Efficient Civics Guild
From eg
"Many activists doubt the importance of definitions and the understanding of basic concepts before calling for action. They are intent on movement instead. But if you don't think through the meaning of what you stand for, you will end up doing the opposite of what you assume. Ill-defined ideas, even propelled by good will, can undercut common ground more effectively than the corporate-state apparatus by corrupting understanding from within." - John McMurtry, "defining what you stand for"
"Social software is political science in executable form." - Clay Shirky
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." - Sun Tzu
"ECG certifies all those who apply infra, healthy telecom standards and supportive internal operations protocols in civic applications, especially municipal government...An ECG master is someone who regularly accepts liability for errors of other guilders and is widely recognized by his or her peers in any of the /infra/ sustainable infrastructure trades." - 2005 introduction to the ECG focusing on Civic Efficiency Group activities that tested the ECG's advice in a difficult context.
Pages with the tag:ECG exist to indicate substantial ECG involvement in definition. This includes but is not limited to exact definitions of concepts that ECG helps define.
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[edit] What it does
The ECG exists to define basic concepts relevant to civics with sufficient rigour that they can be used to create social software, argumentation frameworks and moderation rulesets for computer-supported collaboration and to support democratic decisions and large-scale collective wisdom. Some let.sysops.be definitions and projects of concern to ECG.
To this end, globally standardized ECG-recognized roles and entirely new ECG-defined roles have been codified to create a minimal governance organization to advance and promote efficient civics and the collective intelligence of ethical trolls.
[edit] Who cares?
These definitions are used in turn to define infra trades and maintain trade tensegrity and crash courses about them. An ECG master is someone who teaches these and takes on ECG apprentices. Eventually they may also do policy certification. Anyone who cares about these processes cares about ECG. Eventually this may expand to pretty much everyone, as the wiki protocol and wiki best practices spread.
[edit] Who isn't affected?
ECG also has an interest in open configuration to ensure that withdrawal of underlying web and net and DNS services cannot be used to pressure a group politically, as usually or always happens with political wikis and is a great danger in systems like ESP or PEER or Consumerium. Without some governance organization such projects will almost certainly fail. ECG acts as a default governance provider for these.
"Is there a Pareto-optimal balance of violence?" - Craig Hubley
See openpolitics.ca coverage for more'.
[edit] Managing conflict...
Most guildmasters seem to take a conflict-driven view of wiki - ECG's focus on contentious political activities necessarily involve it in conflict.
"The first rule of Fight Club is 'you do not talk about Fight Club'." - Fight Club (film)
"So these problems, vexing as they are, and the Trolls who raise them, may be the very core of democracy itself, and need to be incorporated into the discourse. The right to dissent from the majority opinion is the foundation of progress and democracy. MediaWiki principles can support this right by keeping all viewpoints recorded, and, if those viewpoints can generate even minimal support, including them as part of the main page." - Sabina Romlin in mediawiki and the public sphere
"It's all trolling, really." - Hayley Easto cited on this slashdot thread
Some ECG adherents study stupidity, groupthink, wiki troll culture, Internet provocation learning and various syndromes including those documented in the DSM-V such as Plain Stupidity Syndrome.
Presentation of complex issues in Simple English especially those related to decentralization and politics itself is another priority.
