Posts tagged wirite
same world together
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.
So say hi to Wirite
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.
Halfway Down
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.
