dekstop: weblog

Via the De:Bug Blog I just came upon the "Mission Statement" of Jimmy Wales' new site, Campaigns Wikia:

Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics. [...]

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

There are more and more people who 'get it', and I feel that we may be reaching a tipping point where another digital revolution reaches the masses and changes our societies.

The idea of huge, participatory, integrative communities. The idea of collaborative organizational structures on a very large scale.

From a slightly different angle, here's what I wrote two weeks ago:

For a while now I've been thinking about how the representative systems of our democracies are more and more obsolete, and should be replaced by systems that integrate people who care, as opposed to those who are simply getting paid to do the job.

My theory is that we are now living with systems that are too complex to manage for small groups of people. Systems where it simply isn't enough to have a couple of dozen people do the error checking, but where you need thousands.

And I believe, I know, I have experienced that the new 'digital' organizational structures we have evolved during the last decade may finally help us cope with this complexity.

It WILL Happen. Period.

I've been having a lot of discussions about this lately, both with friends and with total strangers. It's a really interesting topic to talk about with people you don't know. One such discussion about social filters and participatory systems, on a train from Heidelberg to Berlin, was one of the most memorable meetings with strangers I ever had.

There are many, many who instantly 'get' it, sometimes after a couple of minutes of explanations and examples. It's pretty easy to make the average person understand why a participatory community such as Wikipedia or (my generic example) the Firefox community may well be a precursor to future political systems.

Then there's a distinct second group of people who argue fiercely against what they perceive as 'mob rule'; people who can't fathom the thought of open, participatory systems that actually work. Typically these are people from Academia or political institutions, both of which are groups that are deeply characterized by their thresholds of entry. (I'm not joking here. That's anecdotal evidence, true, but happened too often to be a coincidence.)

And these are the people wee need to have discussions with. Because they're the gateways to making changes on a large scale, to changing the system from within. If we can't persuade them we at least must reduce their fear of these systems. We must demonstrate that what we're proposing is not Anarchy.

Because the alternative would be what the music industry is undergoing right now, with their version of the Conflict with Digital Values: the change is happening anyway, and the existing structures suffer a slow and violent death. And while that may be a fun thing to watch happen to the pop culture industry, I don't think we can afford to let that happen to our political systems.

Updated to revision 2.

Oh boy. Not only is is a great time to be alive -- it's a great time to be a programmer.

One year ago I wouldn't have thought that knowing the tools of bug tracking software or version systems or mailing lists or forum software would have relevance outside the small virtual communities that use them.

Now I know that these are powerful tools of political expression.

I've been bookmarking sites on del.icio.us with the tag "participatorydemocracy".

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