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Archive:Wikicracy

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Revision as of 20:58, 22 June 2008 by wikademia>Emesee (→Feature requests: wording, spelling)

Wikicracy – Wikidemocracy - the future of democracy.

This is wiki, please contribute to this paper. Thank you.

Let's imagine the future of wiki

Wikimedia projects

Collaboration using wikis is one of the few revolutionary inventions of the last few years in the social field. The philosophy behind the tool itself is at the same time simple and extremely powerful - everyone can contribute, in their own language, to the building of human knowledge.

Wikis help people to participate together efficiently without having to hold frequent meetings somewhere specific. Everyone can participate, wherever they may be, provided they have access to internet.

And even more extraordinary, is that contrary to forums, chats, e-mail or telephone conversations, wikis build upon what is previously stated; the first contribution made by someone is not forgotten. Over time the information on wikis is corrected (usually), modified, completed (sort of) by all the contributors that will be reading and editing the articles afterwards. Wikis also provide safeguards if someone intentionally or not had come and deleted useful information.

Wikis are already a success:

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

Wikis are helping to build a global database that can be freely used by all humans, for photos and other media (wikimedia commons).

The revolution has just begun

Where we are: the 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 focus 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 that 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 facilitation of consensus - the future of democracy

Just like the facilitation of knowledge creation by wiki that occurs in an article, the wiki tool can become, if adapted, the ultimate tool for building political platforms, public budgeting, and all kinds of public consultation processesed. That is, it can become a basic tool for more powerful, more efficient forms of democracy.

Today, what I propose is to build together the tool that will allow a better democracy, this has been called by others political wiki

Requirements:

  • Accessible from anyone in the world with internet access
  • Enabling efficient online proposals study/amendment
  • Vote/adoption procedures and elections
  • Robust for virtually any kind of group, association, political party, city board, country, international institution
  • Adaptable to business e.g. shareholders meeting.

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.
  • August 15th: created a trial testing page of socialtext wiki. Reviewing in process...
  • August 23rd: wikimedia websites have been blocked once again by Chinese censors (including this page), after a few month of freedom for non-chinese language pages. Sorry for the delay. Test of socialtext has not been very enthousiastic. Are there real improvments compared to wiki? Some important wiki features have even disappeared...
  • August 28th: finaly got the time to make a graphic proposal (see example at the bottom of the page) Vmandrilly 17:51, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

To-do list

  • Discuss name of the project: wikacracy? wikicracy? wikiocracy? wikidemocracy? democracy 2.0? ...
  • Studying websites related to wiki and software, to democracy and to decision making.
  • At the same time, listing all the feature that implies this project.
  • Working on translations of a short resume of the project. Vmandrilly I can do it for French, and maybe Chinese
  • Designing 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. :-)

Joining the Wikicracy project

Mailing list

http://groups.google.com/group/wikicracy . To join this mailing list, just send a blank e-mail to: wikicracy-subscribe@googlegroups.com

Online chat

msn and others: please add your contact in the list below.

Member list

Just write your name/contacts to become part of this project

Skilled or interested in democracy/organization

  • 'Vmandrilly' msn and e-mail: vmandrillyNOTSPAM@hotmail.com - English Français 中文
  • 'Hawkeye' msn and e-mail: JPM_111@hotmail.com - English
  • 'Tetopa' e-mail: proffaNOSPAMM@rakkausrunot.fi - English, Finnish, Norwegian
  • 'UsuarioRemoto' e-mail: usuarioremotoNOSPAMM@gmail.com - Spanish, English, México.
  • ...

Skilled or interested in wiki software programming

  • ...
  • ...
  • ...

Others

  • ...
  • ...
  • ...

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

The fundamental base of the project

Vote / poll systems

  • ...
  • ...

Others

  • ...
  • ...



Feature requests

(please post here the functions you would like to see implemented in Wikicracy betas)

Wikimedia

Other

These are websites based on wiki and/or 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.

the main idea seems to be this 'digging' system in which you can vote to make the issue more or less visible in the ranking. This looks much like the idea of 'priority' flag I designed on the proposal.(see above in 'example' section Vmandrilly 11:08, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
  • ¿WhyNot? Another interesting tool, that integrates some style of debate. and Voting for popularity of ideas flow. UsuarioRemoto
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