Issuepedia:Issuegroups

Overview

Issuepedia:Wikigroups is the working name for the next piece of the puzzle (of which Issuepedia is a part), where the overall goal is reclaiming government in the name of sanity.

Philosophy (by Woozle)

a little story

Some years ago (pre-web), I found myself thinking along the following lines:

Because our society often acts in ways that we find abhorrent, we often feel like a group of aliens (either the another-country type or the another-planet type) in our own country (or planet). Thinking of the various people I would consider to be friends (or at least potential friend-material), I find myself largely in agreement with most of those people on a large number of issues – and yet largely at odds with the prevailing views on quite a few of those issues.

"So", I then found myself thinking, "what if we (myself and an arbitrary group of friends) were to think of ourselves as really being like a bunch of transplants from some other culture? What if we thought of our own views as representing the values of our society, while still (of necessity) obeying the laws of the external society? What if, instead of legally working as individuals (or even with various special-interest groups) towards change in the external society, we worked together as a group with common values but no specific, pre-agreed positions, to effect those changes through whatever legal and ethical means are available?"

documenting the sanity of small groups

I've watched the ways in which small groups of sane, reasonable people discuss issues, work out which parts are important, and arrive at reasonable decisions... and it stands in stark contrast to the way our society works. It seems clear to me, at least, that smaller groups of people (in quantities somewhere between 2 and 10) do a much better job of working out sane positions than does the vast, unwieldy mechanism of our society.

In fact, probably most of the real opinion formed within our society comes from individuals talking with each other – no doubt based in large part on much of what is said in the various public disputation arenas, but not entirely trusting that more widespread discourse as authoritative. What we currently lack, however, is any significant documentation of what those opinions are and how they were reached – in other words, inter-group transparency.

Wiki technology is excellent for documenting complex interrelationships. Perhaps it will one day be superceded by something better, but it's what we have now.

inter-group negotiation

In theory, various special interest groups should be able to negotiate with each other to reach good compromises that benefit everyone as much as possible. In practice, this happens either not at all or else behind closed doors, where only a few actually benefit and everyone else is left wondering what the hell happened.

When each group's decision-making process is largely available for public scrutiny, and where the details of any inter-group discussion are also available for viewing and further discussion, and where everyone involved knows for certain that they have the power to make changes if anything doesn't make sense, the situation should be a lot different.

Resolutions

What goes on in a wikigroup would go something like this:

• users suggest changes to the way things are currently run (these will be called "Suggestions")
• other users comment on those suggestions, perhaps coming up with alternatives
• at some point, each suggestion becomes refined to the point where people will want to stand behind it, to say "this is how things should be", and (effectively) sign it like a petition. These will be called "Resolutions".

As signatures begin to accumulate on Resolutions, the group will need to start looking at ways to actually effect the proposed changes.

Effecting Change

another little story

In the 1970s, I was a space nut. I joined The National Space Institute and The L5 Society, which later merged with each other and became The National Space Society. I avidly read each issue of the Society's magazine (the real reason I subscribed), looking for hopeful news of our gradually increasing presence in space.

At some point, however, I started to notice that most of the discussion – most of the real effort put in by the L5/NSS members – seemed to be about lobbying the government to increase NASA's budget. (There was maybe a little talk about reducing some of the red tape so that private entrepreneurs could more easily gain access to orbit, but nobody was really taking that idea very seriously back then anyway.) And here we are 25 or so years later, two space stations down (Mir and Skylab), one new station (ISS) and one Big Telescope (Hubble) up, and the usual cluster of unmanned orbital and deep-space missions, but basically no real change.

The lesson I got from this: lobbying doesn't work unless you have Lots Of Money. Like, more money than the umpty-ump thousand¹ members of the NSS have been able to contribute, often in chunks of $5000 and over.

This is obviously wrong; decisions about national policy shouldn't be made by whoever spends the most. The obvious counter-argument, of course, is "well, maybe spending more money on space really isn't that great an idea". If that's true (and it's certainly arguable), then certain things should have happened by now:

• I (and all the other space nuts) should at least have a good understanding of why most people think the current space budget (and plan) is a reasonable compromise (not to mention a better understanding of why they prefer to spend the money the way it is actually being spent, etc.)
• I (et al.) should also feel reasonably certain that those other people understand why we think they are wrong (if we have not, in fact, been swayed by their arguments and found ourselves in agreement)

Neither of these things have happened. This is but the most obvious sign of a deep inadequacy in the way we, as a society, reach decisions.

alternatives

It seems to me that there must be about a zillion other ways to effect change, many of them better²; some serious brainstorming is needed, which can certainly be done in more depth later but here are some thoughts for now:

• Buy stock: this does require pooling some money, but could accomplish things beyond changing the government; we could change corporate habits from within by influencing corporate policy – perhaps even taking control of some smaller corporations, if enough people buy enough shares. Up to now, most "socially-conscious investment" has focussed on putting money into "good" companies; we would mainly be looking at obtaining voting stock in evil companies.
• Spike days: a lot of "cause" campaigns have "boycott" days, when everybody who agrees with the cause is supposed to go out and not give money to the target corporation. This makes a certain amount of sense, especially when you don't have good communication channels between the "core group" and everyone else, but the effects are probably very diffuse. Out of 100 random socially-conscious people, how many of them were planning to go to Wal-Mart on a particular day? Or eat at McDonald's? If those 100 random people agree to observe a "boycott Wal-Mart" day, then even if every single one of them sticks to it (no allowance for emergencies because Jimmy needed new shoes and neither K-Mart nor Target had the right size!), but only 25 of them would ordinarily have shopped there anyway, then the net effect is a downward spike of 25 (or 25% of however many people agree to the boycott).

  If instead we say to Wal-Mart "Hey, we want you to know that a bunch of us disapprove of certain policies of yours as spelled in extreme detail on on this web page [insert link]; to prove that we're serious about it, every one of us is going to buy something at one of your stores on such-and-such date, which should give you some idea of the spending power you are pissing off." Even if all we do is postpone our normal Wal-Mart shopping until That Day, we still have something more like 100% effectiveness – and if some of us are especially ticked off (and can afford it), we might even specifically go on a Wal-Mart shopping spree on that day – in the knowledge that it was for a good cause. It's not like Wal-Mart is going to get rich off one day of our shopping, and we're only going to do a "spree" when we're trying to send a message. Hopefully the resulting sales spike will be enough to get someone's attention.

• Voting: my overall reaction to "get out and vote!" has generally been "yeah, right, and it always makes such a difference". However... if there is a strong sense that we have all decided to vote a particular way for really good reasons, this is likely to increase "voter fidelity" (i.e. the percentage of voters who actually vote the way the group has decided to vote), which would increase the WikiGroup's per-person effectiveness over other more traditional issue groups. There may also be particular tactics – call it "Guerilla Voting" – which would only work within a group where there is a certain level of trust. (e.g. mass write-ins of a non-establishment candidate; consistent voting against gerrymandered incumbents, even from those in the incumbent's party...) If nothing else, unusual results from the polls might get media attention; hopefully this won't be our primary goal, however.

Footnotes

Note 1

I can't seem to find any numbers for this online, and all my old issues are buried in boxes somewhere if not completely lost...

Note 2

Many of them would have been doable before the coming of the internet (or at least understandable without invoking the idea of an "electronic network" or even "computers"); they're just a lot easier and cheaper now.