Posts tagged wirite
About Wirite
Wirite is a document editor that allows any number of people, anywhere in the world, speaking any languages, to come to consensus. Together.
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.
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.
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.
[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
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.
Wiriting the Pillars
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.
