Sam Strasser

Recall momentarily that a friend of mine, Jeff, wants to create a web-based application that enables collective brainstorming.  He proposes to call his idea Cloudthink and you can read it directly from the source.  He and I have been debating, at first privately and now more publicly.  I was perusing the internet the other day, looking for more information on Jeff’s idea, and I found some interesting efforts already happening.

Theory and Discussion

The theory behind Jeff’s idea is simple, at least at a very high level, but it necessarily causes several passionate debates.  An internet-based direct democracy has never existed, to my knowledge, so there are things to work out.  I found some good places to read more and to discuss.

EfficaSync, which was the first theoretical explanation I read, (over)uses a programming metaphor to explain the idea, and does so in a fairly clear way.  Start with this document.

Top-politics and the Election Methods Interest Group (EMIG) are two discussion groups devoted to the issue.  EMIG is more self-contained, whereas Top-politics is a place where people come and post about their projects, which are not controlled under one larger project.  EMIG seems to get more action, although I have not read too much of it.  On the face of things, one person dominates the discussion.  But we saw that coming.

Software

I found two actual implementations of something like what we are talking about.

The first is called Direct Democracy Portal.  I didn’t install it or anything, but, based on the description on SourceForge, it is a portal that allows a random organization to be governed by itself.  That is, it implements EfficaSync.  I haven’t tried it out though.  I may in the future but we’ll see.

The second got me the most excited.  It is called OpenTuition, and it isn’t much yet.  But it is something.  The first blog post was…today!  So that’s an exciting coincidence.  Someone else is thinking about the very same thing.  The domain was registered in July and updated two weeks ago, so this is obviously a first start.  It looks fresh though, and this one I will continue to follow.

So those links should get you started.  I’m interested to see how Jeff incorporates these existing communities, which could help him generate users.  He could of course merely contribute to their projects, so as not to diverge into too many projects, each of which is eventually abandoned.  We shall see.