opolitics

an audio (podcast) update on Open Politics in Israel

Read my open politics implementation.

CNET News.com

Congress catching on to the value of blogs

When someone calling himself “John Kerry” posted a diary on the popular liberal community blog dailyKos last week, its members reacted with both suspicion and amazement.

Congressional bloggers

Eleven members of Congress have jumped into the blogosphere so far. Some have gone the whole nine yards and allow readers to publish responses to their musings. Other aren’t there yet.

See also:

BBC: Bloggers take on politicians

I am a new media strategist to MK. Dr. Roman Bronfman and the Democratic Choice Party. I started in August 2005 after a friend; Eran Vered introduced me to Dan Goldenblatt, Dr. Bronfman’s political advisor. Vered showed me the proposed site of the party and complained about the backstage user-interface.

The design wasn’t exciting but not bad just a standard party website (here is the new russian site). Goldenblatt invited me to the meeting with the website developing company. During the meeting Eran Vered lost his patience and complained about the unfriendly editing interface, which was really bad. I calmed them down and said that it wasn’t that bad and we can work around it, I suggested a few new features like blogging and content syndication (RSS), Eran added a forum. We decided that I would produce an outline and a plan. I started to work on a web strategy.

The first thing was to implement a blogging system and Wordpress was my choice. The developing company didn’t respond to my requests for database and server access and it took them 3 weeks till they obliged to do so. I spent less than 20 minutes installing the Wordpress weblog software. I started experimenting with wikipedia mediawiki as a social software system. Dan organized a meeting with Dr. Roman Bronfman and I presented my web strategy. Bronfman was excited with the blogging idea and asked if it could be and audio one. Yes, I replied “it is the coolest thing on the net called podcasting“. After inviting friends to experiment with the wiki. I got to the conclusion that it was to complex, and I swapped the mediawiki software with the Drupal based civicspace. Wikipedia is popular in Israel as an encyclopedic source, like anywhere else, but there is only a minority of people whom are tempted to edit it. Drupal/Civicspace uses conventional content posing structure people are less hesitant to publish content. Elections were called for the end of March 2006. If we were not in a tight campaigning schedule I would have continued with the wiki.

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.

I suggest based on Linus’s Law

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Arnison’s Law:

Given enough eyeballs, problematic content is shallow.

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.