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Archive:Wikicracy

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Revision as of 14:16, 13 August 2007 by 218.19.2.88 (talk) (→Others)

Wikicracy - Wikidemocracy - the future of democracy.

Note : this is wiki, please feel free to contribute to this paper. Thanks

INTRODUCTION : Let's imagine the future of wiki

Wikimedia projects : the ultimate tool towards world unification of the human race

Wiki projects are one of the few revolutionary inventions of the last years in the social field. The philosophy behind the tool itself is at the same time simple and extremely powerful : everyone can contribute, in its own language, to the building of humanity knowledge.

It helps humans to participate together efficiently without having to hold frequent meetings somewhere specific : everyone can participate, whatever location he is, provided he has access to internet.

And even more, which is absolutely genius, is that contrary to forums, chats, e-mail or telephone conversations, it is building upon what is previously stated : the first contribution made by someone is not forgotten. The information written down on the screen is corrected, modified, completed by all the readers that will be reading the articles afterwards. And it provides safeguards if someone intentionally or not had come and deleted useful information.

It is already a success :

And other new projects, all having their own part in building a mankind-made information access for mankind.

Meanwhile, it helps building a global database that can be freely used by all humans, for photo media (wikimedia commons)

The revolution has just begun

Where we are : efficient building up of knowledge

Wikimedia projects have mainly succeeded where information shall be according to the facts. Why ? Information is always biased in some way, more or less depending on many things. Sometimes, one may focuses on one aspect of reality and forget about other aspects; and, in the worst case scenario, false information may be delivered by someone too close to the subject of an article. Thanks to the community and the wiki tool, a large amount of people check the articles, and thus can complete the other aspects not mentioned in the article, or put a warning if the article is thought to be biased. The more people are watching the article, the more likely experts in the field will be looking at it, and the less chances are that errors won't get noticed. This is the key for most perfect information, once we understand that like everything in this world, nothing is perfect, but everything can be improved and can converge to the (unreachable by definition) ideal of perfection.

Where we can go : efficient building up of action decision process making - the future of democracy

Just like the amelioration of knowledge by participation of all people interested in an article, the wiki tool can become, if adapted, the ultimate tool for building up action programs and assist decision making processes. That is, it can become a tool more powerful, more efficient than various basic forms of democracy.

Today, what I propose is to build together the tool that will allow a better democracy, accessible from anyone in the world with internet access, enabling efficient online proposals study/amendment and vote/adoption procedures and elections, for virtually any kind of group of people, association, political party, city board, country, international institution, and could also be adapted to business shareholders decision making.

List of ideas for the foundation of the tool

Building of Proposals

  • The tool shall be able to do what wiki does already. (writing of proposals classified by categories, history, discussion about the proposals, etc)
  • Categories would not be called category, they would be called issues, and a page would present all issues related facts and if needed, the explanation for why something shall be done about it.
  • The content would not be called articles, they would be called proposals
  • Proposals shall adopt the following structure :
    • main proposition
    • other propositions
    • alternative proposals ('amendment 1', 'amendment 2', etc)

The pros and against argumentation would not figure in the proposal itself, it would figure in the discussion part of the wikicracy, so that the 'proposal' remains a working document that could be adopted if so decided.

Adoption of proposals

((Reminder: this paragraph shall be explained more clearly))

  • Every fixed term or every time administrators of the section believe the proposal has reached a good quality level, a vote is organized. Everyone of the group entitled to vote is contacted by e-mail to cast his vote. The proposal and its amendment reaching a specified % (by default, 50%, but this could be more or less depending of the organization requirements) of the entitled members would be adopted and the executive body shall enforce it. After the % of YES is reached and the proposal is accepted, or after the expiration time for casting vote is reached without reaching the % of YES needed, the proposal shall still be alive and open for modifications, unless a significant % of people vote for abandoning this proposal. Voters will be asked to explain their vote. Votes can be casted on the new amendments, and eventually, if the members are not too many and share common goals, they will all agree to support the final proposal

(All this to say the objective is 100% agreement on the proposals, but proposals shall be able to be adopted if, let's say between 50% for a very large group with conflicting interests and 100% for a small group of good friends, accept it).

Follow up of action and evaluation of work

  • (note: proposal following Gerard remark on the 10th of august) : we shall add to the proposal a follow up of decisions taken, (which could take the form of discussion page and/or an evaluation/vote by the members regarding the action of the executive body towards the issue.

Elections

  • A special section shall be available for elections of people.
    • it would present a list of coming elections/nominations and the voting agenda.
    • people could present themselves as candidates, and a discussion shall be open for those who want to explain why they support this candidate. Another discussion board would be open for each one of the candidate's personal proposals (for or against, and why). And another section would be available to ask the candidates questions. (note : I believe it is not necessary nor good that there be a place available for saying why they hate the candidate. If you don't like someone not because of its proposals, you can just go to another candidate and say why you support him.)
    • At the time decided and until the deadline is met, every potential voter is asked to cast his vote.

Others

  • All vote including choice between more than 2 positions or 2 candidates shall be done by Condorcet Method or other similar systems (a choice between different systems could be proposed later). Results shall be calculated automatically.
  • For specific demands, a version of the wikicracy should make it possible for the voters to choose to vote/post comment anonymously.
  • On the opposite, votes casted by elected representatives shall never be anonymous, representative shall be accountable of their actions towards the people who elected them.
  • For specific decision making organizations, it shall be possible to give more weight to the vote of some people than others. For instance, vote for shareholders assembly shall be proportional to its share of the Capital.

Status of the project

  • Beginning of 2007: idea of a way to put people working together online to make proposals in a cooperative way, and where people could vote on the proposals.
  • Beginning of August: re-discovery of wiki and it appeared that the platform is the best tool for the idea.
  • August 9th 2007: first publication of the project.
  • August 10th: first try to make this project known to wikipedians in the perspective of gathering a team of democracy/organization experts and wiki programming experts.
  • The project has been featured in on main page, latest news section. A new proposal regarding democracy on wikis is available at Wikicracy. Please review and comment.
  • Currently in the process of studying websites related to wiki and software, to democracy and to decision making. At the same time, in the process of listing all the feature that implies this project. Soon working on translation into French and Chinese of a short resume of the project. Then next step will be to design the interface. And then later we will need to translate this into computer code...

Supporting Individuals and Organizations

(It's always nice for the contributers to receive encouragments, even if it is just symbolic. :-)

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People joining the wikicracy project

Skilled or interested in democracy/organization

  • 'Vmandrilly' vmandrillyNOTSPAM@hotmail.com - English Français 中文
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Skilled or interested in wiki software programming

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Others

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Already existing tools and add-ons that may be usefull for this project

The fundamental base of the project

Here is the available add-ons page for MediaWiki.

Vote / poll systems

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Others

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FAQ

(answears to general comments/critics received on the project)

Q: Yet another wiki website?

Not exactly. We propose to develop a new wiki software, or more precisely wiki software improvments for decision making processes. A platform that could then be used to create the wikis based on debate (as opposed to wikis based on factual information)


Q: Are you sure it is worth the investment?

No. Who cares anyway ?
Yes:
  • Many people have tried to use wikis for organising debate websites, and there has been many projects to create these kind of wikis, but most of them couldn't develop well because wiki is not (yet) adapted to their specificity.
  • More generally, just like there was a huge need for good encyclopedical information, there is a huge need for good debate and adoption process of solutions proposals. Many (if not most of) countries, organizations, associations, parties find it very difficult to adopt a good organization where its members can all contribute to the decision making process. This project has the ambition to become a think tank for improvment of of democracy (whose basic idea is to have the participation of all to the decisions that concern them)


Q: Does Wikicracy compete with wiki Wikipedia, Wikibate, Wikiforum, Wikireason or Wikireason:Wikireason:related projects ?

No. Wikipedia, as well as a most (but not all) official wikimedia wikis, are dedicated to gather free content of quality, thanks to the participation of virtualy anyone with access to internet and the work of the community. This project purpose is not to about gathering content. It is not about debating on specific issues either, or setting pools, or whatever.
No. This project is about developing further the wiki software so that we can use it better for cooperative working on issues (propositions and debate) / and for decision making (votes) / and for elections. These fonctions are no impossible to do with the wiki software as it is, but is not very functionnal. (not easy to organise a vote and build proposals on a traditional wiki...)
Yes. It competes with wikis, because ressources/time that would be used and efforts that would be made by programmers to develop this platform will not be availlable for improving even further wikimedia and other information based wikis projects.


Q: Does it concern wikimedia?

No. It sounds like your are just proposing an online debating society, which really isn't something the Wikimedia Foundation would have anything to do with. It will never be a Wikimedia project.
Yes. The wikimedia foundation is not only dedicated to free knowledge for all, but is also promoting projects that respects its philosophy, projects where the idea that everyone shall be able to participate to the contents of webpages, for the benefit of all. On the main page is stated "Welcome to Meta-Wiki, a website devoted to the coordination of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, including Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and the MediaWiki software on which it runs", therefore, project on improvment of the MediaWiki has its place here


Q: Why voting? And why the need of elections? Shouldn't democracy be the work of all? If the people vote for representative, then they won't participate anymore.

  • whereas we have all the time we want to improve little by little the knowledge in all fields, the action matter is by essence different: we want and we have to take decisions. (And we sometimes have to take them very fast before it is too late). At the time an action must be taken, members may not have reached a consensus. And in a very large group of people with different oposing interests, you can statistically never reach a perfect consensus, you will always find people to opose any proposal. Therefore in the field of action, we cannot afford to wait everyone agrees, or we will probably never do anything.
  • On the opposite, a decision taken by just a majority (or worse, by a minority) will lead to serious doubts in the quality of the decisions. This is why I propose that any decision taken shall continue to be discussed if the issue it was supposed to solve remains after taken action. This until the issue is solved or a consensus on what shall be done is reached. Wiki-based cooperation guidelines will help to build proposals through cooperation, and thus help to reach the largest possible consensus.
  • For a matter of efficiency, we need people to organize the actions based on the proposals. Whereas a proposal need the maximum of ideas to reach a good level, some people shall accept to take responsability of its implementation. And these people shall be recognized as the best to succeed in their mission. The election is the way by which we can select the candidates the most recognized for the mission they are asked to take responsability for.


Q: (Your question) ?

(proposal of answears.)

Example / test websites

The project has not yet reach this stage (see status)

feature requests

(please post here the fonctionalities you would like to see implemented in wikicracy betas)


Others

(websites based on wiki and democracy principles. They may develop tools for their own wiki that could be used in this project. These websites/wikis may also be the firsts to wish to test wikicracy betas)

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