1) The development of a world class debating forum with an end decision on most topics. This could be used by any group of people needing to discuss problems, research, and ultimately make some decisions.
This would include and link together the three major components of a debate;
A) Research, both synopsis of published research and user generated research.
B) Development and definition of problems and goals.
C) Development and definition of solutions and a voting mechanism to decide the preferred outcome.
2) Developing this forum working with real, existing community needs. Also encourage the use of this forum by any community that wanted to enable it’s members to inform themselves through debate, and make decisions. This could include a vast range of public, and possibly private, organisations.
It's clear there are a number of existing projects with similar aims, and that would seem by far the most sensible place to start.
David Woods
So far, this is the closest thing I've found to what came out of our first group discussion. It's a democratic platform based on online collaboration, with an emphasis on creating an evolving constitution.
Will Perrin, who was at OpenTech today, seems to be using blogs to help local communities organize and expose issues. There's momentum in the communities he's setup. Perhaps we can build decision-making tools that would help with those blogs.
Working with front-line professionals in local government over the last couple of months, I’ve been coming to see that:
- The big challenges are not about technology – they are about the content and the process of mobilisation and communication.
- When it comes to technology we’ve not got one big challenge we’ve got 100s of small challenges – and we’ve got no systematic way of dealing with them.
Tim Davies, who's speaking at Reboot Britain on Monday, makes some good points here that should probably influence our strategy. I wonder if you have encountered the same problems when speaking to various community groups?
