.

“The Revolution of the United States was the result of a mature and reflecting preference for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence. It contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy, but its course was marked, on the contrary, by a love of order and law.

“It was never assumed in the United States that the citizen of a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases; on the contrary, more social obligations were there imposed upon him than anywhere else. No idea was ever entertained of attacking the principle or contesting the rights of society; but the exercise of its authority was divided, in order that the office might be powerful and the officer insignificant, and that the community should be at once regulated and free. In no country in the world does the law hold so absolute a language as in America; and in no country is the right of applying it vested in so many hands. The administrative power in the United States presents nothing either centralized or hierarchical in its constitution; this accounts for its passing unperceived. The power exists, but its representative is nowhere to be seen.”

“‘CENTRALIZATION’ is a word in general and daily use, without any precise meaning being attached to it. Nevertheless, there exist two distinct kinds of centralization, which it is necessary to discriminate with accuracy.

“Certain interests are common to all parts of a nation, such as the enactment of its general laws and the maintenance of its foreign relations. Other interests are peculiar to certain parts of the nation, such, for instance, as the business of the several townships. When the power that directs the former or general interests is concentrated in one place or in the same persons, it constitutes a centralized government. To concentrate in like manner in one place the direction of the latter or local interests, constitutes what may be termed a centralized administration.

“Upon some points these two kinds of centralization coincide, but by classifying the objects which fall more particularly within the province of each, they may easily be distinguished.

“It is evident that a centralized government acquires immense power when united to centralized administration. Thus combined, it accustoms men to set their own will habitually and completely aside; to submit, not only for once, or upon one point, but in every respect, and at all times. Not only, therefore, does this union of power subdue them compulsorily, but it affects their ordinary habits; it isolates them and then influences each separately.

“These two kinds of centralization assist and attract each other, but they must not be supposed to be inseparable. It is impossible to imagine a more completely centralized government than that which existed in France under Louis XIV; when the same individual was the author and the interpreter of the laws, and the representative of France at home and abroad, he was justified in asserting that he constituted the state. Nevertheless, the administration was much less centralized under Louis XIV than it is at the present day.

“In England the centralization of the government is carried to great perfection; the state has the compact vigor of one man, and its will puts immense masses in motion and turns its whole power where it pleases. But England, which has done such great things for the last fifty years, has never centralized its administration. Indeed, I cannot conceive that a nation can live and prosper without a powerful centralization of government. But I am of the opinion that a centralized administration is fit only to enervate the nations in which it exists, by incessantly diminishing their local spirit. Although such an administration can bring together at a given moment, on a given point, all the disposable resources of a people, it injures the renewal of those resources. It may ensure a victory in the hour of strife, but it gradually relaxes the sinews of strength. It may help admirably the transient greatness of a man, but not the durable prosperity of a nation.”

“Granting, for an instant, that the villages and counties of the United States would be more usefully governed by a central authority which they had never seen than by functionaries taken from among them; admitting, for the sake of argument, that there would be more security in America, and the resources of society would be better employed there, if the whole administration centered in a single arm—still the political advantages which the Americans derive from their decentralized system would induce me to prefer it to the contrary plan. It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life, and if it so monopolizes movement and life that when it languishes everything languishes around it, that when it sleeps everything must sleep, and that when it dies the state itself must perish.

Wiriting the Pillars

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:02:00 -0400

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”.

So say hi to Wirite

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:30:00 -0400

Hi Wirite! Here is a FAQ/Introduction/HowTo that may be useful before I get a more official page together.

Wirite is a new type of editor that helps any number of people, anywhere in the world, speaking any languages, write anything together. Let’s see how it tries to do this.

Document Search

The first page is a list of documents that can be edited with the website. There is a search tool so that you can try to find a document that has already been started which discusses a topic that you are interested in.

Document Support

Once you are in a given document, one of the main pages is the details page:

This page will show the document, as well as a current snapshot of who is supporting, and not supporting, the document.

Take a look at the tag cloud on the right menu bar:

When you create an account, you can put in any words that you want to describe you, and you can change them at any time. Here is the information on my user page, for example:

Note also that I put a location in, but not my address, just as much location information that I want to.

The words in the tag cloud are the sum of all the words that people that are currently contributing to the document (meaning that they are doing something with the document, either supporting it, not supporting it, etc.) used to describe themselves. The larger the word in the tag cloud (such as “dog-owner”), the more people that are contributing to the document used that word to describe themselves.

As you click on various tags in the tag cloud, they will highlight, and the number of people that support and do not support the current version of the document is displayed, and their position shown on the map:

no tags selected…

just cat owners. looks like 3 cat-owners support the document as is, and 2 do not.

cat and home owning seniors.

cat and home owning seniors, and happy people. Note that since the person with this last tag is in Utah, we lost the detail in Baltimore.

For any group that is selected, the sentences in the document will change colors. These colors represent the level of dissatisfaction of a given sentence for the group that was chosen (in this case, cat-owners). These are the sentences that will make some people in the group not be able to support the document if they stay in as is:

Also, as each red sentence is highlighted by you, you can see some of the reasons why these red sentences cannot be supported:

They can be voted on if you are part of this group, and you think it is a meaningful reason.

Also, for each sentence you scroll over, there is a popup to do the following things:

EDIT the sentence (and any other sentences) however you may like
VOTE on changes to the sentence that other people have made
VOICE your dissatisfaction with the sentence as well. In other words, become a non-supporter as well.

These actions of EDIT, VOTE, and VOICE, coming from this page may lend themselves to making changes to the document that try to change the document so that more people come on board the document as it goes to the next version.

These same actions are available on the main document bar:

So they can be jumped to whenever you want without looking at the support dynamics of the document.

Editing

The editing page allows you to openly and freely edit the document however you would like, as if you were the only person editing it:

as you are editing, you can hover over the popup on the side that says “hover to show your edits” and it will do a quick diff to show what you have done so far (it would be great for this to be done on the fly as you are typing, but I can’t find any solutions for that right now):

As you type, the website will periodically check the database for edits that other people have made that are similar to yours. When it finds some, it will display them as you are typing:

you can click on these edits and see whether they are similar enough for you to vote them up or not:

You may decide they are similar and vote them up, decide not and to keep editing, or vote things up and continue with your own editing.

If you continue editing, after you are done, you hit the button “prepare your edits for voting”. This will allow you to “package” your edits so that they can be voted on:

Here is the logic of this step: when you are editing an entire document, there are certain edits that “go with each other” and there are edits that don’t. This step allows edits that must be put in together to make sense, to be “packaged”:

Note that the packages can intermingle with each other. For example, package 3 here is sandwiched in-between some edits in package 2. If one, or both, or none, of those packages are voted in, the change would still make sense.

When you are done packaging, and writing a short comment about the edit if you would like, you hit “submit packages”, and the packages are saved and gotten ready for people to vote on.

Voting

Voting is where alll of the sentence packages can be viewed and voted on:

Deal breaks (VOICE)

As we saw in the “Details” section, Wirite tries to give all people with ideas in the minority a 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. 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.

Clicking on the deal break tab will allow you to express these deal breaks:

When you first contribute to a document by making a change, or voting on something, you automatically become a contributor and a supporter (your light is green). On this page, you can express your dissatisfaction with one or more sentences, that will put you in the non-supporter category:

Now your tags and location are represented by red instead of green, in the supporter pages, and people can see what you are not supporting. This allows you to influence the document even if your idea doesn’t have enough votes to directly change things.

The combination of this ability to EDIT, VOTE, and VOICE, as well as specifically see dissatisfactions from non-majority groups, may allow the document to come to consensus in order 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.

Document History

The document history tab shows what changes were voted in and not voted in from version to version. You can see from version to version how the support has changed for the document:

You can click on any package to see the detail of who voted on the package, and what the outcome was for the package.

here is a package that got voted in in version 2 of this document:

and here is one that didn’t:

Note that even though more people voted for this change than not, it wasn’t voted in. That is because it overlapped with another package that was more popular.

Document Settings

The settings tab shows all of the parameters of the document, and the current stage that the document is in:

Document Creation

If you don’t find a document that has the topic that you want to start writing on, then you can create you own:

You can cut and paste a document from anywhere: A document you are editing on a word processor, or Google Docs, or a Wiki page, maybe even a movie review.

The title of the document currently is not changed and voted on, so keep it generic so that it can grow with whatever the document becomes (I know… and impossible task). Several parameters are also entered at this time that will allow the document to move from version to version without leader intervention. Here is the list:

document open or closed: If the creator of the document would like to only allow people within a predetermined group to contribute, say those in a club or a voting district, a closed document would be ideal. If it is a document where the people that may come to agreement with each other is unlimited (err, up to ~7 billion x 0.302), then an open document would be ideal.
if the document is Closed, the creator of the document can add a list of emails that will allowed to edit the document. The emails are linked to the accounts that are made in Wirite. This list can be changed at anytime by the document creator. [Note: in a closed document, we are giving a larger amount of control to the document creator. With an open document, the document creator just gets things started]
amount of time between document cycles: This is the amount of time between automatic document version changes. After this amount of time, all of the edits that have been created and voting on those edits will compiled and put into a new version of the document.
number of edits before document cycle: If this amount of edits are performed on the document in a given cycle, then it doesn’t matter if the “amount of time between cycles” (#3) is up, the document will automatically use the edits and votes that it has and go to a new version.
number of votes before document cycle: similar to “number of edits before document cycle” #4, if this amount of votes are performed on the document in a given cycle, then it doesn’t matter if the “amount of time between cycles” is up, the document will automatically use the edits and votes that it has and go to a new version.

A few notes: The last two (#4,5) are an attempt to not have too many edits to be created and vie for what limited space there is in the document already. And what I would like is on the settings page to have all contributors be abe to vote on their ideal settings for #3-5, and continually taking the average for the actual properties.

Multiple Languages (not working well yet)

Some of the most needed collaborations in this world involve people from different cultures. By enabling people that speak different languages to back a common cause, traditional governmental and cultural boundaries become less of a barrier between meaningful collaboration between large groups of diverse people.

Although Wirite can be used in any single language, another aspect of the method is its ability to allow people that speak and write in different languages to edit the same document with one another. Because the sentence is the fundamental unit of editing, discussion, and voting, each sentence can be immediately and automatically translated to other languages when it is created. Comments on packages and votes as well as the user tags are also translated in this way. Each sentence is in reality a multitude of sentences, one being the original, and the other being automatic translations of the original into all of the languages that Wirite supports. By doing this, the actions allowing collaboration, editing, voting, and discussion within the same document can be performed using any language. This makes the entire process of collaboration on a document language-independent.

Here is how it works: if someone is editing in another language, say Spanish, they will see the document as such:

This edit is stored as the original, and also translated versions. When this edit is viewed in another language, say English, when it is being voted on, it shows this languages translation of the edit automatically:

The asterisk next to the package and the package comment is a way to know that this was originally created in another language.

So that is it for now! Thank you so much for helping out with this, thank you for your time, and please let me know your thoughts and ideas!

Halfway Down

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:14:00 -0400

This is my first blog entry ever, so here is the ubiquitous one liner that tries to sum up my feelings or intentions:

I didn’t grow up on the Internet, but I’ll grow up here.

This first blog entry I am exploring why I spent more than a year developing the ideas of the Document Project (dp) before discussing the concept with the web community, before talking to possible end users, or talking to potential investors, even though these things are very important to creating successful websites.

What is the point of asking? We have recently been approached by a US State Senator that is interested in evaluating the dp to see if it is a useful tool to connect with the senator’s constituency. This made us realize that our first market could be constituent services offices at all levels of the US government. Constituent services is a good market since they could benefit from a new technology that allows the collective voice of a constituency to be expressed in document form, similar to the bills and resolutions that are debated in government, and similar to petitions that are written to a representative. It may be advantageous for first adopters at all scales (town, state, country) to advertise in campaigning that they are using such a tool, and the size of the groups using the tool can naturally scale with the development of the technology.

Here is another reason that constituent services is a good initial market: we have no good ideas for another one. Just saying “it will develop from high school students petitioning their school, to community organizations creating documents they will follow, to petition writers garnering support in the community, then move to large systems like the people of Egypt creating a new constitution”, although a dream scenario, it is too vague. (Unions were another good idea, but constituent services seemed ideal, especially with initial interest from a state senator.)

So here (finally) is the dilemma: We have a concept that captured the interest of a US representative: Create a way to allow large groups of people to collectively voice a position on a specific topic. Although we haven’t talked to him yet, it is almost a sure bet that although he likes the idea, he does not care about how I think we should go about doing it, even if I have been thinking about it for a while.

This scenario cries out for the following to occur: scrap my current ideas of how to implement the system, talk to the end users, and build a tool motivated by user testing. There is a clear path to do this: talk to the representative, see what types of topics he would like to use the tool with. How many people would be using it? Will the topics be divisive, and how much so? How would he like to receive the final result of the collaboration? Would he want a moderator, or have the creation process have no leader? And so on. Then, using a test group, study the use of current systems such as Google Docs or wikis to see where these tools break when hundreds or thousands or more begin contributing. Then, finally, build new functionality into a new system with this knowledge. This, I have been told, is a standard way to build a website.

The alternative is to show him a preliminary website that offers the ideas and the methods that I have already come up with, even though they are not tested and there has been no feedback on whether they are good or not.

Putting emphasis on the first option may be more useful when creating a website that needs to be economically successful to survive and evolve. But I have a feeling that this method puts limits on how large or difficult of a problem can be solved, since the idea immediately faces the constraints of conventional wisdom and reality. In this case, I clearly see a benefit of developing the concepts of the site up to a certain point before this happens.

Trying to solve big and difficult problems is… well… very big and difficult. Big problems usually don’t fit in the standard economic or usage models of websites. Websites that try to solve big problems reach very far, then need time to evolve with lots of support from like-minded people before they even have a chance of working. And even then, there is a very high probability of failure, due to the regular failure modes of new things, but also because the original codifications of the problem and solutions are usually way off base, since we aren’t smart enough to do any better. On the other hand, there is a chance to do something really great, so who cares about all the difficulties?

A second reason is that life is too special to follow a ruleset about how to create great things, and how to love. I follow people and ideas that have gone before me just enough so that I am not stepping on too many toes, and that people I care about like having me around more often then naught. It’s really scary sometimes, but it is the only way I feel I can challenge the world to have more quality in the minds and hearts of all of its beholders.

So here is where we are. I have thought about a problem: What is the best tool available, within current limitations of technology and communication, to allow an unlimited number of people with disparate ideas and backgrounds to coherently and sensibly interact with one another when the need arises? I’ve investigated the issues involved with the problem, understand how the problem is currently dealt with in our society, codified the challenges to making a better system, and created a least resistance path to overcome these challenges. It’s not perfect, but it is something. Now I want to build it, show it to everyone around me (including Senators), and then get lots and lots of help.

I’ve only taken a few sips of my coffee.