Insights Intelligence Innovation
An Innovative Collaborative
Reinventing Democracy
Information
Reinventing Democracy is a group established to examine the potential changes in democracy that could result from web 2.0 and web 3.0 technologies coupled with more participation, collaboration and openness.
Website: http://www.extremedemocracy.com
Members: 8
Latest Activity: Jul 22
Reinventing Democracy
This discussion group stems from the book, Extreme Democracy, the groups’ blog, and work with Texas Forums. There was a lot of discussion and an online discussion of the book.
It seems to me that now is an appropriate time to reopen the discussion, but under a different name. I don’t think extreme democracy caught the public’s attention in a positive way. We are faced with what appear to be insurmountable issues in America and the world. As far as I can tell we have environmental, economic, political, demographic, and social crisis. Our infrastructure is decaying. Our educational system is failing. Our society is in crisis. Our economy is complex (in non equilibrium) and we’ve just completed a massive shift of wealth to the very rich. And, this is only a partial list.
We’re all hoping that our candidate and political party will win because that they have the best chance of helping us.
However, regardless of the outcome of the election, the number and magnitude of the problems we face far exceed the capacity of a single man, administration, political party or government to solve. The only way out of this is through massive collaboration that will help us to perceive, and solve the problems we have.
Two recent reports on reinventing democracy stirred my interest again on this subject: Rebooting America and Where is Democracy Headed?
There are several other blog postings that might help frame the back ground for this discussion: First Democracy, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Innovation and Economics, Hot, Flat and Crowded, The Financial Crisis, and Remember Generations.
My interest, and I look forward to hearing what your interests are, is to find a problem that we could work on using collaboration and web 2.0 tools.
It seems to me that now is an appropriate time to reopen the discussion, but under a different name. I don’t think extreme democracy caught the public’s attention in a positive way. We are faced with what appear to be insurmountable issues in America and the world. As far as I can tell we have environmental, economic, political, demographic, and social crisis. Our infrastructure is decaying. Our educational system is failing. Our society is in crisis. Our economy is complex (in non equilibrium) and we’ve just completed a massive shift of wealth to the very rich. And, this is only a partial list.
We’re all hoping that our candidate and political party will win because that they have the best chance of helping us.
However, regardless of the outcome of the election, the number and magnitude of the problems we face far exceed the capacity of a single man, administration, political party or government to solve. The only way out of this is through massive collaboration that will help us to perceive, and solve the problems we have.
Two recent reports on reinventing democracy stirred my interest again on this subject: Rebooting America and Where is Democracy Headed?
There are several other blog postings that might help frame the back ground for this discussion: First Democracy, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Innovation and Economics, Hot, Flat and Crowded, The Financial Crisis, and Remember Generations.
My interest, and I look forward to hearing what your interests are, is to find a problem that we could work on using collaboration and web 2.0 tools.
Discussion Forum
Why Societies Collapse 1 Reply
Started by Paul Schumann. Last reply by Elaine White Jul 22.
Reinventing Democracy in the Blogs and Press
Loading feed
Comment Wall
Comment
-
Comment by Paul Schumann on December 23, 2008 at 1:46pm -
You can follow my Del.cio.us tags on extreme democracy at:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/pauls70/extremedemocracy?count=15
-
Comment by Paul Schumann on December 23, 2008 at 1:40pm
-
I don't know what the purpose of this group is supposed to be. All I know is that it's a rapidly growing application of web 2.0 technologies and has the potential of revolutionizing the American version of democracy. I've posted 18 blog posts on the subject. You can find these by going to all blog posts and looking at the topics. Obama got elected in part because of his effective use of the the Internet and web 2.0 tools, and his transition team is actively seeking input from citizens. This could be the first presidency that has citizen involvement directly via the Internet.
There are a number of groups focusing on the issue of the use of web 2.0 on democratic processes. So, there may be no role for this group other than to alert people to what's going on.
I was disappointed in the lack of follow up on the Extreme Democracy effort. I just recently published some of the presentation material on the blog. I don't know what happened to the recordings.
Thanks for the link to Debategraph - a fascinating web 2.0 tool.
-
Comment by Wolfgang A. Korzen on December 17, 2008 at 5:12pm -
As it is not fully clear to me what the goal of this group should be, maybe you could describe it, or, the group could try to define it.
From my present point of view, I see two areas to focus on and to structure the topic – methodology and content.
Should the group be interested discussing and maybe developing a procedure of how the web could improve democratic decision making, we will have to explore the methodological aspects of the web as an instrument for democracy.
Or, if the goal of this page should be the production of real content and solutions, a topic should be taken and elaborated on. In this case, a concrete problem or goal has to be defined, knowledge has to be accumulated, possible solutions have to be developed, and recommendations for further action have to be formulated. To transform the results to reality, many more steps would have to follow. On the way from definition to result, methodologies could be tested.
You are asking to find a problem that we could work on. I think it is not so much a question of defining a problem, as there exist enough and you have already mentioned some of them. The question is how to carry out such a project, as a considerable workload has to be faced. If there is money, any project can be carried out. So, perhaps one should consider the question of how to finance this approach.
-
Comment by Charles Knickerbocker on December 9, 2008 at 7:35am -
Hmmm... There is a lot going on about eDemocracy. Is this group more for the community of practice that put together Extreme Democracy? A continuation of the Texas Forums (TF) online discussions?
Did we ever do a postmortem of TF effort? If so, is that written up somewhere?
I suggest googling edemocracy, eparticipation, online civic engagement, etc.. NCDD.org is not the only clearing house on all this stuff, but there has been a robust discussion on their list serve about Obama's change.gov.
Have you all seen Debategraph http://debategraph.org/Default.aspx?id=6155924c-f68c-46f0-8faa-0295b69f771b ?
About
Badge
© 2009 Created by Paul Schumann on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
You need to be a member of Reinventing Democracy to add comments!