Hi everyone, Heather Marsh, former editor of WikiLeaks Central and one of the people who's working on The Global Square project -- she tweets as @GeorgieBC -- has been writing about governance through stigmergy, concentric user groups, and epistemic communities. Applying the model of contributions to Net projects such as Wikipedia to governance. I don't have time to summarize her thoughts accurately, and to be honest, I'm still thinking them over. Maybe I'll invite her to join the list and talk about them. But here are the main links if you want to look yourself:
http://wlcentral.org/node/2419 http://wlcentral.org/node/2464 http://wlcentral.org/node/2447 One thing that strikes me as missing from these conversations (both on this list and elsewhere) is the lack of discussion about real-world transitioning to whatever proposed abstract system. The lofty and perhaps implausible (in my opinion) goal of removing coercion and still maintaining social insurance and minority rights, or any other abstract system we discuss, is far removed from the perspective, of, say, a good bureaucrat at the US Department of Health and Human Services who's working hard to maintain and spread the new Obamacare Pre-existing Conditions Insurance Plan so Americans who qualify for the program don't go broke and die from lacking health insurance. (As I understand it, the PCIP is funded by a ginormous taxpayer-funded grant sitting at the DHHS, and the PCIP folds into the rest of Obamacare once the main of healthcare reform is implemented in 2014, pending this summer's SCOTUS decision.) Just as we want more dialogue and outreach between hackers and good journalists about digital security, so people advocating new forms of government should communicate with those who actually have real-world experience getting resources to the downtrodden or applying for government grants for scientific research or whatever -- whether the real-world-experience person works for the government or for a community center or for a nonprofit charity or whatever. It is a way of keeping the discussion tied to concrete specifics, and quite often better answers come from empirically interacting with specifics, rather than a rationalistic remaining in theory.
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