[Campaigns-l] Intro and Ideas (Take Three!)

[politics at nymar.demon.co.uk]

[ Third time lucky trying to send this to the mailing list, some of these
  may have been discussed by now. By all means let's have a forum.
]


Hi All!

Quick intro; Nick Fortune, IT pro, free software fan and UK citizen.
Been active on a few fora over the years, but never quite got involved
in Wikidom.

I've been looking for a decent forum to discuss some political issues for
a while now. This new project sounds very promising, and I'd quite like to
be involved.

To which end, I have a few ideas and suggestions for directions you
might consider taking. With the possible exception of the first one,
none of what follows should be read as being "instead of" what's
been discussed so far, They're all "as well as"


* International Scope
        I think it would be a shame to limit this to US politics.
        Some issues are inherently cross border - the obvious
        climate change and copyright reform spring to mind - but
        they are the obvious ones. The benefit comes from the
        inobvious issues - the ones that I'd hope to see emerge
        if we can structure this thing properly.

        Also, lots of potential contributers are not going to be US
        resident, yours truly included. Making it a US talking shop
        will rather limit its appeal to a lot of potential contributers.

        As far as I can see, the Wiki structure should be able to organise
        all this heirarchically. We can have a world issue section, a US one,
        a UK one (possibly not next in importance, but then I'm biased)
        and so forth...

        One more point on this, which I'll save for later.

* Electoral reform
        Personally, I think electoral reform is the only issue worth
        talking about for the next elections. I think the two party
        system is to easy for various vested interests to game, and
        I think some of them are becoming too good at it. The voters
        are only significant once every 4 years (or five over here)
        and inbetween we have lots of expensive PR types wineing and
        dining our elected leaders. Guess who gets listened to the most?

        We also have the problem that increasingly, both parties are
        pre "wined and dined" so that which ever side wins an election
        they're going to arrive pre-persuaded to a certain course of action.
        I think of this as Punch and Judy politics: they may make a lot of noise
        and squabble over what to do with the sausages, but at the end of the
        day it's the same puppeteer workng both of them.

        This in its turn encourages the rise of political lying, as
        policiticians increasinly say whatever they think will get them
        elected, without any intention of doing as they say, except perhaps
        by co-incidence.

        As an example - Tony Blair of the allegedly left wing Labour Party
        has been continuing the exact same policies executed by Maggie
        Thatcher when she headed a hard right Tory government. If you consider
        at what they _did_ rather than what they _said_, then the only
        difference you're likely to find is that Maggie made better use of
        the handbag.

        If we're ever going to make our representatives accountable to us
        for more than 1 day in every 1461 then we need to change the means
        by which we elect, and to provide means by which we can unelect them
        if they fail to uphold their commitments.

        OK, that turned into rather more of a rant than I'd intended.
        Let's move swiftly on...

New Political Structures
        Let's have space for some debate on new political mechanisms
        beyond simply electing and unelecting candidates. 
        
        Questions like "do we need to have the same person represent
        us for every issue?" "What stops us from making every issue a
        referendum?" People are very cautious about discussing such changes
        and rightly so. But I think we could discuss them.
        
        I'd also like to see gaming exercises organised where we set up
        model systems using some of the proposed ideas and then try and
        break them. Ultimately, I'd like to design looking for robustness
        and resistance to corruption.
        
        It might also be interesting to game some existing structures
        the same way looking for a better understanding of the ways in
        which current systems are broken
        
Modular Manifestos
        There's this brain dead idea in politics that everyone in the same
        party has to have the same position on everything. It's stupid
        and as the parties increasinly abandon any philosophical basis
        that might once have guided them, some of the policies imposed
        make less and less sense. 
        
        A quick example. In the UK we have (had anyway) two dominant
        parties. The Tories are tradionally right wing, Labour tradionally
        leftist. And yet they're both expected to have a consisten
        internal policy on whether the UK should or should not be a
        member of the EU. Why, for heaven's sake? It's a completely
        orthogonal issue to the tradional. The result, unsurpisingly,
        is that both parties have been deeply divided on the issue,
        which has been the cause of a lot of needless political
        turmoil.

        So, I'd like to counter this by building a collection of single
        issue manifestos. Basically, take an issue, define the problem,
        state the desired result, and how you propose we go about getting
        it. Manifestos should also include a tangible deliverable that we
        can use to determine if the goal has been met, and a timescale
        within which the plan will operate.  As optional extras, a
        fallback plan if it turns out the program hasn't worked and a
        buget for implementation.

        The idea is to have lots of these, and to structure them so that
        people can build detailed personal manifestos by picking
        modules from the list and posting them. I'm vaguely aware of
        some of the behind-the-scenes structures that grew up among
        wikipedians and I think this could tie in with that quite
        nicely.

        What I'd like to see emerge here is a foundry for forging new
        political movements and new politcal parties for the Twenty
        First Century.  I think this fits very well with what Jimmy
        describes in his introduction.

        I mentioned one other benefit of internation scope - if we do thus
        right, we should see emerging international political movements.

At the end of the day, this is a chance to look at some new possibilities
and I think it would be a shame to limit this purely to providing resources
for those working within existing structures.

Let's use this thing to its full potential. Let's play mix and match with some
ideas. Let's feed them back, peer review them, and then see what we get.

We may surprise ourselves.