opolitics

Ryan King has announced that he will continue S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. I have used S5 a few times in the last couple of years, and really enjoyed it. The web never looks good on a presentation because of the size and the detail it presents. PowerPoint on the other hand, isn’t web friendly for the same reasons the other Microsoft office products are not web-friendly using not standardized HTML and bloating converted files. S5 gives me the liberty of enjoying both world’s standardized HTML files as well as hyper-linking to other sources.

I see the future where Blogging software WordPress and S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System will be mashed up to form a tool where presentation will have comments and trackbacks and really create a discussion.

A must read:

Geek activism has not taken off yet, but it should. With the gamers recognizing the need for a louder voice, EFF gaining momentum and Linux taking on the mainstream on the one hand and recent severe losses in privacy, freedom of speech and intellectual property rights on the other, now seems to be the best time to rally around the cause.

An unparliament is a conference where the content of the meeting is driven and created by the public rather than by elected politicians. The unparliament is the reality gathering where Open Politics are debated, a meeting place for the community.

The concept based on Unconference, an idea by Lenn Pryor when discussing BloggerCon but popularized by Dave Winer in his blog.

please add ideas to this short definition.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.
Broadly conceived, this term could encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but some would restrict its meaning to more recent software genres such as blogs and wikis. Others suggest that the term social software is best used not to refer to a single type of software, but rather to the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication to engage in community formation.[1] In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.[2] In many online communities, real life meetings become part of the communication repertoire. The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative work systems.

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software

References

1. Stowe Boyd, “Are You Ready for Social Software?”
2. Christopher Allen, Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
3. Adrian Chan, “Research, Notes, Investigations into Social Software issues”.
4. Clay Shirky, “A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy”.
5. Matt Webb, “On Social Software”.
6. Joseph M. Reagle Jr., Social Protocols: An Introduction

The wikipedia definition of Open Source Politics or Open Politics combines traditions of the free software and open content movements with postmoderism, and promotes a decision making method claimed to be a more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues.

Critera

• anyone can participate
• all participants are equals
• all actions are transparent
• all contributions are recorded and preserved
• all deliberation is structured
• all content is re/organized by participants on an ongoing basis.
• partisan behavior is limited by the format and community standards.

Underlying preferences

• decentralization of authority: giving the widest and most potent franchise to citizens is thought to minimize what economists call the principal-agent problem, or the tendency for managers to abuse authority.
• centralization of information: the use of information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process.
• equality of opportunity: anyone can participate in deliberation, with the expectation that people themselves select to participate on issues in which they have the greatest stake, expertise or both. Open politics treats the expert and the citizen as equals, implying that the experts are obliged to convince the citizens directly, rather than using representatives as intermediaries/brokers of policy. This use of peer review is emphasized as the best method to determine what is true or good (with the understanding that this should change over time).
• encouraging diversity of thought, such that multiple positions and arguments are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.

Implementation

These criteria are generally satisfied by a wiki or some other collaborative workspace in which multiple points of view are conveyed and reviewable in “living documents” that reflect, on an ongoing basis, what the community thinks.

David Abutbul suggested that parliament meeting sessions should be held using XHTML standard while ministerial positions in government should be voted using the XFN standard.

Bugzilla
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Bugzilla is a general-purpose bug-tracking tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla Foundation. Since Bugzilla is web-based and is free software / open source software, it is also the bug tracking tool of choice for many projects, both open source and proprietary.

Bugzilla’s notion of a bug is very general; for instance, mozilla.org uses it to track feature requests as well.

Government needs it! (bug-tracking tool and track feature requests)

Oh dear, the LazyWeb, “The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)”, hit me.
I just googled LazyGov and stumbled upon the idea I posted yesterday.

Tim Jackson: “The idea would simply be to put up a web site where people - normal civilians, not think tankers or politicians — can report good ideas from governments around the world so that they can be shared and copied.”

Mark Simpkins started LazyGov.

LazyGov is based on the LazyWeb concept and the RFC (Request for Comments) process. The LazyWeb claims that “The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)“. civil society take waky ideas and try to persuade government to implement them as laws. Usually this is a long process and at times involves protest.

On the other hand, politicians take ideas and make them into policy, after getting feedback from their constituency. Participation and peer review help discuss ideas and build a constituency.

LazyGov only works when people discuss ideas and help each other improve government.

I discuss my Open Source Political strategy for MK. Dr. Roman Bronfman and the Democratic Choice Party. Building a community, Adding interactivity and transparency to the way politics are done.

Podcast: MP3 Audio file