Explicitly political public wiki
From eg
An explicitly political public wiki starts as or with an overtly political mission, vision, frame (parties, NGOs, advocacy groups, etc.). Usually a public wiki is only one aspect of a political initiative. An overview of political wiki, mostly useful for linking to a lot of other pages on various topics, explains that the most important feature is safe/fair/done criteria, basically moderation rules, e.g. the open politics in force audit criteria for an overtly political wiki. Other desirable features are defined in detail and argued at openpolitics.ca and elaborated in a yahoogroup. Among the important provisions are protection for anonymous sources.
Common subject matter for overtly political wikis include ethicss, transparent government, quality management in government and in parties. Many citizen journalism efforts would clearly qualify.
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[edit] SourceWatch
For example, SourceWatch .org compiles dossiers on sources: who makes the news and why, and is associated with [prwatch.org a blog, prwatch.org] that deals with current issues. They offer excellent support for student contributors and encourage papers to be published.
[edit] Wikimedia Foundation
While Wikipedia tries to avoid political argument, there is lots of discussion about premature neutrality in the context of its governance, TIPAESA which was used as early as 2002, and visions for Wikipedia, e.g. some which go back as far as 2002. This suggests that the most successful wiki's governance may have been affected by issue-focused debate structures, and the use of "visions" to define long term goals.
There was also an active discourse about Meadows' leverage model in the context of Wikipedia, encouraged mostly by Florence Devouard (elected to the first Wikimedia Foundation board, co-creator of Wikipedia ArbCom, and chief editor of the French Wikipedia) who also wrote the Wikipedia article on the twelve levers, and much of the material regarding ecoregions, ecology and green politics in French. This kind of information tends to be very politically significant and provides context in which political issues can be illustrated.
[edit] geospatial wiki
Any geographical or geospatial wiki uses location as its primary organizing mindset, so category for instance will almost always be related to where. One specific to the Great Lakes watershed(s), Great Lakes Wiki, .org, has no explicitly political mission but overtly its mandate matches exactly that of the International Joint Commission that supervises agreements regarding those lakes.
Ecological maps have political implications if only because they identify the connected areas that are affected by changes, e.g. upstream. A watershed atlas was created by the committee that oversees environmental compliance for NAFTA, the CEC. Aside from natural fresh water flow, terrestrial ecoregion [http://www.worldwildlife.org/ science/ecoregions/terrestrial.cfm map from the WWF and National Geographic] also indicates indirectly what natural services are supplied by natural capital in a given region. This helps identify endangered species and high-priority areas and generally increases awareness of dependence on natural phenomena.
[edit] ethnolinguistic use
The surviving indigeous languages also are mapped relative to their ecoregion, which has significant political implications given the special rights of these groups under the UN.
[edit] The Hawaii template
The range of material that could be covered in an explicitly political wiki approaches that of any large public wiki, often exceeding depth of Wikipedia. And it is often organized geographically by jurisdiction. For instance, dkosopedia.com Hawaii coverage, especially the environmental issue coverage, has excellent reference depth. Far superior to any blog or non-editable public web. Even the slight bias in the material due to the wiki being explicitly Democratic may not be enough to prevent neutral or even opposing parties from relying on it. Any party or candidate whose supporters are fully aware of a resource like that, and regularly update it, and parallel entries in other large public wikis, may have an edge in framing and staying on message.
[edit] Dkosopedia
[edit] Frames
dkosopedia.com is by far the most sophisticated explicitly political wiki. It takes a sympathetic point of view to the US Democratic Party. It's quite enlightening: most sophisticated, partisan Democrat, sophisticated. They explain their framing methodology as
- .Identify specific claims that can be challenged, in claim:namespace
- .Identify faulty political language, putting it in term:namespace
- .Explain the problem clearly, using neutral point of view terminology
- .Estimate the cost of not doing repairs, with simple cost arguments
- .Realign the frame, by making careful issue statements
- .Provide new language for immediate use, via positions on the issue
- .Reinforce existing language using the reframe:namespace on each questionable term," which has since been augmented by the frame:namespace for all terms in progress and framed:namespace for terms completed and considered practical.
[edit] Visions
The metholodogy seems to be a hybrid of the FrameShop that Jeffrey Feldman originated, and living ontology. For instance, the uses' Vision for America follows the living ontology pattern for a vision: "...the vision/threat/status or utopia/dystopia/status form evolved to help frame best case and worst case scenarios by keeping them constantly compared and comparable with improbable or impossible scenarios, and with the status quo, so it would be obvious if best or worst cases were too similar to the status quo and not similar enough to barely-impossible scenarios (as one would expect a 0.1% probability scenario to read more like a 0.000001% scenario than like a 50% probability scenario, but it's amazing how many do)."
Also, the discussion was organized using be/do/go in its political variation.
[edit] openingpolitics.org
A UK project copied the open content issue list from openpolitics.ca, specialized it for the UK, and is cooperating with simpol.org to attempt to create better simultaneous policy in many nations at once via us.openingpolitics.org and au.openingpolitics.org and other subdomains.
[edit] openpolitics.ca
The most useful body of theory to tie politics to web 2.0 was contributed anonymously via the ECG and openpolitics.ca.
First an awesome example of documentation of TQM issues http://openpolitics.ca/quality+management+in+government
Then a list of the most useful pages in the project:
http://openpolitics.ca/featured
It's tricky to use wikis to write platforms, etc., the Green Party of Canada did try it.
http://openpolitics.ca/Living+Platform+in+Practice
but if you do it right you remain "on message"
http://openpolitics.ca/on+message
[edit] Logic trees and fallacy
There are numerous arguments that IPA is superior to other argumentation frameworks for political purposes: aside from technical merits, and ease of explanation, the inherent stability of the structure, which is a disadvantage in many applications, is an advantage in politics, where debates are often stable for decades, and finding a stable issue statement is a pre-requisite for success. IPA allows for fallacy as a type of counter-argument, but wikireason.net has more explicit structures to signal fallacy.
[edit] debatepedia.com
The classic yes/no/abstain style of debate, carried on at debatepedia.com, leaves focus/frame/filtering in the hands of the editors alone.
[edit] position protocol
This doesn't allow however for creative position fusion and online deliberation about that, as in the GPNS position protocol proposal of Craig Hubley: " A relatively slow consultative process should prepare the platform to be discussed, in the form of a number of open issues with positions the party might take, at a policy convention (live meeting) to take place several months before any anticipated general election. The output of this meeting should be a mail-in ballot asking members to make the most important or controversial policy decisions. Those able to attend the conference will set the final ballot questions. Those able to use the online tools will frame the issues for that conference. But those who can do neither must also have a voice: Accordingly, the mail-in ballot should make the major decisions on which policy directions to take on the most controversial issues: those which do not come to a strong (U-1 or U-2) consensus at the live policy conference, where the party may take one of two or more contrasting positions. These become multiple choice questions on a mail-in ballot. The results of that ballot will be binding and the final platform will be authored by Shadow Cabinet according to its directions, again using a collective collaborative editing process."
[edit] Writing laws, policies, platforms via wiki
Some naive efforts like wikocracy.org seem to just want to rewrite laws using wikis. This hasn't worked as well as representative factions debating contentious questions using some formal mechanisms like issue/position/argument to reach any consensus.
It may not be possible to have someone lead/manage/moderate who is not part of the group. Some goal/process/audit discipline is usually required. Some proposals, like the open party explicitly defined at openpolitics.ca, reduce an entire political party to organization protocols that would enshrined in its founding documents.
[edit] Living Platform
The three Living Platform projects (greenparty.ca/lp, lp.greenparty.ca, livingplatform.ca) demonstrated some advantages of these more explicit frameworks. See Living Platform interface and Living Platform in Practice for more detail.
[edit] Green Party protocols, constitutions, crises
Living Platform in Practice, especially its model of what it meant to remain 'on message', seems to emphasize quality management in government and attempts to govern reflexively as the sore points on which Forrester's Law was triggered, chilling internal debate. In that case, coverage of Green Party of Canada constitutional and political party governance issues simply moved to openpolitics.ca after the GPC Council Crisis. Proposals for the next GPC and Ontario provincial party constitutions, and an attempt to rigorize the party's internal protocol were prepared, and resulted in about a dozen political party directive resolutions to change the party's course. Only one passed, but the others received substantial support, and may still repair the party and permit a reinvigoration of the Living Platform project.
In 2008 and again in 2010, resolutions were introduced to revive the GPC Living Platform project, but the expertise to do so had long since departed that party, moving to openpolitics.ca and this wiki and other projects including OPUK and OPCA.
[edit] Imagine Halifax
The most successful of these platform-writing projects may have been Imagine Halifax, which used a wiki to outreach to just under 50 activists, about 30 of which wrote planks for a platform which eventually became a citizen survey. It's no longer visible to the public, but try [[archive.org] or read the actual list of municipal initiatives that helped define a political initiative in this wiki.
[edit] ECG
The ECG toolset and terminology is relatively well described at openpolitics.ca, which may serve users interested in more expressly political issues better than this wiki which covers the category:ECG and includes published and shared resources more focused on the real web 3.0 rather than on any industry.
Laws of large public wiki by Craig Hubley addresses some other political issues. In progress.
