Metagovernment Meeting 3
Starts Saturday, January 23 at 17:00 GMT.
Format
We should chat in the chat box but simultaneously edit in this section. By moving down the agenda and flushing out each bullet.
Attending
- Ed Pastore, United States
- Pietro Speroni di Fenizio, Portugal /Italy ( I am an Italian living in Portugal)
- Thomas von der Elbe, Germany
- Craig Simon, United States
- Tom Linton, United Kingdom (left with apologies: 17:43)
Roles of leadership:
- Get projects started, keep them running
- speaking on behalf of the group (is this needed?)
- On Vilfredo, keeping the ball running, and when a question ends with a request to open a new question doing so
- Thank the people for the work they are doing!
Form of leadership (suggestions):
- ad hoc - someone is first at doing something, others may follow (or not)
- For individual meetings: someone prepared to take the role of facilitating things for everyone else. So not a 'leadership role' as such, more a service.
- some of the beauty of our common goal (e-democracy) is, that we can speak as a group without needing a leader
- i.e. democratic leadership (?)
- there is probably some value in having an administrative group, though.
- no "leadership" a turning president to each meeting who organizes it and orders ideas and puts them to the vote. The president is just the excutor not the decider, the decision has to be the "parliamentary one" that's Montesquieu's true democratic separation of powers
- The other part of the leaderhip would be an offcial speaker who's in charge of expressing the result of collective choices publicly but again he's not "in charge"
- (this is a suggestion on the leadership!) Let's organise a CMS, for Metagovernment, and have the various people have roles inside it. So someone would be responsible for parts of it. But no one is responsible for the whole thing
everybody is an admin? just a couple technical people have access to the database and the server but the cms is equally accessible
Project Goals & Actionable Items
- Open a blog on a nonprofit such as tuxfamily.org
- Ask Jackie if she'd like to do it — Ed
- Start German translation — Thomas
- Propose next meeting for 2 weeks from now
TODO:
Things that the members should do when walking away from here:
The IETF process is highly outcome oriented. Especially note its process for starting with a BOF (Birds of a Feather), moving to a WG (working group) within various standards tracks, overseen by a highly disciplined (and respected) editorial authority. Its processes are also entirely open... Anyone can participate. If you're interested, my (Craig Simon's) dissertation covered a great deal of IETF history, including the evolution of its standards process. http://www.rkey.com/essays/diss.pdf (PIetro: Thanks, I'll look into it)
on how we should set up an open architecture for MG
Agenda
The following agenda is proposed. Please expand or edit this section as appropriate.
- Leadership in the Metagovernment project.
- Idea: Pooling up money to buy a coder from
rentacoder.com (somewhere) to do what we ask him to do
- it is generally a recouring thought I have from a few years, that a community with a way to clairfy what they want, and a bit of money to rent a coder should be able to just buy someone to make their dreams come true. Maybe I (Pietro) am a bit Naive in this.
- what specifically? for example:
- 1) we keep on speaking about integrating the various tools together.
- I do share that goal, but imo this would have to be a community process among all software developers involved in developing the individual sites.
- 2) or what about changing etherpad
- Common Registration for all e-dem-tools
- Translation to other languages.
- Ads in the Internet and the real world.
- Fleshing out these agenda items as goals and objectives in Metagovenment.org's strategic plan (preferably in StratML format) so that stakeholders (i.e. human beings) and inputs can be associated with them and progress against them can be measured and reported to stakeholders (i.e. still human beings).
- Indaba Application Network
- Facebook's WeVote application (a ranked choice voting tool with a rich visulaization of results) is the current showcase product of the Indaba Application Network. The long term goal is to "create better tools for better democracies" so that people can get better at the business of governing their governments. Indaba is a traditional Zulu term for an important meeting where "people get together to sort out the problems that affect them all, where everyone has a voice and where there is an attempt to find a common mind or a common story that everyone is able to tell when they go away from it."
- Creation of a video presentation for metagovernment.
- Studying a different CMS for Metagovernment
- Needs - List of Requirements for the new CMS:
- List of Possible Solutions:
- Candiwi, since it is a wiki and an Active project
- Rule2Gether, since it is CMS Drupal-based and has debate pro/con comment functionality + Decide2Gether for voting closed questions + Vilfredo for open questions (needs heavy linkage at the beggining)
- Fresh Install of Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Plone or other basic CMS sw.
- Organising an integration between various projects, either:
- closed integration, in which particular projects/tools take on pre-assigned roles
- open integration, in which any number of projects/tools may simultaneously fulfill a single role
- mixed integration, where some roles are fixed, but the actual program to be used, can be changed to test various systems.
- Blog (for announcements, updates on the projects, news about e-democracy)
- wiki to save the inherited wisdom of the community
- set of rules(probably writte in the wiki) to define how information moves from one role to the other
- chat place (like piratepad.net)
- Integraton of Vilfredo inside Metagovernment (Shall we set up a formal process with which questions are asked? How? When? By whom? What should we do after?)
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