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 Perhaps it will one day be superceded by something better, but it's what we have now.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-tribal negotiation

to be written

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 thousand members of the NSS (can't seem to find any numbers for this online, and all my old issues are buried in boxes somewhere if not lost) have been able to contribute, often in chunks of $5000 and over.

still in progress